I wrote up a very rough summary/set of notes. Please excuse all the errors in punctuation, spelling, and formatting. Thought it might be helpful for people who want to skim, as the whole thing is more-or-less a book.
This is a very syncretic fusion between computing, dialectical materialism, entrepreneurial laissez-faire idealism and a bombastic techno-optimism.
Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.
"Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.
The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through.
"Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.
The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.
"Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early, release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned once.
"Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.
"The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's understanding of hardware.
"A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.
"The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim: "Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very dangerous view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.
"Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.
The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.
There's something about the HN users that makes them enjoy taking a shit on other people's work without including positive or at least constructive feedback.
I've been a member for almost four years and I still haven't figured out what it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.
Even by Hacker News standards this comment is disappointingly negative. You'd do well by including even the tiniest bit of positive feedback – this collection obviously took a lot of work and apparently you were engaged enough to make it through 11 essays.
Good review, but it's worthwhile to note the source of the essays as well: it's a ribbonfarm adjunct and memetically sponsored by a16z, the saviors-of-humanity-with-no-ulterior-motives-whatsoever-but-keep-giving-us-billions-of-dollars-okay-mm'thanks.
Normal humans aren't supposed to understand this stuff. You are supposed to sit back and absorb it potentially while under the influence of mind expanding substances. It has also been rumored it helps to have two or more brains to understand ribbonfarm posts after 2012.
Plus, these writings are explicitly "inspired" by spending a year with Valley Thought Leaders and growing their already delusional viewpoints to even higher extremes (source: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/07/28/breaking-smart/). If you want to know how the movers and shakers in SV view their positions on high, read these essays and bask in the glow of their perfect prophecies of how the future will play out and how they, the ones on high—they, and they alone, are instrumental to the future of humanity. (plus, like, lol sharing economy with 25% vig so you maintain a monied billionaire class, obviously. feel free to share, but always give us 25% or we'll cry.)
These essays follow in the modern ribbonfarm style (high concept stream-of-thought/forget-the-world story telling—start with a thesis, see how far you can go until the world breaks). For example, here's a recent totally serious ribbonfarm excerpt about email:
Stream workflows avoid the illusion of perfectability of information flows implicit in notions like Inbox Zero altigether. Flow Laminar is an asymptotic ideal you will never actually reach, because incoming flows always bring in entropy, and while you can impose laminar flow on downstream parts of a stream, the only way to get rid of turbulence is to shut down the flow altogether.
The first essay on that list starts talking about "soft technologies" without defining what they are.
They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).
There is also the fact that mathematics isn't in it. It's a list of abstract non-physical technologies that includes writing and software and excludes mathematics. I am not sure whether money should or should not be there (trade and value-store are both pretty transformative concepts for sure). But the idea of encoding the rules of behavior of the world in a form amenable to direct manipulation over those same rules seems to either be missing (math), or presented as a 21st century discovery (software).
I was comfortable with the notion. It seems to me that "soft technologies" are the ones that cause ideas and thoughts to be materialized in the world. The other technologies seem to be physical transformations of matter and energy.
What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.
And only two of these, written language and money, were soft technologies: seemingly ephemeral, but capable of being embodied in a variety of specific physical forms.
The idea makes a decent amount of sense (technologies with no fixed physical component), it just that the list of what counts is completely FUBAR.
For example: math, the OODA loop, indexing, laws, logistics (ex siege warfare, "never start a land war in asia"), contracts, empire / political hierarchy, etc.
My interpretation is that they are technologies that embody/manipulate information, as opposed to matter or energy. And, whether you agree or not, the argument being made is that information technologies are different in fundamental ways than matter or energy technologies.
Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is his regular blog audience.
So this is a blog that will write 1 article every 5 weeks and batch release them in 2017? I am all for thoughtful content, but binging isn't a concept that can be applied to blogs. This makes no sense.
Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation.
What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which is catalogued for direct and total consumption online?
It's a valid thing to do because the ideas are all interrelated in complex ways. Releasing them all at once allows you to read a little, get inspired, jump around, check another intriguing title, and then come back tomorrow to read a little more (if you are inspired).
A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of pedagogy! :P
Can somebody provide cliff notes? This is too long and I strongly dislike what has been written in the first few essays. Maybe somebody can sum this up in shorter form.
You realize you can shrink your browser window width and increase the text size to make the layout how you want?
For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the most boring comments to read.
[+] [-] antisugar|10 years ago|reply
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_...
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.
"Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.
The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through.
"Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.
The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.
"Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early, release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned once.
"Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.
"The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's understanding of hardware.
"A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.
"The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim: "Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very dangerous view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.
"Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.
The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.
----
Overall, I do not recommend this.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|10 years ago|reply
I've been a member for almost four years and I still haven't figured out what it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
Seriously. Facepalm.
RMS would not be happy to read this.
[+] [-] ed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|10 years ago|reply
Normal humans aren't supposed to understand this stuff. You are supposed to sit back and absorb it potentially while under the influence of mind expanding substances. It has also been rumored it helps to have two or more brains to understand ribbonfarm posts after 2012.
Plus, these writings are explicitly "inspired" by spending a year with Valley Thought Leaders and growing their already delusional viewpoints to even higher extremes (source: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/07/28/breaking-smart/). If you want to know how the movers and shakers in SV view their positions on high, read these essays and bask in the glow of their perfect prophecies of how the future will play out and how they, the ones on high—they, and they alone, are instrumental to the future of humanity. (plus, like, lol sharing economy with 25% vig so you maintain a monied billionaire class, obviously. feel free to share, but always give us 25% or we'll cry.)
These essays follow in the modern ribbonfarm style (high concept stream-of-thought/forget-the-world story telling—start with a thesis, see how far you can go until the world breaks). For example, here's a recent totally serious ribbonfarm excerpt about email: Stream workflows avoid the illusion of perfectability of information flows implicit in notions like Inbox Zero altigether. Flow Laminar is an asymptotic ideal you will never actually reach, because incoming flows always bring in entropy, and while you can impose laminar flow on downstream parts of a stream, the only way to get rid of turbulence is to shut down the flow altogether.
[+] [-] mwcampbell|10 years ago|reply
- Michael O. Church's latest: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/technology-i...
- Giles Bowkett on the decadence of the current consumer software industry with regard to QA: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/07/actually-no-stuff-u... See also his takedown of Paul Graham's essay on immigration: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/06/let-other-95-of-rea... and why we should currently be scared of software eating the world: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/05/my-skepticism-re-ub...
- A couple of posts from Alex Payne: https://al3x.net/2014/06/17/dear-marc-andreessen.html https://al3x.net/2013/12/18/bitcoin.html
- Unicornfree with Amy Hoy, which promotes bootstrapping profitable businesses (remember, Mr. Rao dismissed steady-state models of profitability as self-limiting purism in "Rough Consensus and Maximum Interestingness"). For example: https://unicornfree.com/2014/4-economic-facts-that-say-boots... https://unicornfree.com/2010/dont-bite-the-shit-sandwich https://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-lon...
[+] [-] McElroy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaemon|10 years ago|reply
They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).
[+] [-] lazaroclapp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petejansson|10 years ago|reply
What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.
[+] [-] BowBun|10 years ago|reply
And only two of these, written language and money, were soft technologies: seemingly ephemeral, but capable of being embodied in a variety of specific physical forms.
[+] [-] tbrownaw|10 years ago|reply
For example: math, the OODA loop, indexing, laws, logistics (ex siege warfare, "never start a land war in asia"), contracts, empire / political hierarchy, etc.
[+] [-] tedsanders|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jordanpg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelrunyon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zvikara|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_lev|10 years ago|reply
Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is his regular blog audience.
[+] [-] andrewtbham|10 years ago|reply
Also lots of references to previous great insights: Alan Kay, Carlota Perez, Jeff Bezos,
[+] [-] kzhahou|10 years ago|reply
I refer to this as "cementing the drive."
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation.
What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which is catalogued for direct and total consumption online?
> an e-book. Got it now guys.
[+] [-] javajosh|10 years ago|reply
A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of pedagogy! :P
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|10 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, what? Oh it certainly is, believe me.
[+] [-] bluishgreen|10 years ago|reply
This is a great collections of essays, I'd say bed time reading for the budding entrepreneur and/or VC.
Ignore (or misunderstand) at your own peril.
[+] [-] alexashka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akulakhan|10 years ago|reply
This is that, except in ascii.
[+] [-] curiousjorge|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|10 years ago|reply
The lines are over 120 characters long at 16px. On a 1080p screen this is just to small and wide to follow properly.
This sort of thing is bearable here on HN when skimming comments but for reading over '30,000 words' it's just too off putting to even start reading.
[+] [-] npizzolato|10 years ago|reply
For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the most boring comments to read.