kgu

Edit: never mind, silly question

I can't find it viscerally in me to take moral issue with the guy releasing the code. I understand it belongs to Blizzard, but I just don't feel sorry for them. Not defending that, just stating a fact about the absence of an emotion in me.

That said: if you believe the guy would've been right to distribute the code, it follows that you believe the right thing for Blizzard to do is to release the code themselves. Instead of arguing morality here, one might spend one's energy articulating that argument to Blizzard instead.

Sorry for the downvotes; I upvoted you to correct. I think it's an interesting question. There are probably fields where it's possible and fields where it's not.

Some students certainly outperform others by a factor of ten. I'd hesitate to score managers numerically, but it seems plausible that working for one could feel ten times more smooth or whatever than working for another, whatever that means. Intuitively, probably not factory workers, but prove me wrong.

10x is not actually that much. I could play basketball with Michael Jordan or chess with Magnus Carlsen, and they'd win essentially an infinite number of games against me without losing once. That doesn't mean they're infinitely better, because theoretically I could through practice become as good as them, but the factor is way more than 10.

Arguing that 10x developers don't exist strikes me as the extraordinary position requiring extraordinary evidence, rather than the inverse. People vary; why wouldn't they here?

Some people argue, essentially, "programming is complicated," but even if you want to claim that programming consists of multiple dimensions along which programmers can be measured, how about when one person outperforms another on every dimension by a factor of ten? What should we call that other than one person being ten times better than another?

Other people argue that while 10x developers may exist, teamwork matters far more. Well, what do you suppose would happen then if you managed to assemble a team of only 10x developers?

The gradient covers all the hypothetical programmers that could exist but happen not to.

> However, as soon as you have a slightly larger team, these decisions will usually not be made by one single person. If you have a large project with dozens or hundreds of engineers, you'll have dedicated teams for some of these tasks, making their own desicions.

Another interpretation of this is that 10x programmers get dragged down when they have to work on teams that are too large or don't grant autonomy.

I support!

I hear what you're saying and actually agree. The somewhat pedantic point I was making earlier was just that the author could've more conservatively written, "here are some possible dangers down this path which we should think carefully about."

(Sorry for replying to a long, substantive comment with a short one; I just don't have anything to add.)

I found the thread interesting and informative up until she drew her conclusion:

Elon Musk doesn't strike me as an innovator when he talks about building tunnels and subways. He strikes me as Robert Moses. Who are these tunnels going to serve? The Latino communities in LA? Or are we just running them straight to the rich neighborhoods?

It's hard for me to believe someone doesn't have an axe to grind when they make statements like this. On what basis does this person claim that Elon Musk bears resemblance to Robert Moses?

This is my problem with many politics-in-tech discussions. People who take politics seriously say, "technology always has political implications." True enough; we do indeed seem to forget that. They stir some history into their argument. Even better. But once they have to perform analysis, free of the rigorous standards of thought you have in e.g. math or science, they start saying baseless things.

That disagrees with the Twitter thread you linked to, which claims:

> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.

Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.

Well, fair enough, you're right that SJW can be used as a label too.

My original flagged comment was actually "The invigorating fervor of social justice"; I didn't use the term "SJW." It was a sassy thing I wrote because I thought it was funny how the obvious comment that took no courage to write was shooting to the top as usual. I was making fun of people with who post passionate, rallying cries in the spirit of "we must stand our ground," knowing full well they're on a message board that will congratulate them for it, and, while they're at it, being rather boring.

As for my SJW comment, I was explaining to tomlock why people use "social justice" negatively. I should've added "e.g." before "social justice warrior."

I think it's needlessly mocking, but it is not a label: it has an actual definition, and I'd consider anyone who used the word outside that definition to be using it incorrectly. It refers to a specific set of behaviors. Bigot and racist used to not be labels, until people started applying the terms to everything.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't mean to be sensitive; is the suggestion that I did this somewhere, and am thus missing the irony?

I probably shouldn't have posted that, but "social justice warrior" is a pejorative for actual good reason. It refers specifically to people who don't genuinely care about justice, and are rather interested in shoving everyone in society into categories at the expense of individuality, policing language with offense and outrage, and creating a culture where name-calling with labels like bigot, racist, etc. are treated as compelling arguments by appealing to a sense of tribal identity—all in the name of justice.