asciilifeform: it is why asciilifeform is sympathetic to the 'gabriel_laddel's dope' pov : the degree of contortion involved in serious engineering , mentally, is every bit as much a self-abuse as to take any known dope
asciilifeform: which is why i said to laddel 'dope requires discipline', because a lone programmer in a cellar is both general and soldier
asciilifeform: but quite destructive to folx who are doing equivalent of ~planning~ the march☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: and aha, 'inca marching powders' etc.
asciilifeform: 'packing', and brute labour of whatever other kind, also can have sensation of 'inch away', read the tales of athletes in training, alpinists, pilots.☟︎
asciilifeform: only the latter, notably, results in the inmate/employee being of some residual use to his owner, so 'corporate culture' is unsurprisingly built around utilization of this type, and the speedy ejection of the other one.
asciilifeform: two different reactions to being killed with boredom -- daydream and gabriel_laddel around ('mapper') -- or, alternatively, -- 'mindless robot' ('packer'), typical caricature of 'cube dweller', 'dilbert'.
asciilifeform: briefly revisiting upstack, imho 'mapper' and 'packer' as depicted in the essays are only 'types of people' in the sense that there were two types of inmate at auschwitz - folx who immediately jumped the fence and died on the wire, and ones who 'checked out' and turned 'Muselmann' ;
asciilifeform: the code - was incidental. which is why it today is going the way of the snake's legs, or the f35's wings and engine.
asciilifeform: the 'culture' was, as i gather, never actually ~about~ the code, but... about the coffee; the shared deathmarches; the dope; the sensory deprivation bottles; the 'scene'; and other pretenses.☟︎
asciilifeform: phf: stands to reason that if adrenergic dopes are addictive, likewise so would be ordinary adrenaline
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu had a pretty good handle on subj, though i have misplaced the relevant piece. the one where he described two basic outcomes of the traditional western crippling of schoolchildren, and they roughly correspond to the 'mapper' and 'packer' portrayed here, and in 'bipolar lisp programmer', and other similar essays.
asciilifeform: quote of 'programmer stone' ? we had a number of these earlier in thread ?
asciilifeform: reader must feel 'on the throne' merely by act of reading.
asciilifeform: important ingredient is the lack of mathematical or any other pre-requisite that a reader might lack and thereby stumble, or provoke feeling of inferiority
asciilifeform: asciilifeform refers to this genre of writing as '10th-dimension', after infamous pseudoscientific b00k/www by same name, which consisted of highly refined 'imponade' (to borrow naggum's) , that is, writing designed to pull the reader's intellectual cock and give a sensation of 'profound insight', 'yes, NAO i UNDERSTAND FIZZZIX!' or similar.
asciilifeform: phf: happen to have a preserved copy of any of these ?
asciilifeform: ( and what precisely could be a motivation, in moribund american megacorp where 'proverbial' programmer always seems to work, to 'super' ? 1% bonus ? to be fired three months later than the next-best team ? better potato ration ? which..? )
asciilifeform: i find it interesting that the authors of these (and there are many) virtually never mention even approx. ~what~ their 'super team' of 'super people' was DOING☟︎
asciilifeform: see also mircea_popescu's thread about the filipino bordello, with the 400 beds.
asciilifeform: i thought this was known to pretty much everyone in the field since... '70s..? but apparently not
asciilifeform: but giving ~them~ soundproof boxes etc. simply results on moar tetris-man-hours.
asciilifeform: elsewhere, in butugychags, folx doing things no sane person would voluntarily consider doing, are, yes, warehoused, as author describes
asciilifeform: and where they are found, they are kept in comfortable conditions, or even spared the idiocy of commuting to offices etc.
asciilifeform: folx who WANT to do the thing they are doing -- or at least have genuine desire to hold in their hands the end result, $widget, $proggy , and not merely the week's paycheque -- give the impression of the '25x productive'
asciilifeform: 1st line of subj article , 'For decades we have known that some people are 25 times more productive than most in software engineering jobs. ...' is correct, but the remaining article gets the cause/effect relationship backwards
asciilifeform: do they live anywhere outside of caricature ? normally dysfunction is more subtle.
asciilifeform: the 'missing library cannot be linked -- is merely OPINION' people.
asciilifeform: i gotta wonder, how come i never met these folx.
asciilifeform: ^ from phf / adlai / mircea_popescu 's link earlier
asciilifeform: fact that if the base library dependency isn’t there, the component can’t link to it. He looked at me and said, “There are no facts, there are only opinions, and all opinions are equal.” ...'☟︎
asciilifeform: en able to link. One day it became apparent that the component extended a base class of the Qt graphics toolkit, while their program used MFC. Foolishly, I ventured to suggest that if the base class wasn’t available, a derived class couldn’t be linked to it. One of the workers informed me that this was “my opinion”. I should have left it alone, I know. But I used to work in a useful industry. I explained that it was a simple
asciilifeform: 'Amongst some people, such confusion has been elevated to a philosophical ideology. I once watched a very lost group working near to me, who had spent months trying to print out a graph. It was all very complicated for them. Eventually they decided to purchase a third party graph drawing component, which advertised that it could print out graphs. After considerable administration they obtained a binary library, which they were not th
