One person wants a list of their political enemies banned from software conferences, one of them doesn't want them banned. Which one is tolerant? The only intolerance and exclusion I see is from those requesting that specific people with whom they have political disagreement be banned.
If one takes the narrow scope of openly "wants political enemies banned from software conferences" as the only way one can be intolerant, this actually makes sense. Doesn't it seem obvious to you, though, that there are other ways to be intolerant?
For example, take this author's beef:
> Around the same time this Rubygems drama was unfolding, David published a post [exploring his confusion and fear](https://web.archive.org/web/20250915074221/https://world.hey...) of the diverse ethnic makeup of the city of London, in the United Kingdom.
In that blog post, DHH included this paragraph:
> Most recently, five officers(!) came to arrest comedian Graham Linehan for illicit tweets. When much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question, such that the reader might imagine something far worse than what was actually said. So you should actually [read the three tweets](https://web.archive.org/web/20250915093439/https://grahamlin...) that landed Linehan in jail, and earned him a legal restraining order against using X. It's grotesque.
Cherry-picking the tweet that seems most unreasonable:
> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
The author takes this to mean:
> In other words, that if you see a trans woman minding her business you should go out of your way to harass her – and then physically assault her.
So, since you brought up the question, and given this additional context, maybe there's something more to think about: which one is tolerant? Do you think it is unreasonable for the author to dislike DHH to the point that they would refuse to go to a conference at which he is scheduled to speak?
It's unreasonable and seemingly dishonest for the OP to have used the phrase "don’t share their opinions". It's similarly unreasonable and dishonest to refer to him as a mere political enemy. That's obviously not where the disdain comes from. You wouldn't think you simply "don't share my opinion" and that I'm just a "political enemy" if I think you should be excluded from public spaces simply for being different from me. You'd probably think I'm being intolerant. And there would be no shortage of folk coming out of the woodwork saying that actually you're being intolerant for not tolerating my opinion (that you don't belong for being different).
I am really tired of the lazy argument style of using "corporate" as a synonym for "bad". I too think it's bad to encourage addictive gamblers. I don't care if it is corporate, individual, or state run.
Matt Stoller is a leftist and views everything through that lens. I agree the framing is unfortunate. On the other hand, if you ignore the unnecessary "corporate" part, he's basically right.
For me, the push to single page applications and the unnecessary complexity that brought with it made me just sick of fooling around with web things- we had solved the problem and they invented nonsense that made it harder. There has been so much to explore over the past 7 years in machine learning though- it just requires a lot more compute than most people have available on their desktop.
The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.
The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).
It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.
This is where John Gall's Systemantics comes into play, “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."
Obviously a bit hyperbolic, but matches my experience.
I agree with the saying as such but I think it's actually a counterpoint to the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" idea. When building a system initially you want to do the simplest thing that can possible work, given some appropriate definition of "working". Ideally as the systems requirements evolve you should refactor to address the complexity by adding abstractions, making things horizontally scalable, etc. But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call". Before you know it you have an incomprehensible API with 250 parameters which interact in complex ways and a rats nest of spaghetti code serving it.
I prefer the way Einstein said it (or at least I've heard it attributed to him, not sure if he actually said it): "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler".
> But for any given change the "simplest thing that can possible work" is usually something along the lines of "we'll just add another if-statement" or "we'll just add another parameter to the API call".
Sounds to me like we need to distinguish between simplicity of the individual diff, and simplicity of the end result (i.e. the overall code base after applying the diff). The former is a very one-dimensional and local way of optimization, which over time can lead you far away from a global optimum.
Just need to find the right scissor statement to really get the debate going.
reply