Edit: maybe all these weirdos in the techfash groupchat are experimenting with the wrong nootropics and gave themselves brain damage. They all seem to be unravelling simultaneously.
A new pokemon game for switch/switch2 came out (Pokemon Legends Z-A)
Lots of gamergate smell wafting around gamer reddit, particularly regarding conspiracy theories about reviews. Dudes being completely unhinged that it isn't whatever version they played when they were 10 years old but with AAA graphics. Real normal stuff to reply about 100x in a day.
It could just be me being defensive about a thing my kids like lol.
It's just that my intuition nudges me when I come across that variety of authoritarian confidently incorrect guy who can't imagine people liking things that they dont like (or vice versa), and who will move worlds to enforce their one true take. It feels like they're everywhere, fueling most dumb internet social movements. It's like it could be a small piece of a General Theory of Weird Online Assholes.
The phenomenon rhymes with Musk Reply Guys, Music Experts Who Hate Taylor Swift Professionally, Claude Code Evangelists, and Star Wars Fandom.
Usually you get tech creeps insisting that they could've done physics. Isn't it kind of uncanny when a physicist insists on their capacity for tech creeping?
Edit: also thanks for the explainer!
Who's left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Also:
When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."
I love how Wells has given us both a great series of stories AND a jokey terminator analog to diffuse the mAnLy trope of building and/or fighting terminators.
zbyte64 gave a great answer. I visualize it like this:
Writing software that does a thing correctly within well defined time and space constraints is nothing like climbing a smooth gradient to a cozy global maximum.
On a good day, it's like hopping on a pogo stick around a spiky, discontinuous, weirdly-connected n-dimensional manifold filled with landmines (for large values of n).
The landmines don't just explode. Sometimes they have unpredictable comedic effects, such as ruining your weekend two months from now.
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