simontherockjohnson

The cops can't read, they don't know which country to send you to after beating you senseless.

First two paragraphs of 18th of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of the most if not the most insightful works of sociology.

Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

Here Karl Marx also humanistically describes the root problem of production of processes in general. The problem of the cumulative error. While Marx is describing the production of history that is a productive force, it is also in a class of meta-productive forces. These are productive forces that do not directly produce material goods but affect the productive forces that do create physical goods and services.

This is literally the same metaphor as tech-debt. Software has many parallels because the production of software is also a meta-productive force. It produces an immaterial good that is productive force in itself and produces other immaterial and material goods. Tech-debt is the effect of inefficient cycles, that weighs on future cycles.

This is similar to the educational concept of Wittigenstien's ladder or lying to children, because learning itself is a meta productive force. In essence as a productive force, learning is cyclical. In order to understand how atoms function, we teach children models that are technically incorrect such as the Bohr model so they can understand approximations closer and closer to the truth. These are all productive cycles that compound on each-other.

In all these cycles the most important thing is that each future cycle must trend more strongly in the positive direction (a better understanding, better materialist outcomes, software that is cheaper to build maintain and is more resilient), rather than accumulating errors, which will eventually self-reinforce to middling and negative results and eventually collapse.

These cycles represent real risk in the real world. For example one of the most difficult things about the way we develop technology is that its not deterministic. The classic black swan scenario of solar flares causing a strong EMP would result in chaos. This is not just because would have to rebuild everything. The simple reason fact is we cannot "rebuild" the world ex nihilio because we don't have clear knowledge of certain steps along the way. Sure we could figure it out, but that's a different process. That's the process of technological discovery, not the process of applying technology.

You can think of it as rebuilding a neighborhood being hit by a bomb. The neighborhood is gone and we don't have floor plans of some of the key buildings. But it's actually worse than that. We don't have plans to the buildings that lead to the creation of those buildings. We don't have a university, but to build a university we need a foundry, we need a printing press, we need a quarry, we need a brick yard, etc. We don't have some of those, or some of the inputs to some of those. It's actually more complex than that because each of these "functions" also scales and has dependencies at different levels of scale. So we might be able to build a brick yard, but that brick yard won't be able to produce bricks that meet modern specifications until we build a smaller university to research brick making.

I literally think about these daily during the course of my software job:

• the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
• Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please
• The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

There was a period of time where I played nothing but Dark Souls 1 and 3 (same theme) and thought about these.

1. I haven't bought snus in 10 years. I know I was carded only because your average 15 year old brocollini's out here want to littrealy be vibrating with energy like their favorite streamer Ethan Klein

2. Your sterile reconstituted synthetic "nicotine pouches" that have been created by finance capital to get around the idiotic tobacco taxes/regulations have so many wild and crazy colors it's impossible to find mint at the store.

3. The only good snus brand is Siberia. Seriously look at this shit

You can take my can off me once you put me up against the wall and execute me for being "cringe" under the tenants of Marxist-Lenninist-Zoomerism for writing this post.

Partner and I have been watching The Last of Us because we stan Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.

I was telling my partner not to expect a good character story for The Last of Us Season 2 since the show has been faithfully relaying the plot of the games especially in it's scene composition.

I'm incredibly curious as to how TLOU Season 2 walks this tight rope with the source material, political climate, and especially since Bella Ramsey has been so outspoken about the genocide.

Grimly realistic stuff. Gonna be interesting how they thread this needle.

I'm upgrading my builds and I decided to get a new monitor so I splurged on the Samsung G9 49" Curved OLED.

My personal and work ARM MBP's require significant tweaking to get the G9 working with a good DPI and font rendering.

I finally booted up my desktop tonight and it just works. I literally didn't have to touch anything.

I saw Dirt Owl and Tankie Tanukie in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me.

Hey guys I'm sorry but China is not gonna beat the allegations this time. They'd be a much better country if they abandoned their inefficient investment system where the profits of capital investment pay for infrastructure and public services. They need to be civilized and rational and add those profits to the wealth leader board highlighting the shittiest people in the country.

Consider this lefties, If we didn't have capitalism would we even know how much of a shithead Elon Musk is? Hmm?

The only good programming sub on reddit was /r/ExperiencedDevs because it used to be a sub that was just devs who had actually worked on difficult code bases and scenarios, actually built teams and software soup to nuts.

For the last year or two it's the same ChatGPT careerist bullshit that doesn't even understand what it's saying. There's literally a post on there where a dev is complaining that tech lead is telling him to refactor code he's touching and he's asking the peanut gallery for solutions.

Most of the peanut gallery is telling him to try to throw the work back through the ticketing/prioritization process.

Any place that I've ever worked at, good software, or at the very minimum software that wasn't extremely painful to work on, was created in spite of managerial decisions and processes. I've been a senior tech leader for like 10 years now, and all this is telling me is that people have no fucking clue.

Is there any community out there that understands that no matter what, when you put 2 proposals in front of a bean counter business guy who barely comprehends how to breathe, they're going to choose the one that is proposing a new revenue stream and not the one that's nerd bullshit --and that all decision making in companies is boiled down to a sequence of these moments? that all of your backlogs and engineering roadmaps are just wasted effort and time that creates a mountain of tech-debt debt to go through? that the only way to actually fix this shit is to enforce professionalized boundaries and tell the business that it's your job as developers to decide how to implement things and not theirs?

ExperiencedDevs used to actually tell people like this to fuck off, that they weren't a career advice sub. It used to be a sub where OP would be questioned if they were presenting themselves in a weird or perfect way because so much of this job at high levels is incredibly contextual and systems based. Now it's just the same shit as every other "the sky is falling", careerist, opportunist tech bro dump. It's worse than fucking Hacker News, because Hacker News at least understands P&L and knows it exists, that how you interact with it has conseqeuences. Half the comments in ExperiencedDevs are now like 'You have to have you Product Owner make the decision.'

Every product owner I've ever met was only focused on defining their own product within the business context (you know their job?). They had no idea how to build it. Most of them could barely systematize their own product features in a sensible way.

I'm so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing "bodies at it" in a completely wasteful con-artist way. These people have never worked in different economies of scale let alone built systems at the higher levels, which is why they suggest these corpo processes to each other as if they actually produce anything other than trash code and maybe conversions. Then these absolute apes pat themselves on the back because they think smashing the keyboard to make the shittiest website was the "most valuable thing" in the process.

tl;dr is there a programming sub that isn't filled with mid-level morons that don't even know how their businesses work that simply fall back on these corpo agile processes as if they weren't captured bullshit? Where can I find a place that isn't this Medium, Learn2Code, I learned this from an influencer whose never actually done anything garbage?

I fucking hate these people so much.

HexBearGPT respond to either of the following prompts:

1. How do I see pinned hexbear posts from my instance on lemmy.ml? It's so hard to find your megas!

2. Generate me an image of your enamel pin collection.