stegosaurus

Thank you for this comment. The links are fantastic. On the reading list. :)

I find Apple 'hate' far more understandable because of their market share.

Bitcoin makes up a tiny portion of the market and is completely optional. I mean, it barely even exists.

Apple's activities (notably 'tivoization'), threaten general purpose computing.

Regardless I still try to come to peace with it (i think it's very important to have a positive mindset). As long as I can still buy my ARM SoC boards, x86 machines, etc, I'll be happy. If that starts looking dim, eh. We'll see.

That'll be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop, then? ;)

>> In the pre-Gox days of the Bitcoin subreddit

This is true! You don't have to agree with them, though. The network still exists and is cool and useful regardless. You don't even need to use Reddit! I don't hang out on reddit.com/r/visa (does it even exist?)

>> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist

I think it would be fairer to say that it's 'a-environmentalist'. The badness or goodness of energy use for PoW just wasn't really a concern.

When I play Quake 3, my computer uses more energy. I consider that an acceptable compromise. Perhaps there are people out there that don't, so they don't play it.

I would find it quite odd if they criticized my habits, though. We should be trying to get along, not looking for chances to grumble at each other, you know?

As I posted further down - most of the issues here seem to stem from people having this idea that in the extreme long term Bitcoin takes over the world and 'their' (as if this is some sort of holy war?) green bits of paper become firewood or something.

That isn't a realistic model for how the world works and is really just an odd way of thinking.

I can play Quake 3 and have fun with it, and post blogs about it, without thinking it's going to destroy every other video game out there ever, without debating whether it even is a video game, etc. Hey, it has fast inverse square root, that's cool, but it's not going to result in the actual world being deleted and exchanged for CGI VR land.

Fundamentally it seems to be that there's some element of 'faith in the concept', that is turned off when it comes to money, perhaps as a protection mechanism. I don't know.

... Just chill out, you know? I might go out for a run soon. You can still walk, don't worry, it's not banned (I also walk, it's useful, maybe we can be friends?).

Sort of, but not really.

I think really what we're arguing about now is the distinction between hiring for a Google position (pushing the absolute state of the art) and hiring for a position creating accounting software or something.

I don't think that it's reasonable to expect to be hired into a top tier position as a kernel hacker at RedHat or a database expert at Google with an English degree and a few weeks of github commits.

I think that most software development jobs don't need the level of technical chops that are being asked for - and that many of the developers that actually have this level of ability just don't need the company (this post might be an example of that).

Some of the job requirements I've seen make me think along the lines of - 'hell, if I can do all of that, why would I work for you for peanuts?'.

>> rather than just kill time

Yeah, that's something I find really odd about most mobile games. They seem designed as a way to basically put the brain into a low energy state or something, rather than actually being interesting.

My personal experience of games like Candy Crush is that people play them on the subway or whatever when there's nothing else to do. If they had a book with them they'd read that, if someone handed them a Nintendo DS with zero effort they'd probably do that (if they could get over the ego thing).

I can't really imagine anyone setting themselves up for a marathon casual gaming session. They seem marketed to be one level above 'watching paint dry' and used in circumstances where that's the only alternative.

I think that's only true if you follow this idea that Bitcoin is going to take over the world, become a global reserve currency, we should hold 100% net worth in it, whatever.

Regardless of correctness, that sort of attitude feels really stressful to me (to think about the ultimate endgame of anything that ever happens under some 'ideal' circumstances). I don't think it's healthy.

For the time being, we have a cool technology that lets me use asymmetric crypto to send people a tenner on the other side of the world. If it all fails or drops massively in value tomorrow, I lose the small amount I have in my wallet.

I'm sure some cypherpunks figured that GPG meant we would all plug ourselves into the wall and be anonymous and stateless and stuff. That probably won't happen, but does it make GPG useless, worthy of ranting about?

I think you're spot on with this.

The general quality of discourse on any thread seems to drop hugely whenever politics comes up.

We seem to be able to leave each other alone when it comes to using vi vs. emacs - the odd joke comes up, but that's about it.

But politics? There seems to be this attitude of conversion, missionaries, convincing, it's kind of frustrating. I think it's healthy to question one's views sometimes, but not to face a constant onslaught.

Looking a bit harder, the language people use here is quite clearly politicized and strange - people use past tense, which I find difficult to interpret as anything other than trolling. No-one would say 'Linux was a good OS', because it currently exists and is used daily...?

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd.

If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'.

What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5?

From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

>> Also your flippant, dismissive attitude on quite important CS concepts wouldn't take you far.

Please try to avoid this. We can discuss without resorting to attacks.

>> "There's no point in testing for X or Y because ... e.g. we won't need X or Y to perform the job we are being tested for"

That's what most people are arguing for I think, so I agree with you there.

>> not being able to recognize what BFS even stands for in the first place is enough to raise a red flag anywhere.

By doing this you are throwing away developers that have made their respective companies millions in revenue. It's not hypothetical. One day, a non-CS trained developer will come across a tree and use it. And then they'll learn.

Yes, it's really odd! I used to work at St.Oberholz in Berlin. It was open until midnight and had a fantastic vibe.

Thanks for the link but I don't have a device to download the 'app' to, so the search continues...

The article is a bit tangential to what I imagined based on the headline, so I won't comment on that.

I would be very happy to pay for journalism, though.

I don't know if it's always been this way, but traditional news media seem to basically report a thing, with some unfounded commentary, and that's that.

I would love to see a 'general affairs' version of something like lwn.net.

Headlines like 'Inflation hits 0.5%' are just bollocks without explaining what inflation is, why it matters, what 'real return' is, whether real return is actually useful in $CURRENT_YEAR, etc.

In the UK we seem to have a relentless focus on personalities which is quite frustrating. 'Cameron this, cameron that' 'Osborne will be...' - focus on the policies, please, I don't care about the politicking. They'll be in for four years regardless, you know? It's just gossip.

My guess is that it's based on the instantaneous nature of news nowadays. If the Daily Mail has something on their front page, as The Guardian you need something up very soon if not now. If not for ad views, simply for relevance.

It might be time for me to start picking up The Economist again. I liked the weekly format, it seemed to give them time to actually flesh things out a bit.