AnonJ's comments

Such self-hosted services might help us a lot, as Slack is currently blocked in China already. I think the two main reasons are that the Chinese government is unable to inspect the data at will, and also they fear sensitive data being leaked to the US government easily, which is actually quite legit. No interest in politics nonsense and having full control over your own sensitive data is probably the best possible thing to do.

What's wrong with that? Many great products started at companies which are not "supposed" to do that as their core business. Pivotal Tracker is one thing that immediately sprang to my mind. Why do you want to strictly limit what a company is working on, and potentially kill great ideas anyways. I believe as long as they're still functioning, their game development business is probably totally fine. The same applies to a person: I don't believe if you work on something as a full-time job you're then not allowed to have your hobbies, side projects(some of which are quite huge in scale) and personal interests. That would be horrible.

Might come across as quite unbelievable for modern day western folks but that's basically exactly what also happens in China and in general East Asian countries. Totally archaic in the modern world and can become extreme hinderances for frank discussions, collaboration and productivity. Fortunately young people are gradually getting rid of those s especially among themselves but it's sometimes quite bad that many people of previous generations are still emphasizing those as civilized etiquettes, while in fact it only breeds hypocrisy and miscommunication. This is also an example of misunderstandings and conflicts between generations: some mundane members of older generations simply don't really understand the more modern ideals of young people, and from incomprehension stemmed suspicions and fear, which is unfortunate and laughable. Some of them are also realizing the issue for sure but the number is still small. The sooner it's gone in our culture the better. I guess it takes time though just as it probably did in other places in the world. Culture changes are always a kind of behind the socio-economic changes.

Weird. How were librarians supposed to know that much in the eyes of the general public. Surely they were no different than other folks?

Weird reasoning, that. I hardly see how a selfish, "territorial" and noncooperative approach could benefit anybody. Sure people might cooperate, but that doesn't mean they will take shortcuts and mess things up.

This argument is really rough. Many programmers surely will only want the content, but websites are interacting with the whole world, and they have business models which cater to the general public. If they only exist to serve simple, static contents then the companies running them might add well just shut up shop. Why even bother spending expenses maintaining such stuffs if they don't appeal to the general public and easily call them to actions anyways.

His ideas are mostly hugely idealistic and categorical, ignoring real world scenarios and downplaying the downsides of free softwares. People who believe in complete anarchy can perfectly choose to live in their enclosed community, but if the world were to follow their way of living it would be a total disaster. Though of course debating their ideas would contribute to the development of practical, real world ideas in some ways. Better to have such a voice around than not, of course, but most people, after thinking it through, would just rightly reject taking his ideas verbatim.

This author is quite exaggerating a bit. It seems like he himself is constantly preoccupied with politics. Fine. But this doesn't mean other people who he see with his eyes are necessarily thinking in the same pattern. "Machiavellian" is such a heavy word. Go started out with a purpose, a purpose which makes a lot of sense. It's not all about "make a new language and shove the new rules onto everyone by coupling it with Very Fast Build Times, a kind of veto-proof Defense Spending Bill in the Congress of computer programming." Such a design has a lot of practical value.

All pretty good. However the author didn't answer the question he posed at the beginning of the article. How does he plan to escape the "ephemerality" of computer programs? Seems from the footnote of his website that he plans to do so by "journeying from web ephemera to the timeless world of data." But is that really so fundamental a change? Or, actually, maybe programming isn't that "ephemeral" after all. It's just that people nowadays have the luxury of updating things at a much higher rate than ancient people, while still preserving(and improving upon) the core spirit. Languages, libraries and classical programs have been around for years. They're not really being overhauled/outdated as suggested. They're just being improved.

The general point is quite good. The only thing is that PHP should be considered as a particularly bad outlier and people still should avoid it at all costs. It's just way too old. It's not "boring", it's antiquated. With Rails/Django being around for almost a decade, they're much more sensible choices than PHP. Sure if your whole massive codebase started out in PHP that's one thing, but if you are spinning up a new project I see definitely no reason for using PHP... Even if it means you'll have to spend a little bit more extra time getting up to speed in the beginning, you'll benefit a whole lot in the end. The same goes for MySQL vs. Postgres, to a lesser extent of course.

He'll probably not think PHP is the best language. But PHP is definitely the language he has the most efficiency on though.

Stallman is becoming quite increasingly peculiar. Not really interested in his talks. His software was great but his ideology (and generally that of FSF) is probably a kind of out of touch with the reality.

Yeah exactly. The post was quite crude and I can't see a passionate, career-savvy programmer in it. I guess the most important value of the post is to open up our eyes to those colleagues who aren't into the trade with a true love for programming. Their mindset would be something quite hard to comprehend were we using only our own perspectives.

It certainly is crazy. I appreciate that the author left hints and certain introspection about how it could be a self-irony. However the author seems mostly still believes in it being true. Looking at the "evidences" he put together they're mostly frail and nonsensical, especially the motive part. Rational people would certainly avoid failing prey to such obviously irrational rut. Good for being sane enough at times to remind readers about that, though.

The post seems to be inspired by a hot question on Math StackExchange http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1143132/is-there-a-s... . Probably the author should also acknowledge it?

Well probably 90% of games are just brainless mass entertainment productions and it's quite pointless playing them anyways. But a few games are true works of arts and playing them, just like going through an insightful book/movie, gives you a lot. This might be the most convincing reason if I were to keep playing certain games.

Well, after all most games are commercial projects using which you have to feed a lot of people(investors, programmers, designers, composers etc.). Therefore you cannot expect them to present really serious and deep stories, in the way authors are able to do personally in literature. Therefore trying to interpret too much into the story/taking them too seriously mostly won't get you anywhere. There might be occasional strokes of excellence but in general storywriters for games were just rushing to meet deadlines. In this case, bringing back the last Meteor could be a touching story, however for the sake of commercial production they couldn't really produce a coherent narrative for it across all Meteor series games, and in the end Samus just ended up being a self-conflicting and basically brainless and senseless character. Yeah, games played at certain stages might bring deep nostalgia, but those most likely come from personal experiences instead of the stories themselves.

By the way, quite a remarkable story in terms of personal experience.

This article makes no sense. All those services mentioned are pretty much third-party marketplace-style thing. What’s the point in insisting a “path upwards” or whatsoever when in all manners the marketplace just exists to connect customers with service providers? I don’t think it’s the marketplace’s duty to cater to the service providers who simply use the marketplace, just like it’s not an office space's duty to ensure that the companies which loan a space live long and prosper. And anyways I don’t see normal taxi drivers having a clear “path upwards” either. The arguments are quite invalid and TBH a bit sensational.

Basically true. Glad to see that it's still something from oneself(self-discipline) instead of anything imposed by the outside world. However there's one thing that I can't really agree with:

> Trying to drum up enthusiasm for fundamentally dull and soul crushing activities is literally a form of deliberate psychological self-harm, a voluntary insanity: “I AM SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THESE SPREADSHEETS, I CAN’T WAIT TO FILL OUT THE EQUATION FOR FUTURE VALUE OF ANNUITY, I LOVE MY JOB SOOO MUCH!”

Nonsense. "Cutting the link between feelings and actions" is to prevent the short-term irrational and counterproductive effects brought by fickle emotions. That's totally right. However, if you don't have a fundamental, long-term passion for what you're doing, then you'll definitely have serious troubles. If the author doesn't like filling spreadsheets, that's fine. I don't like it either. However he cannot plainly declare that everybody who says he/she likes it to be insane. This is quite hilarious.

Of course, "interest" and “passion” in most cases are actually brought about by consistent devotion and hard work in the first place. Then a positive feedback loop is formed. That’s true. You can’t expect most people to “love” what he/she does without he/she mastering it and deriving joy from it first. However if you just choronically feel your job is dull and “soul crushing", then you should probably seriously consider seeking something else to do. That is totally different from admitting that cake is more seducive than broccoli, but just rationally and correctly deciding to eat broccoli for the sake of health. In the latter case, the problem is that our currently technology pretty much doesn't allow you to enjoy a cake-flavored broccoli. So you've got no rational choice but to eat broccoli. However in the case of jobs, you're a free person. If you really can't like a job even after you've learned to do it systematically and with discipline, just change one which you have more passion for. There's definitely no problem to it.

I generally understand what the author is trying to emphasize here. I am probably just being a bit picky and feel he didn’t employ the appropriate words/example in this place.

"Rising the price of the cables by 33%" feels really sinister and underhanded. Is this guy totally sure that it was done intentionally.