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LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

antirez.com

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Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#101

Post by malvosenior »

bigiain wrote: post #97
malvosenior wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. I think you have this very wrong. Until personal computers went mainstream, all programming was for business (or the military, or research). It's great that a ton of businesses are benefiting for free from antirez'…

I also think quanticle is wrong, but for quite different reasons. I didn't start programming as "a profession", and have zero desire to "put away childish things". Sure, I get paid (and paid well) to do some of this stuff, and accept "the increasing responsibility" while doing it at work on someone else's dime. But... I do it for a living because I enjoy doing it for fun - and as a result of that I'm good at it. I st…

I totally agree. I code because it's fun for me and I find it inherently interesting (and yes, whimsical). That I can make a good living doing what I love is great. That businesses can derive value from my code doesn't really concern me either way.

It does irk me to see people be so demanding with antirez. They are in many cases benefiting financially from Redis, all for free. It's ridiculous to get on a high horse and start shaming/bullying someone who created something that you benefit from, even if your benefit wasn't the author's intention but merely a byproduct of them making something awesome.

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#102

Post by thanatos_dem »

bovermyer wrote: post #11

We seem to be losing our playfulness. In light of that, I'm going to take some time today to do something random, just for fun, and share it with others.

For several years, Palantir's main product had, hidden deep inside of a stack of preference windows, a button simply labeled "Find Terrorist". It was a bit of an inside joke, since at the time the software was treated as a magic box that solved all your problems, and when it was still focused on government use cases.

but you know who doesn't joke around? The government doesn't joke around. So yeah, as soon as it was found by a user, that button was immediately removed. It's just a shame that some contexts are deemed "too serious" for an obviously lighthearted addition with no real detrimental effects.

At least some software has managed to maintain their humor, like Phabricator - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#103

Post by bigiain »

malvosenior wrote: post #100
bigiain wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As you know, the term has been in use for decades and no one was confused. It's ok to say you find it offensive. I don't think that's a powerful argument _against_ the change antirez has chosen to make. There are a lot of other terms that were in common use for decades, that confused no-one, that reasonable people have stopped using because they're offensive to other groups of people.

That's my argument against saying the term master/slave is confusing . Like you said, some people found it offensive, there's no credible argument that says it was confusing (although people are trying to make it). My argument against making the change is that it's high risk for a functional NOOP.

A "functional NOOP" for people with a particular privilege.

Rosa Parks would have risked much less and still have gotten home if she'd given up her bus seat. Would that have been a "functional NOOP" too?

(Edit: In rereading this I can see it might be taken as accusative or aggressive. It's not intended in that way, and certainly not intended to accuse you personally of overprivilege or racism...)

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#104

Post by bigiain »

malvosenior wrote: post #101
bigiain wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think quanticle is wrong, but for quite different reasons. I didn't start programming as "a profession", and have zero desire to "put away childish things". Sure, I get paid (and paid well) to do some of this stuff, and accept "the increasing responsibility" while doing it at work on someone else's dime. But... I do it for a living because I enjoy doing it for fun - and as a result of that I'm good at it. I st…

I totally agree. I code because it's fun for me and I find it inherently interesting (and yes, whimsical). That I can make a good living doing what I love is great. That businesses can derive value from my code doesn't really concern me either way. It does irk me to see people be so demanding with antirez. They are in many cases benefiting financially from Redis, all for free. It's ridiculous to get on a high horse a…

Heh. Staunch agreement in this thread - respectful disagreement in that other one. We should go for a beer or coffee...

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#105

Post by sgentle »

quanticle wrote: post #92
bovermyer wrote: post #11

We seem to be losing our playfulness. In light of that, I'm going to take some time today to do something random, just for fun, and share it with others.

>We seem to be losing our playfulness. I think that's a good thing. The early hackers could get away with being playful because their work was, in the grand scheme of things, not actually all that important. No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. However,…

Be careful not to confuse solemn and serious. If the Apollo engineers could have fun shooting a tin can at the moon and the Manhattan Project engineers could have fun creating humanity's most terrible weapon, you can have fun making a VC-backed webapp or back-office database.

Don't let anyone convince you engineers having fun is the reason for all the garbage software. That's pure stockholm syndrome. The reason for garbage software is that developers aren't treated like real engineers, and don't act like real engineers. They're children in a room full of adults making Important Business Decisions That They Just Need To Accept. So what if those decisions are bad engineering? You're not a real engineer anyway so listen to the grownups.

The worst part is they do it to themselves. In the biggest sellers market in history, developers don't put their feet down about bad decisions because b-b-but I might get fired! They passively watch, nod sagely when it all goes to shit and say "mmm, I knew that was going to happen" like ignoring the responsibility that comes with professional training is something to be proud of.

You think sales people make more money because they studied harder? It's because they know their value. You think lawyers get taken more seriously because they dress better? It's because they are personally and professionally liable for everything they say - or don't say - to a client. You think doctors have more autonomy because they never have any fun? It's because every doctor knows that no extenuating circumstances, no "but management said", no piece of paper can ever clean the blood from their hands.

Believing that the problem is easter eggs is buying into the same mindset that brought us here in the first place. Those naughty developers again! Gosh, when will they start wearing ties to work, sit patiently in meetings while we talk at them, and then sign off on half-finished garbage code? Don't they know we have a business to run!

But the Challenger didn't explode because of Silly Shirt Friday. It exploded because management didn't respect their engineers. When the first fatal microservice is written, it won't be because developers had fun. It'll be because they don't respect themselves.

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#107

Post by quanticle »

malvosenior wrote: post #94
quanticle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We seem to be losing our playfulness. I think that's a good thing. The early hackers could get away with being playful because their work was, in the grand scheme of things, not actually all that important. No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. However,…

> No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. I think you have this very wrong. Until personal computers went mainstream, all programming was for business (or the military, or research). It's great that a ton of businesses are benefiting for free from antirez'…

>I think you have this very wrong. Until personal computers went mainstream, all programming was for business (or the military, or research).

You're misunderstanding my point. I said all of their code. I was referring to the code written by the early "hackers", in university labs. Of course there was computer code being run to compute payrolls and run industrial systems. But you'll notice that that code was very rigorously written, and an Easter egg of this sort would not have been accepted into those codebases.

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#108

Post by spin »

debaserab2 wrote: post #82
Nadya wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of busybodies on Github, sometimes these go viral on Twitter and other locations for the heated discussions. Here's a small collection of various levels of offence. Some are merely polite requests and some are "horribly offended". I think one or two of them may even be concern trolls but that doesn't matter since they still got the changes made. There are a few hundred other examples to pull from, the…

Wow, thanks for all the links. I just spent way too long reading all of these. I found some of the requests to be pretty reasonable. Some were reasonable, but not very pragmatic. Some just kinda elicited an "eh, come on?" sort of response.

Haha, yeah, I just read through that entire list. I'd say that more than half of those seemed very reasonable and civilized to me. But the people complaining about penis.js seemed to have completely missed the point of that whole project.

I then started browsing through my own code to see if anything seemed offensive. One thing that caught my eye: in SPI communications, there is very clearly a "master" and a "slave". I have programmed many SPI-related code... So now I wonder, what was the original complaint in calling Redis servers "master" and "slave"? That terminology is very, very common in computers.

EDIT: I guess this is the original complaint?: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

EDIT #2: I guess I'm late to this conversation: http://antirez.com/news/122

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#109

Post by quanticle »

bigiain wrote: post #97
malvosenior wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. I think you have this very wrong. Until personal computers went mainstream, all programming was for business (or the military, or research). It's great that a ton of businesses are benefiting for free from antirez'…

I also think quanticle is wrong, but for quite different reasons. I didn't start programming as "a profession", and have zero desire to "put away childish things". Sure, I get paid (and paid well) to do some of this stuff, and accept "the increasing responsibility" while doing it at work on someone else's dime. But... I do it for a living because I enjoy doing it for fun - and as a result of that I'm good at it. I st…

I'm not saying you can't have fun. But I do think that it's important to recognize that your fun can impose costs on others. Like I said in my original comment, I don't mind in the slightest that antirez is experimenting with visualizing complexity theory on the command line. What I object to is that he's shipping this as part of redis. Why? It just seems like it adds maintenance burden for no purpose.

Re: LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command

#110

Post by quanticle »

sgentle wrote: post #105
quanticle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We seem to be losing our playfulness. I think that's a good thing. The early hackers could get away with being playful because their work was, in the grand scheme of things, not actually all that important. No businesses were using their code to run payroll and inventory systems. No hospitals were using their code to make treatment decisions. No oil refineries were using their code to runs pumps and valves. However,…

Be careful not to confuse solemn and serious. If the Apollo engineers could have fun shooting a tin can at the moon and the Manhattan Project engineers could have fun creating humanity's most terrible weapon, you can have fun making a VC-backed webapp or back-office database. Don't let anyone convince you engineers having fun is the reason for all the garbage software. That's pure stockholm syndrome. The reason for g…

>But the Challenger didn't explode because of Silly Shirt Friday. It exploded because management didn't respect their engineers.

That's a myth. I encourage you to read Challenger Launch Decision, by Diane Vaughan. Challenger didn't explode because management disrespected their engineers. Challenger exploded because the engineers themselves normalized deviance. They would launch, observe anomalous results, note that the system hadn't failed, and then expand the envelope of normality to include the anomalous results. At no point did the team working on the SRBs say, "No, we should stop the Shuttle program and redesign the booster," not even to other engineers. Repeatedly, in interviews, engineers expressed surprise and shock at the failure, because they thought that the problem of O-ring blow-by was a minor problem that could be fixed with tweaks. Indeed, on many an occasion, they thought that they had fixed it, only for the issue to recur in the future.

It's easy and comforting for us engineers to think that Challenger was due to myopia on the behalf of NASA management. But it's wrong. Challenger was the result of cascade failure of rationality all throughout the NASA organization, and the engineers are as culpable as the managers.

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