everything about it reinforces the feeling that it's all just retroactive justification for finding a toy they made more fun than expected
ETA: to be clear there's nothing wrong with making a toy and then turning that toy into it's own all-consuming hobby (TTRPGs for example) and one of the best parts of programming is how easy it is to do just that. It's just kind of annoying watching people wax rhapsodic about nonsense instead of copping to "yeah we're having a lot of fun, i feel like a kid again"
fwiw they actually live on a sailboat and have sporadic internet access and limited electricity, so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
The problem is that none of their problems are real problems and there's nothing to minimize when they're not real. You cannot minimize made up first world problems
No, they really do live on a sailboat with intermittent power and internet access. Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices" these are real problems, and ironically enough not problems faced by most people in the first world.
> Unless you take "made up" to mean "as a result of their choices"
Not the original poster, but that’s my view exactly. If you impose the limitations upon yourself then it’s not really a “problem” for you, is it now. You just can afford to make your life shittier for an “experience” to then have fun solving the issues you’ve created for yourself
Then say "constraints" if it feels better. To me, this conversation comes off as much more of a manufactured problem than idealistic people living on a boat and figuring out how to make tech work for them.
Edit: However, upon reading further comments, I don't want this to be seen as a defense of the group against actual complaints.
One of the (many) fascinating things here is that - even if by virtue of their 'self-imposed' stringencies - their output showcases production values that are very applicable throughout.-
> , so saying it's retroactive justification isn't really true and minimizes the real problems they face.
I wouldn't call any of the listed problems "real problems" in the context of my long winded disability and homelessness lmao. I used to be in their community, the mods, and indirectly, them, were abusive as hell. Their community is, last I heard, hemorrhaging queer folk (or maybe it's bled dry and queer folk just don't stick around there anymore!) because they have repeatedly shielded abusive members and placed them in positions of power, and ignored, silenced, and ejected their victims when they finally kicked up a fuss about it. Part of the move from an internal chat to Mastodon was specifically so it would take the pressure off them having to actively perform any sort of moderation duty or deal with the abusive people directly.
They are, fundamentally, rich people playing at being poor and living in a tiny sustainable island while the rest of the world burns. Their stuff is very interesting, sure, but stating "real problems they face" ignores the fact that every one of the problems they are facing are ones that they themselves have created. I actually really love some of the things they've come out with, but it's important that all of their work comes with the context that it was formed in, at least in my opinion.
edit: I forgot about the 'cult' thing... they are absolutely a cult. at least one of their members made explicit reference multiple times to being part of a cult and it was never actively denied outside of a "well, not yet, we don't have the numbers ;)" kind of thing.
Wow, you're the first person I've seen speak up about having similar experiences with them as me, thank you. I was a merveilles member some years back until I had some really rude/abusive interactions in IRC from Devine and a prominent moderator. I really would love to play with uxn and varvara but gosh I simply refuse to be around people like that.
Honestly, adding your voice here is incredibly kind; and likewise, I'm so grateful to hear of another with this sort of experience.
Their design sensibilities are very good, and I feel exactly the same -- it just... doesn't sit right, feels bitter, somehow, to create things with their tools, in the full context of everything.
I've often mulled over starting up a little group sharing some of the same sensibilities but without the toxicity, to be honest.
If the single voice of just some random, well meaning guy on the internet helps: Go ahead and get going. We need more "groups", projects, efforts, initiatives, approaches, not less. Go for it.-
Thanks for writing this. It matches my experience 100%. I just signed up to comment because I know people will desperately want it to not be true but there are plenty of us ex-mervilles folk out there who've experienced the cult element and abuse, we just don't talk about it.
Is this the right forum for accusations lacking evidence? We appear to be very reluctant about it, if it’s someone like Sam Altman, but it’s just fine for random developers?
I have logs of some interactions stored somewhere, but they're very patchy and stored in plain text. They also contain personal interactions between server members, so I would not feel comfortable releasing them (I also lack any way to get in touch to obtain consent for releasing the logs!)
I do not have logs of direct messages because it escaped my intention -- while I planned to get them, that never happened. At the time, I was lied to and told I would be able to return, and then 3 months later I was informed I was not going to be able to return to the space. They also did not inform anyone that I was leaving, either. I had long friendships with many in that slack instance, and not only would they not know where to find me, but none of them were informed that I had even left -- as far as any of them know, I ghosted them. There was absolutely zero transparency of moderation both at the time, and as far as I am aware, to this day.
Something I forgot to mention in the above is that at the time they had a code of conduct, and this code of conduct listed a two strike system, along with a resolution system. Neither of these were followed in any capacity (likely because they didn't exist), and there was never any communication by the moderators that I had had strikes raised against me.
Indeed. And even within a group that shares some core identity across one axis (e.g., queer people), the usual fraught hierarchies have a way of establishing themselves—unless you really make a point of preventing that from happening.
The ones who are wealthy will hold relative power over the ones who aren't. The ones in good health may neglect or actively exclude the ones who aren't. Racism and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. And so on.
No that's not what they mean. They mean you'd kind of assume someone who identifies as queer, or is at least knowledgeable enough on the community to participate in some ways, wouldn't be homophobic.
In practice this isn't the case, because you can use this as a shield. So for homophobic people it might be advantageous to enter the community in a way that causes the least amount of personal friction. Like, simply putting pronouns in your bio and doing literally nothing else is trivial - but the social benefit is not.
It's a big problem, because people who ARE non-binary or ARE bisexual or whatever then get a ton of backlash. Because those identities are the most common to be commandeered, so to speak. At least online.
Yes, well, that's not what anyone is doing. Here is the logic that caused surprise:
1. Leaders identify with nonbinary pronouns,
2. thus: leaders appear to be members of the/a queer community,
3. and: queer community members tend to center queer people/experiences (regardless of whether said members are shitty people for any reason),
4. yet: the leaders are specifically harming and driving out queer members of their community. This is unexpected. Not "wow, this should be impossible" unexpected, just "damn, this shouldn't have happened" unexpected.
It's quite simple and straightforward.
As an aside, (and I know I'll get downvoted for my tone, but it is what it is), for ye straight commenters: consider that your opinions on queerness and queer community dynamics probably aren't very well informed when you're entering conversations about them. (Inspired by but not personally attacking the parent comment. They might be queer too! And their statement is true, it's just off the mark in this context.)
Living on a sailboat approaches some very very hard life/existential pinnacles that most people never even attempt to climb.
Yeah, you can have a simple regular life; that's lower on problems maybe. But man, sailing around & futzing with interesting barefoot developers projects sure sounds challenging in a lot of very very excellent ways.
Satellite internet is expensive, let’s all move down town! Housing in the city is expensive, let’s all move to sailboats! So you see at some point you have to address difficulties with some kind of approach besides avoiding them
"We choose to make this video game and do the boat life thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!"
It's like how you can say that VT100 emulation has an expiration date, but you can't say that about the underlying concept of some UI based on a screenful of monospaced text, which is immortal.
I apologize for an off-topic question, but I'm curious why you choose to write "." as ".-". Is it an internet convention I'm unaware of, or maybe punctuation from a language other than English?
LessWrong had some pretty good advice in the early months of the pandemic, despite their terrible track record on politics and AI. There's a lot right with the Amish. You could write an entire book about the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Cults can have a lot to offer.
... in no small part perhaps because they remain isolated "pockets" of culture where - often - "progress" is slower or more controlled. Where idiosyncratic behavior becomes the "new" orthodoxy as behavior or culture "degrades".-
Where was it ... "Nightfall" (the novel) I think it was where a cult periodically saves civilization - by being the only ones that know how to handle the aftermath.-
cults are generally the only way to solve deep-rooted problems. otherwise people's habits are too strong and they keep reproducing the existing traditions that create the problems through unexamined avenues
... I was going to add certain forms of cryptography to that, but then realized that we've always have had some sort of cryptography that was "hardware-appropriate" (ie. sufficiently hard to break, to be useful) for the age. So older hardware was just fine ...
Any crypto you did couldn't be future-proof in the way it is today though. Don't know if that's mainly due to better algorithms or from the fact modern CPUs are optimized to rapidly decrypt/encrypt things.
It was algorithms. Back in the 90s there was no AES or ECC. There was RSA, and it was feasible to generate long keys, but it was impractical. Keys from back then could probably be easily factored nowadays. I think the spread of the Internet pushed demand for longer keys and better (more secure and efficient) algorithms.
Just because I was there (I agree with your general point) I wanted to say that I made my first PGP key in 1995 and it was a 4096 byte one, which is just as uncrackable now as it was then. I even remember being vaguely confused, because it gave you options, and I was thinking to myself "wut. Who wants the weaker-than-necessary key. I'll take the big one, thx"
Interesting. How long did it take to sign? Also, though I wasn't sure (which is why I didn't mention it), I thought one of the reasons keys were so short back then was due to the US classifying encryption algorithms as munitions, which made working with actually secure encryption standards difficult for developers. I would have expected the longest key would be 1024 bits, at a stretch. Even that is barely crackable today.
Neural nets using individual tubes as nodes? Although the current trend seems to be quantizing down to a minimal amount of bits to process more in parallel, in an analogue system you could have a near "continuous" range of values.
Chat rooms and bare bones text editors aren't supposed to be process-heavy, and yet the popular communication platform Slack requires outrageous amounts of ram and CPU to function. [...] Making software this way is costly to off-grid users, or those on slow connections, [...]
What the boat couple is doing strikes me as the most romantic sort of bricolage and just gives me the warm fuzzies all over. But Urbit just pisses me off for a variety of reasons.
For me any potential technical argument and innovation is completely drowned in the needlessly pervasive anti-capitalist genderfluid digital nomad hippie talk.
Fascinating that you seem to think that taking the time and energy to write a trollish shitpost about your offense at someone’s use of pronouns is somehow not acknowledging or caring about that someone’s use of pronouns.
I don’t think you’re an activist, I just think you’re yet another someone who is unable to see the Amazon forest for the chip on your shoulder.
I hear this a lot but I don't think the "lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management" is really fair.
I order delivery through the apps a ton, but it's not because I'm bad at financial management. Like many here, I have a well paying job that takes up a ton of my time and energy during the week, and cooking every night is simply not feasible. Takeout is expensive, sure, but if it enables me to hold down a job that let's me afford it, it's a conscious trade-off that I can make.
Could I spend more time meal-prepping and freeze meals instead? Sure. But again, time and energy.
Diagnosed with ADHD here, there's nothing ADHD friendly about this imo. I'm REALLY into reverse engineering content and I just bounced right off the GIANT WALL of text at the beginning.
It's presented in a highly linear conversational fashion but the data doesn't appear to need to be linear. I absorb things in a non-linear fashion (I jump around, sometimes I even read/skim things backwards and out of order.) So it could easily be made ADHD friendly with clear delineation between ideas. A really simple way to do this would be surrounding definition blocks with a slightly lighter background color box and sticking strictly to necessary data, not using conversational language.
Also the color scheme sucks (or rather is non-functional at least to me.). The blue text words really stick out, but the white bold text is what's important. However it also matches with the headers since they seem to be the same font and color, it's really distracting for some reason. Under assembly instructions specifically: like all I see is "value, register, destination, source, destination, expression, destination, destination, destination,..." literally the least important information is highlighted.
The sidebar on the left is distracting too and pulls my eye constantly.
Equating Beginner with ADHD is also mildly offensive and defeats the point if this is targeted at people suffering from ADHD. People with ADHD dive head first in the deep end or not at all, no exceptions. If it's labelled beginner/for-dummies, I'm skipping it or at best skimming it (like i did with this).
ADD/ADHD diagnosed for >30 years now and I was actually curious if some new ADHD friendly web format had been discovered after my years in web engineering, turns out the answer is no.
The chunking and labeling of concise, strictly topical content and illustrative examples rather than having paragraph-after-paragraph of exposition is a huge factor for my flavor of ADHD, though we're obviously not a monolith. For contrast, lots of folks love the expository format of the Python docs which explains a lot about why things work rather than simply how they work, but that setup is absolutely murder for me. My brain is screaming at me after skimming the first two paragraphs to see if I'm even looking at the right doc, and I'm hitting google or stack overflow 3 seconds later. It's not a good strategy-- I definitely consider it a shortcoming-- but other doc systems work much better for me. For example:
Which one of these is not like the others? The Python docs are brilliant for people that click with that style, and as we can see from this well-shared and very controversial piece, (http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2013/02/19/the-python-docume...) suck for others.
Edit: As usual when the Python docs usability is questioned, cue the "well I've got ADHD and I just LOVE the Python docs" (said in the voice of the 'Well I LOVE SPAM' guy from the Monty Python skit). Sure, but you aren't some sort of standard by which others are measured.
Thanks for pointing this out. I had never really thought much about it. I 100% agree with you! The docs are totally why Python is so comfortable for me.
I know so many people that so love them, and I do find the content useful sometimes... but I wish they could be modified a bit to have the deep dive after the really concise reference sheet style doc.
But almost any time I've seen them discussed, even intimating that they're not ideal in their current state is an open invitation to summoning the online equivalent to a pitchfork-wielding crowd implying you're incompetent, lazy, and stupid for having a different usage style. I'm sure there are a lot of people involved who want nothing more than for them to be as useful as possible to everyone who needs them, but those toxic dynamics emerge so quickly in critique. It would obviously be a huge mistake to simply remove that info, but I think the format could be enhanced to work well with other usage styles.
As much as they annoy me, I think MS doesn't get enough credit for their dev docs. MDN has some more expository docs in addition to their great reference pages, too. They're super useful, but having them combined can be a real struggle for folks that have difficulty harnessing their attention.
Given the context of conversation, just noting that I too have ADHD and writing in C# has been definitely more doable than dynamically typed languages (or languages that require a lot of code to express something LINQ allows me to do in 1 or 2 lines, like Go). And as long as you know the type for the feature you need, you can usually just write e.g. "Regex" and press `.` and the VS Code or any other IDE of your choice will show you the list of supported methods - most of them are really straightforward to use. It works really well and knowing I don't have to perform much of work to ensure what amounts to type safety manually, or write additional tests, has been really helpful.
More on C# Regex, extra props for source-generated Regexes also generating documentation to explain the exact pattern and how it is matched similar to how websites like regexr do it.
I despise python documentation for this reason. When I want to reference the docs on how to do something I have to cut through huge paragraphs of unorganized and unstructured text to just find out how to do something. It doesn’t help that different builtin modules use different documentation layouts and formatting either.
Yeah I can see why a lot of people love it, but it's fundamentally anathema to the way I use docs. Considering how common other reference formats are, I can't imagine it's rare among developers, but I'm not sure. I'd love to do a usability study. Modern accessibility guidelines implore taking neurological differences into account with web content, but if it's not easily measurable or even a bit subjective, it's not going to get budgeted for in most cases. I imagine without expert advice, even gauging whether or not you've got the right approach is difficult.
IDK. I think sometimes people lean into the idiosyncrasies of their own ADHD. I have ADHD, but I get sucked into writing code because it lets me focus in a way that dishes and laundry do not.
Another way to look at this is that a lot of content is not well organized.
For some people, this is an inconvenience. For some people, this makes the content impenetrable.
In a learning context, most people benefit from better organization and concision. Some people benefit significantly more than others, and they’re called out here.
Baffling. I'm in