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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".
So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
From the "waffles" link:
Wow, Meredith really knows how to win the hearts and minds of her readers.
Actually, that article is full of money quotes.
Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room.
</sarcasm>Glad to know that Torvalds is not beyond redemption, hope does not get more than a few years of sensitivity classes.
Also, ESR and RMS had different ideologies, with ESR favoring 'open source' for practical reasons while RMS free software movement started from the dogma that closed source software.
Also, while what Torvalds accomplished is super impressive, to reduce Stallman's impact to "haha, Hurd" seems plain wrong to me. That guy build fucking GNU, after all. And you would think that given the gist of the article ("knowing arcane runes is overrated"), she would appreciate that RMS founded the organization which invented copyleft, which is very much an active ingredient in much of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Sure, ESR is less impressive than the other two, but he did sell F/OSS to the suits (wait is that term elitist?) and writes NTPsec, which seems a lot more useful than what Meredith is doing.
Oh no. Not only Musk and Thiel with their billions of dollars, but the final boss battle will be moldbug. How can they possibly hope to survive?
Sorry for being a bit emotional, but that text really pulled my strings.
Very charitably, she is not entirely wrong. Gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping is bad. Long ago, a decade or so after I started programming C, I gave Python a try. Today I use it when I find it appropriate. I no longer consider it absurd to have programming languages which are usable by people who do not understand how pointers work.
Still, I think a huge part of what outsiders consider elitist in computer nerd and hacker culture is mostly striving for excellence. Outsiders often are "I don't care how it looks or what it does, as long as it (superficially) works". This is anathema to any craftsperson who takes pride in their craft.
Nobody (I think) goes to a meeting of a Poetry society and reads their poem and then goes "well, it was grammatically correct, and it conveyed how I felt about my cat dying, so if you do not like it, you are just a bunch of elitist pricks."
Apart from some minor technical details, there is no difference between the skill of a brain surgeon and someone who once tried to butcher a rabbit, after all.
My final observation is that the insistence on stuff being as simple as humanly possible is exactly what placed the left-leaning ex-Twitter users in their present conflict with Bluesky.
During the exodus from Twitter, there were two different main destinations: Bluesky (theoretically an open protocol, de facto a single platform), and Mastodon (an actual decentralized system, where different servers can have different content policies while their users can still engage with each other). Naturally, the anti-tech left moved to Bluesky, because it was slightly more convenient. If they had listened to the hackers, they would have told them that placing the people who write the software in charge of the servers (and thus content moderation) is generally a bad idea, and that it is worth the increased complexity to avoid such a situation.
Now they find that they have merely moved from one golden cage to another one, and that the developers of that one are also not as much into censoring speech as they are.
Meredith is obviously a crazy person, but to give the devil his due, she's not seriously suggesting this; she's claiming this is the attitude of tech people.
Fair. That being said, I think she is mostly building a strawman. I have contact with plenty of technical people (though not from SV), and I never got much in the way of condescension for being a physicist. The only people I have heard making jokes along the lines of "oh, you have a PhD, should I help you to tie your shoes?" are my colleagues expressing self-irony.
Of course, it helps that I (mostly) know what I am talking about, and possibly also that I am a guy.
A lot of big tech companies were conceived in academia, Sun and Google come to mind. I really do not think that the tech sector looks down on academia, I am very doubtful that Google would hire anyone who expressed the opinion that graph theory and big-O calculus are just masturbation for academics in their ivory tower who have no idea how the real world works.
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