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- Hacker News
- I stopped reading when the author was spending pages defending the stuff he hadn't even written yet from the imaginary criticism in their head.
Future tip: make your argument. Make it well, and make it succinctly. Save "arguing with the Internet" for the comments.
by hungryhobbit - Repos are owned by an owner. The owner has full control of the repo but it's not like you are being forced to use the Repo. Nobody comes to your house and forces you at gunpoint to delete your forks or forces you not to use alternative software.
Jesus. Stop misusing the word authoritarian.
by init1 - I’d take this even further and say most programmers are incapable of building authoritarian software; where the client is subservient to the server by default.
The tyranny of the system administrator.
by r3trohack3r - Should be (2020) per the URL.
- I think the concept that our culture is ripe with authoritarianism is sound idea. It's funny, I can see it easy in politics and government but not in our organizations until now, so that was a surprise to me. But the way it's written comes off like someone with an axe to grind. The length was way over the top and it needs refining.
But the author is right, this is a pervasive problem in western culture that is the primary cause of most of our ill's when 90% of our society can't even conceive of supporting structural change in our institutions you know we have a problem.
by trinsic2 - > authoritarianism is so ingrained in the fabric of software development
Based on this thesis I thought it was going to be a bit more meta about how software itself is inherently authoritarian-by-default from a technical perspective, how it takes active work to mitigate that dynamic, and how that spills over into our communities.
To illustrate this, I'll point to the differing mindset required to write secure code, and how most programmers are not good at it - ie modeling a second party who acts independently from the intent of the programmer. The programmer who doesn't do this is assuming an inherent authoritarianism whereby the code will only be used to carry out their intent, rather than as part of a mediation between parties with diverging interests. (security vulnerabilities specifically are the narrower "emperor has no clothes" dynamic)
We can see this manifest with how business types look at technologies like remote attestation (aka WEI, etc) - as a technique for preventing end users from using their own chosen software for their own purposes, in favor of the business's singular top-down vision/desires.
(OP essay focuses on social dynamics, which are much tougher to frame and substantiate arguments for. The attempt is laudable but then kind of falls flat due to only using one example (regardless of how flagrant of an example it is))
by mindslight - From the same mind who brought us "python 3 is not turing complete because its interpreter cannot run python 2 code."by BigTTYGothGF