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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

Nadya wrote: post #53
debaserab2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s.. really interesting. I’m having trouble figuring out how a codebase could offend a person. It has to be more than using masculine pronouns or something - do you have any examples you’d share?

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…

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by compsdon »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #63

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The problem with letting thin skinned people decide what's offensive and what isn't is the list constantly changes, and contradicts itself. Now there's precedent. Other people's turbulent emotions define what is acceptable in redis, and all you need to do is throw tantrums and say your feelings are hurt. This is sheer insanity. If the words are that offensive that they shou…

  Now there's precedent.
The court of public opinion isn't a real court, and has no rules, so setting any precedent in this way is meaningless. One guy caves to pressure, and assuredly this is what describes these events. But the next time around, anybody who chooses to, can safely ignore this incident.

This sort of thing comes down to either telling people to shove it, or not. Some people can drop that hammer every single time, others are pained by it, and take the path of least resistance.

Telling people to get bent was a thing for decades, but internet amnesia means some people have either forgotten about it, or never learned how to do it in the first place.

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

#123

Post by bigiain »

quanticle wrote: post #109
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'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.

What _I'm_ saying is that you're free to write your own high performance in memory data store without any bothersome whimsy-related maintenance burden.

Antirez has already written his one, in which he's chosen to include whimsy.

Your objections to him doing that seem... I dunno. Pointless? None of your business? Overly entitled? Not quite sure exactly, but since you didn't pay him to write it for you, objections from you on what he should or shouldn't include in the thing he's allowing you to use for free seem to be at the very least impolite...

While you're happy to burden Antirez with "increasing responsibility" placed on his shoulders in the name of "the profession", you seem to be fairly quiet on one of the fundamental aspects of "profession", which has always implied "getting paid for it". Being part of a profession fundamentally implies "imposing cost on others" for your work. How much money have you offered (or would you be prepared to offer) to Antirez or Redis Labs for a version of redis _without_ whimsy? I'm sure at least Redis Labs have someone in their sales team who'd be happy to negotiate an appropriately professionally priced and supported license for that.

The very name of this command seems to be a perfectly reasonable response to your complaint that this piece of free-as-in-beer as well as free-as-in-freedom software is somehow "imposing costs on you" - LOLWUT?

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

#124

Post by kickscondor »

beaconstudios wrote: post #114
kickscondor wrote: post #5

Ah, hackers, we are getting lost inside capitalism - inside startups - inside e-commerce and social media... I am not talking about socialism or leftism, we can get lost in those too - I am talking about 'personal'/'hobbyist'/'obscure' - like we see in zine sites like whimsy.space or the rabbit hole of sites like philosopher.life. A part of our humanity will always be in 'obfuscation'/'code golf', demoscene, abandonw…

you, uh, got any more of them philosopher.life sites? H0p3's wiki combines three of my favourites things: function over form art, Jungian reasoning and the (true) hacker ethos of unbounded individual exploration. I've always wanted to be a part of a community following those ideals or the underlying unifier between them (cicada 3301 exemplified this mentality too; lesswrong seems interesting but I get the impression…

You'll need to read deeper into h0p3's wiki to find what you're looking for. A good start is here: https://philosopher.life/#Find%20the%20Others and on his pages title "Link Log". Hopefully we will see something at sphygm.us soon.

I hope this late reply finds you, beaconstudios.

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

#125

Post by beaconstudios »

kickscondor wrote: post #124
beaconstudios wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you, uh, got any more of them philosopher.life sites? H0p3's wiki combines three of my favourites things: function over form art, Jungian reasoning and the (true) hacker ethos of unbounded individual exploration. I've always wanted to be a part of a community following those ideals or the underlying unifier between them (cicada 3301 exemplified this mentality too; lesswrong seems interesting but I get the impression…

You'll need to read deeper into h0p3's wiki to find what you're looking for. A good start is here: https://philosopher.life/#Find%20the%20Others and on his pages title "Link Log". Hopefully we will see something at sphygm.us soon. I hope this late reply finds you, beaconstudios.

It does, thank you!

I was deeply involved in hacker culture in my teens and, while I can't describe what "it" is, I really rather miss it. Your mentioning the demoscene reminded me of how their community reminded me of the same. A few other subcultures I've encountered echoes of on the internet too. I've been reading a few of h0p3's posts over the last few days so hopefully I'll find some pointers.

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

#126

Post by antirez »

QuinnWilton wrote: post #98
antirez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! That's the idea. If you write LOLWUT version 5 you'll see past versions.

I think it's also kind of poetic if the old versions stop being supported entirely. Then each piece of art is a snapshot of the whims of the Redis maintainers at that point in time, without any pretensions as to the art's usefulness.

Yes I also think that this would be a more neat artistic project because of the intrinsic one time value of every piece. Currently what the code does is to preserve the ability to run the old versions without giving a direct way to do so, that is, it checks the REDIS_VERSION constant to select what to run.

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

#127

Post by SZJX »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #63

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The problem with letting thin skinned people decide what's offensive and what isn't is the list constantly changes, and contradicts itself. Now there's precedent. Other people's turbulent emotions define what is acceptable in redis, and all you need to do is throw tantrums and say your feelings are hurt. This is sheer insanity. If the words are that offensive that they shou…

> This is sheer insanity. If the words are that offensive that they should be removed from a computer program, should they be removed from the dictionary next?

Your argument is sheer insanity. Should history books teach facts about slavery and holocaust? Of course they do. Should slavery still be preserved nowadays in a normal society and defended in a normal context? Of course it shouldn't. What's your point?

This incident didn't come out of nowhere and I personally have also always felt the terminologies to be a bit unsavory. I'm glad that somebody out there actually did the job of calling it out. I don't think this is generalizable to many other situations as well. I don't think there are any other terms that made me uncomfortable as this one. Can you come up with an example that might be "subject to whimsical fit"? What a way to distort the argument really.

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