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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2024

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  • An ancestor of mine wrote a memoir of growing up in an Old West mining town. He saw one gunfight. In the early morning, a man saw the front door of his house open and another man walk out. Not happy to find that another gentleman’s bacon had been in his grill, he demanded satisfaction. That led to an impromptu duel which the offended husband won. My ancestor was walking to school when it all went down.

    That was probably an exceptional situation, since the town in question was notoriously violent and corrupt.




  • There’s some theory and computer science behind parts. The value of peer review is evidence-backed. The idea that dev teams should self-organize is consistent with some varieties of management theory. Retros have been shown to have value, though the way they’re often done in Agile teams I’ve worked in has left much to be desired. Estimation with dimensionless points has zero evidential backing. The notion that the team should be able to set dates rather than having milestones imposed by management is, at best, woefully naive, since it presupposes a commitment by management that, in real life, few managers are willing to make. And in most cases where the shit has hit the fan, we later find that we needed more analysis, more planning and more design up front, rather than less. There are only certain application domains where you can get away with being as minimalist with those disciplines as Agile exponents claim you should be.



  • he was wrong about it being necessary to destroy capitalism before this happened

    I thought it was more that (using modern terminology) he viewed socialism as an emergent phenomenon that would arise due to the unresolved contradictions within capitalism. So socialism doesn’t require the destruction of capitalism in order to start, it’s more that once it emerges, it’ll supersede capitalism. The Leninist approach of destroying the old order, then building the new one at gunpoint didn’t work all that well (to vastly understate), leading to a long period of totalitarian state capitalism, where workers had no control over the means of production (which is the main attribute Marx ascribes to socialism) and degeneration into nationalism, imperialist nostalgia and cronyism.

    But so far, along with failed revolutions hijacked by totalitarians, the main thing we’ve seen is that spontaneous emergence of working, non-coercive socialist organizations such as co-operatives has been met with strong and sometimes murderous opposition from the incumbent capitalists.