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Dev.SN ♥ developers

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-so-meta-even-this-acronym dept.

jcd writes:

"I'm rather excited to get going with Soylent and to watch it grow. Nay, help it grow. I have lurked in /. for more than a decade (note: I'm not the same username over there, I know, how sneaky), and always wished I could have been involved with the beginning. So this is a great opportunity, and I joined as soon as I saw what Soylent was doing. Not to mention the fact that I felt right at home with the old style. It's very comfortable.

So here's a question for everyone. Are we going to be the same as slashdot? A clone that focuses as entirely as possible on tech related news? Or will we branch out to other topics? I'm interested to see either way. I posted a comment to this effect in one of our two existing polls, and it may be a community-wide assumption, but I do think it merits a discussion."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Non Sequor on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:41PM

    by Non Sequor (1005) on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:41PM (#3879)

    http://historysquared.com/2012/05/31/the-fox-vs-th e-hedgehog-forecaster-by-philip-tetlock/ [historysquared.com]

    I think you're hedgehogging. Hedgehogs can have a lot of good things to add to a conversation, but when they run the conversation, tunnel-vision runs rampant. Sometimes things are parts of larger trends, sometimes they're isolated incidents. I don't think a call to arms to try to rally a community to evaluate every event in terms of a perceived trend is productive.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by lennier on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:07PM

    by lennier (2199) on Thursday February 20 2014, @10:07PM (#3980)

    Um. Yeah, that link is exactly sort of mindless trend-following Wall Street jargon I consider to be absolutely a huge cause of the current crisis.

    Yes, I have a 'single big thing' I'm interested in. It's called having values.

    I'm not interested in hedge funds, trend predictions, or 'behavioural finance' (the very name gives me cold shivers). I'm not a speculator, I'm not part of the tech noveau riche. My dream isn't to flip a startup for $16 billion so I can afford an apartment in Seattle.

    I have a boring IT job that pays the bills. I'm not here for the money. I'm here for the thrill I felt when as a twelve-year-old kid I typed RUN into a Commodore PET and knew I had a machine that was my own. I believe in the original ideals of Hackerdom: 'access to tools', in the sense of Steward Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog. Technology as a tool to be shaped by the users. Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms. Freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to share.

    If you were here in 1998, you'll remember that that is what Slashdot stood for back then. Not just generic 'tech' and certainly not just the generic dotcom money bubble - Wired was already circling that particular drain. There was a loose movement with a shared cluster of values and spokespeople. Linus Torvalds. Eric Raymond. Bruce Perens. Tim O'Reilly. Lawrence Lessig. Pamela Jones. And in later years, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, writing the kind of post-cyberpunk science fiction with optimism and heart that was instantly recognisable as 'torn from the pages of Slashdot'.

    If you don't care about values and you just want money, that's fine. But some of us believed - and still do - that the Slashdot crowd generally stood for more than just guessing the movement of crowds at any cost.

    --
    Delenda est Beta
    • (Score: 1) by Non Sequor on Friday February 21 2014, @12:01AM

      by Non Sequor (1005) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:01AM (#4062)

      Who said anything about money? This hedgehog/fox theory comes from literary criticism.

      What i wanted you to take away was that people with singular ideals are more likely to be wrong in the way that they assess the future will play out. The people who are more likely to be right are the ones who integrate pieces of other people's ideals.

      I'm not saying you shouldn't represent your ideals. But I think you should voice them without trying to be the nucleus around which a hive mind forms.

      I appreciate openness, but I don't feel like it fixes everything and I tend to think that the Stallman wing of the free software movement tends to place things of utility to programmers on a pedestal above other concerns. That rubs me the wrong way. I think these things need to be regarded as an urge that needs a voice to be heard alongside the other things that people want.

      My values are that I hate false clarity, I hate party platforms, I hate theories that everything is 'just so', and I hate perfection. But I love broken things that sometimes work.

      • (Score: 1) by lennier on Friday February 21 2014, @01:55AM

        by lennier (2199) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:55AM (#4112)

        "Who said anything about money? This hedgehog/fox theory comes from literary criticism."

        Possibly it does. But the site you linked to is full of links about hedge funds and financial trading, not literary criticism. You can see why I might be confused about the message you were trying to send?

        "I appreciate openness, but I don't feel like it fixes everything... I think these things need to be regarded as an urge that needs a voice to be heard alongside the other things that people want."

        I do agree that a singular focus can mean missing other details. And I understand that not everyone in the Soylent community today - heck, not everyone in the old Slashdot community in 1998 - shares the values I've articulated as 'hackerish'. I'm also not particularly interested in being any kind of nucleus; for one thing, I'm far too busy. What I _would_ like is to be an occasional part of a community that _does_ share those values. (Because I think they're important, obviously; they wouldn't be my _values_ if they were disposable nice-to-haves, they'd just be... passing trends and consumer choices, I guess.)

        But I know that times change, people move on, and we don't always get what we want, or even what we need. Least of all agreement with everyone on the Internet.

        Peace, and may your broken things at least sometimes work.

        --
        Delenda est Beta