Fuck Africa, or Exploration in the idiocy of the crowd

First, let's see a nice illustration, easily worth ten thousand words.

Second, the ten thousand words in question :

mircea_popescu


one of the great strengths of the APL ecosystem so far are the user community. Lispy people are a preposterously pricklish and unhelpful bunch in comparison.

Is this true even ?

But part of it definitely stems from the incessant stream of ignorant criticisms leveled at the Lisp community by outsiders

It occurs to me that if the outsiders can do that then the whole ecosystem empowers outsiders to an outrageous, unwarranted and quite dangerous degree. If your highschool peers can make you antisocial by claiming you're antisocial then there's no incentive for them to abstain, is there.
ben_vulpes Programmers are the herdiest of creaturesⁱ. Witness the insane popularity of v8 - js on the server! Also infected with "niceness" - don't talk shit on js! It's not nice!

mircea_popescu I choose not to witness.
bounce Saves going door to door.
decimation No dude node.js is going to change everything.

mircea_popescu Everything that passport.net did or w/e that crap was called. I can't read Locklin without him annoying me. Such a total schmoozeball.ⁱⁱ

advertising is a symptom of insufficient demand or insufficient supply.

Naggum o.Oⁱⁱⁱ
asciilifeform 'Antisocial' in this case is same kind of 'antisocial' as, e.g., mathematicians who won't ask to learn from redditors how to do topology 'correctly according to the kommyoonity!'

mircea_popescu This is what I meant, obliquely. If you allow the "community" of screaming monkeys to decide whether you are antisocial type 1 or 2, you're giving them too much power. And if you conform by doing the "since they call me a thief anyway might as well", you are actually giving away that much power. Consider a simpler case, let me find it.
asciilifeform If surrounded by monkeys, and for one reason or another can't call an exterminator - what to do. In this case - walls. Walls tall enough that the monkeys don't even know, normally, that there is a something behind them, or walls at all. Sometimes - a chimp finds a loose brick, and you have a little infestation problem.

mircea_popescu


The site is owned by the most annoying, donkey riding arsehole involved with bitcoin.

Unlike all the others, owned by nice people that ran off with your coins.

I wish that arsehole would run off with all the coins if it meant never hearing from him again.

This should make it obvious. Of course Redditard monkey would love nothing more than for his idiocy to be confirmed. Important to remember however that his declarative statements are powerless to influence reality, and as much as he'd like to live in a world where there's no incentive for me to stay honest, nevertheless the world and his like have no common points.
asciilifeform The most unbearable itch, to monkey, is the mental hole in his picture of the world, the annoying hatefact that rubs his nose in the entire model being horseshit.

mircea_popescu Right. But what would be the equivalent to "lisp people being prickly" in context ? Me splitting with everyone's cash because some Redditard says things ? Nonsense, that. Equally nonsense in both cases. You can't become prickly just because people are idiots. It'd be giving idiots too much say.
asciilifeform They are 'prickly' in the sense that their only contact with a world outside their own is redditards knocking on the door to 'teach how the world is'.

mircea_popescu Perhaps.
decimation The next step is to become a hermit in the taiga I guess.

[ a pause ]

decimation Re: model being horeshit:

Because, we know that with theoretical cherry picking someone can come up with a set of assumptions that produces a result that may logically follow from those assumptions, but if the assumptions really don't have much traction in the real world, that result really doesn't have much to say about what we are actually looking at.

from my econtalk link above.

mircea_popescu It's worse than that! Consider : you could pick arbitrary assumptions and arbitrary data sets so as to theoretically and practically justify a particular theory sufficiently so that it gives the desired results for a FINITE time interval, calculated to exceed the probable testing period. This is how us kids learn for exams, for instance^iv. Fraud through and through, and yet. Proponents of such tailored "knowledge" will understandably fight tooth and nail with some classes of rational approach, such as the people who use the counterexample effectually (aka, trolls).^v Amusingly enough, for the capacities of the basic rational agent, they'd seem to have a point, too!^vi
decimation Moriarty earlier said that such an attitude is 'simplistic' - after all, how can these people (economists, programmers, students) have so many papers and have said nothing?

mircea_popescu I would suggest the volume in and of itself is proof they say nothing.
asciilifeform This relates directly to certain circles seen as 'prickly'. It comes mainly from not wishing to dissolve in the sea. Not everyone is itching to be part of some gigantic 'everyone' who will 'do things their way'. Naggum wrote that the worst thing that could possibly happen to common lisp is if it became 'mainstream' and popular.

mircea_popescu But that is a much more self aware, and effectually applied, violence than mere prickliness. It's being an asshole deliberately and oppressing selected idiots wilfully. Maybe I misread, but the term to me suggested involuntary and incontinence. Which is what the entire observation was based on, after all : if it's involuntary, if the prickly is passive, then the other party is active, and to the active goes the agency. Too much agency for a monkey.
asciilifeform Sometimes this situation evolves in interesting directions e.g., monkeys steal a small subset of man's tech, and build a cargo-cultish airplane - but one which sorta flies when the weather is just so. Then, for one reason or another (monkey overruns man's city; or, more commonly, man begins to turn monkey-like in his haste and sloth and adopts monkey's approach to design) and the fair-weather airplane becomes the only kind extant.

mircea_popescu That may explain how we ended up with the current USG.

From all this, I draw a few inferences :

• Usability does not mean "easy to use for you". Usability means easy to use for the people we care about, which may or may not include you. But in any and all cases the people we care about does not automatically include you. It certainly does not include you merely because you exist. In most cases it does automatically exclude Africa. Because fuck Africa, that's why.
• Looking for opinions of "people" outside of your WoT is an exercise in patent nonsense, because no people exist outside of your WoT.
• The input on any topic provided by someone meaningless to you is meaningless to you. It's not that you'd be wasting your time trying to integrate such input, it's that you demonstrably can't even understand what the fuck it's supposed to mean. You're about as likely to come to something sensible by inserting randomly generated strings, or in other words the assumption that other people's communication presents itself in plain text is nonsensical, unwarranted and generally dangerous.

1. "Real programmers" would no doubt say this is the effect of the mass diffusion of programming among people that needn't program and can't really program engendered by the C makework paradigm. Perhaps. [↩]
2. I guess consulting aspirations do that to a body. [↩]
3. It's an excellent point. Consider humanity did just fine without dating sites. Why ? How ? What's that mean ?

   Obviously imbalance is not automatically or necessarily a bad thing, and obviously everything's in balance that lacks degrees of liberty, such as the possibility of even conceiving of better balance. What's that to do with the thesis ? Fact remains, advertising only exists in the absence of equilibrium. Just like speech. [↩]

4. This is how the same idiots then "prove" "global warming". [↩]
5. Or for that matter, Diogenes. [↩]
6. Or to quote,

   Your takeaway from this story might just as well be that unless you’re a wiseguy yourself, you’re in no position to open your mouth or get involved once someone you know to be a wiseguy puts the smackdown on some random third party.

   Sure, maybe they’re violent, out of control sadistic maniacs. Maybe. Not your call. For all you know, maybe they saw something you didn’t see, because you’re stupid and they aren’t. Always a possibility, neh ?

   Or fail that, you know, they were probably just jealous because the nobody was competition or something. Right ?

   Exactly the scandalous opposite of everything you have been taught to think, all that nicely pleasant utopioid nonsense about how "everyone can think for himself" and science is "the text, not the context, and certainly not the source" and so on and so forth, all the hopelessly naive nonsense of a meanwhile defeated in the field approach to rational thought. What to do, what to do... [↩]