the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


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NireBryce
@NireBryce

so you know how broken clocks are right twice a day? well this is whatever idiom is necessary for "there's one thing ESR (the nazi programmer guy) wrote that I actually think is important to read". He wrote a letter to a young, brilliant, and oblivious Linus Torvalds.

I think about this every few years because I see the smaller, microscale version of it play out in a lot of my spaces: brilliant people, even among brilliant people, often get far ahead of the majority of everyone else in one topic.

to the point where they can't pass on the skills because they don't even necessarily know how to describe what they're doing, then burn out and we essentially "lose progress" for a few years as it's rebuilt. Because they're so productive that it's, in many ways, subtly detrimental.

but all the while they're evangelizing what they do, because they have the excitement and the charisma of someone enthusiastic and dedicated to their work, accidentally becoming impossibly load bearing, and their ability to teach cannot bring enough up to speed before they run out of steam and disappear from that space.

they aren't kind words (well. considering the author, it's positively diplomatic) but I hope this framing and pretext gets through.

I think about it because in many ways, the Linux ecosystem already grappled with this publicly, made successes and mistakes, and there's a lot that can be learned from that and generalized, because a lot of other smaller groups have these issues.

and if i hadn't given you the original source, I don't think you would have taken it as seriously as a project to learn from. 2000 is over twenty years ago, and I don't think enough people see it as the social project it was, instead categorizing it as extremely technical, which it was, but it required, essentially, partybuilding and party politics among people who were often amatures at both at best when they started.


the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

As one of those so-called gifted kids oh my god do I feel this. Then again I feel like pretty much my entire adult life with computers has felt like yelling at someone like this, unheeded, that they actually are doing it wrong.

To wit --
At this point watching Elon Musk cover himself in shit is actually funny, because the consequences of his failures are relatively contained and they're entirely the result of his own hubris. He's made it impossible for us to feel bad for him.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

hmm, now i want to look into this sort of dynamic in the evolution of organizations/bureaucracies in early modern history... youd read about stuff like "this one medieval monarch was an obsessive micromanager that did tons of administration himself" which is just an incredibly stupid structural position to be in. youre One Guy just get lots of other people to handle things in a sustainable way. but low literacy rates and high corruption rates made that hard for a long time, and i wonder how the history of the design of institutions tracks with this type of problem..