hate-maintainers

conservative fucks. fuck them.

who are we

this is team red, venting our hate against team blue

• we like to be explicit, we like to find truth
• we like to solve problems, not just hide them

bad taste and hostage taking

its interesting that bad taste and hostage taking so often appear together.
probably both are facets of the same personality type (conservative)

in the real world, i would kill the tyrant, and install someone who is "less bad".
in the digital world? lets just pretend this never happened ... "muh ideals!"

provocation

conservative types produce a constant stream of

• passive violence
• provocations
• passive-aggressive behavior

to provoke aggressions of "the others" (liberal types)

we also see this in "provocative" clothing, like whore costumes

mating call

basically, this is a mating call between "two worlds"

we say

• they deserve each other
• opposites attract
• mutual completion
• conjunctio oppositorum

to play or not to play

this is a "game" they play, and we always have the choice

• do we join their game (in the hope to win, cos we have the better reasons)
• do we refuse to play their game (cos its an unfair game, cos we lose 80% of the time)

what would bender do? start a new project, with blackjack and hookers

everyone feels right

all this behavior has its logic, everyone feels he is right,
but its still fucked, and there must be a better solution

slave morality

people who follow slave morality love to do everything "wrong".
to them, machiavelli and orwell are not critics but prophets

in other words:

• they are masochists
• they love to suffer
• they seek and produce "hell on earth", in the hope for a "paradise in heaven"
  • paradise in their mind
  • head in the clouds
  • always look on the bright side of life

authoritarian parenting style

• high demands + low effort
• demanding + lazy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles

sounds familiar? cos its a natural tendency of "some people"

lazy

laziness is a popular excuse to reject patches (what kids these days call "pull requests")

• i dont want to maintain this
• i want this different, but you implement it
• i am never happy, but good luck trying to appease me

rich hearts wear poor coats

• only criminals must hide in sheepskins
• only destroyers must be polite

how many

"they" are not a minority, but also not a majority.
lets say they are exactly half of all humans.
so, if you have a village of 144 people, then 72 people are conservative.

if you say "they are too many", then you probably mean overpopulation which can only be solved by rapid depopulation (aka "mass murder")

he who must not be named

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Voldemort

If you want to know who rules over you,
just look for who you are not allowed to criticize.

Voltaire

• who is on the top of the "hierarchy of victims" (german: hierarchie der opfer)
• who will completely fuck your life if you talk bad about him?
• who enforces censorship of "hate speech" on all platforms? (except gab.com and some .onion domains)

both are right

or at least, both "feel" right in their predictions,
and only real-life experiments can reveal the truth = who was right = who had the right prediction

this is the problem of the judgement of solomon:
king solomon assumes that only one is right ...
some see this as "wisdom" of a king,
others prefer to call this "a simple solution for simple minds"

to merge or not to merge

• conservative: needs strong reasons to merge a patch
  • do we really need this? -> merge
  • has it features? -> merge
• liberal: needs strong reasons to NOT merge a patch
  • does this break anything? -> dont merge
  • has it bugs? -> dont merge

active or passive

Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

amazon principles (via)

= release early, allow to revoke/rollback

insult self or insult others

Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.

amazon principles (via)

= bias for element water (insult self, polite, charming)

= bias against element fire (insult others, flamer, heretic)

quo bono

when two argue, a third wins

commercial projects win, cos they are generally better organized than "fun projects".
there, every wrong decision has real-world effects (loss of money)

in "fun projects", people are more ready to waste energy (ignore potential improvements, ignore potential problems),
cos the real-world effects are less visible

stupid troll or smart troll

some people see the world in only one dimension (black white thinking),
so naturally, they corelate trolls and stupidity ("all trolls are stupid")

personality psychology has a strong preference for two-factor models (four color thinking).
also in test theory, we have four values:

1. true positive
2. false positive
3. true negative
4. false negative

these four values are produced by coupling a prediction ("before") with a verification ("after")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard_(test)

similar articles

Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty

Rust maintainer perfectionism, or, the tragedy of Alacritty

• I feel many crate maintainers are way too perfectionist, for example, despite all the developer hours that went into this PR, it took the effort within years to be (halfway) merged. There's always a reason not to merge, isn't there?
• There's always a new pseudo-problem to tackle. Eventually, developers give up, which suits these maintainers just fine: after all, their baby goes on unchanged, and should they find the feature necessary, or the bug bothersome, they can fix it much better than any outside contributor. (Or so they tell themselves.)
• what stopped the revolution? Simple: Perfectionism. Reading through the Alacritty pinned issues is like reading through a book of sorrows. So many reasons not to merge. So many reasons we can't do it. And if the code is not perfect, God forbid we make it optional. Why even try, if it will not be perfect?
• moaning about how hard the problem is and how much we'd need to ruin our perfect code to support it.
• depressingly conservative.
• Rust, conveniently, makes managing forks trivial.

ycombinator

• The feedback, for the most part, was not about being perfectionism. Not remotely. It's about being correct.
  • You can't just ... Well, you can, of course. But then you have bugs, and crashes, and race conditions.
  • most programmers do not have the patience, skill or experience to write half-decent code that isn't bug-ridden garbage. I don't think any project maintainer ever wants to accept contributions that make their life harder.
• is this really the way to generalise about current / potential contributors? Why would anyone even attempt to contribute if their efforts are likely to be dismissed in this way?
  • phrases like ‘bug ridden garbage’ don’t suggest a welcoming atmosphere.
• Good contributions are not the norm, they're the exception
  • It isn't constructive to think of a contribution as a gift, if anything, it's a Greek gift: contributing to an open source project creates more work for the maintainers, both in reviewing the contribution and then later on maintaining it. If the contribution is good, it offsets those costs, but oftentimes it is not the case.
• beyond code quality, projects have opinions, and their PRs opinions may be incompatible... We need to be grateful even when maintainers disagree with us, because opinion soup makes for bloated, unfocused, buggy, crappy software.
  • there is a lot of entitlement going on in software communities, assuming that it makes sense to integrate inclusivity to such a degree that it's actually incompatible with what makes a cohesive opinionated project.
• The majority of most things is not good, books, music, business plans, you name it. Open source contributions are the same — and that's okay. Much like I don't have a problem with people who write books I personally don't like, I don't take issue with people whose contributions don't align with what I think is good. I try to focus my energy on the ones that I find good, or at least the ones that look like they might end up being good.
• "90% of everything is crap." -- Sturgeon's law
• once someone has put in the time to create a PR, declining it is never going to feel good for the contributor.
  • ego investment, investment protection, bias
• to be told "this doesn't work for our project," no matter how politely, is often emotionally interpreted as a form of rejection.
• what you can do in a project to make contributors more capable and helpful.
• make a contribution that actually helps?
• if you begin to get frustrated as soon as you receive feedback... you're going to have a bad time.
• I've seen some truly impressive contributions over the years and the common element that stands out isn't the authors' skills or experience (even those can't always help you) but _patience_.
• If you receive feedback that bothers you, put it away. Sit on it and come back to in a week, or month, or whatever. Or walk away -- it's your choice. But the ones who are patient almost always succeed.
• if it's the maintainers who lack patience, or they've dropped off the face of the earth -- just fork and move on with your life. That's the spirit of the whole thing, after all.
• It takes time and patience to refine it into something good. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
• Sometimes honesty and truth can hurt. Sometimes you have to accept that and move on. Alternatively you can coddle people so that they think every thing that they do is wonderful and a gift to all of mankind. Or you can take offence at honest criticism everything and ... well here we are. Word policing, and overbearing nicety as form of karma currency are not good things. Adults sometimes call each other not nice names. The world is not a cosy blanket left in the sun covered with kittens.
• This really describes quite well why Rust is such a joyful language to work in. You might still write garbage, but the compiler constrains the types of garbage you can write to a much smaller subset.

similar projects

• hate-typescript.md
• https://github.com/milahu/alchi my organization theory, in case someone actually wants to solve these fundamental problems
• https://github.com/samdark/opensource-hate shows some "low effort trolls" (the stupid haters, tourette syndrome)