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GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

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51–60 of 105 posts

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#51
post #9

Some curious selections there: - 4 books on SQL but none on key/value, graph, document, time series, bigtable etc databases. - 3 books on C, 2 on JS but none on Haskell (leading FP language) or Scala (first to bridge FP/OOP). - None on search engines / algorithms even though it's the most widely used aspect of computing. - None on anything mobile even though it's the dominant computing platform.

I was also surprised they picked "Programming Rust" over "The Rust Programming Language" book.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#52
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming, based on the fact that it's a project by an American company, that this is largely being done by functionally monolingual English speakers. I wouldn't want them to attempt to speak for other cultures. And I wouldn't want to shame them for not attempting to speak for others. It's a bit unfortunate that they use the word "human" so expansively when the scope is so limited, it's true. But it's a new proje…

I'm all for iterative work. I'm just pointing an issue in the current state of this project. It's a common behaviour from huge and global US companies (GitHub IS huge and global) to kind of forget that other cultural groups exist, I'm used to it. It's a bit dishonest in this specific case because they present the project as a "humanity preservation project".

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Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#53
Marvellous. Now GitHub attaches its brand to the entire work of open source.

This is the most real case of cultural appropriation in the last decade.

But the corporate smoke screens focus on bogus cultural appropriation and related issues, so this one will yet again go unnoticed.

I'm thinking about updating my OSS licences.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#54

Marvellous. Now GitHub attaches its brand to the entire work of open source. This is the most real case of cultural appropriation in the last decade. But the corporate smoke screens focus on bogus cultural appropriation and related issues, so this one will yet again go unnoticed. I'm thinking about updating my OSS licences.

Seems fair enough to me... they're footing the massive bill of organising, transcoding, archiving and documenting all this.

It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar but without GH branding nothing stops you (assuming you have enough cash on hand to pull it all off).

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#55
post #4

How often are tech trees used in software development/ project management? I’m leading a hardware development project and I made a tech tree for my team- but I had only ever seen them in video games. Would love some professional examples

Could you elaborate on how you made a tech tree for a development team/project? I'm struggling to imagine how that would look.

Sure, I'll do my best.

My team is designing a new product for our company. We know what we want the end result to be, but we have several iterations to make on our current product to get there, and each iteration can branch through several paths to satisfy our requirements.

So there's a hardware tree which lists the options we have to upgrade the hardware, a software tree that shows the scope of options we have to improve the software, etc.

The idea is to show the different tasks that need to be done; and which can be done concurrently and which need to be done sequentially to get to our goal.

I showed my team the Factorio tech tree to give them an idea, but I didn't realize people used them professionally.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#56

The books under Fiction, Culture, and History - meant to demonstrate our "current culture" - include a number of pretty bleak titles.

On the topic of "bleak" and "societal collapse", it is notable that they chose "Blood Meridian" over "The Road" in Cormac McCarthy's works.

Blood Meridian is generally more highly regarded, no? Wiki states it's widely regarded as his magnum opus and a "Great American Novel".

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#57
post #54

Marvellous. Now GitHub attaches its brand to the entire work of open source. This is the most real case of cultural appropriation in the last decade. But the corporate smoke screens focus on bogus cultural appropriation and related issues, so this one will yet again go unnoticed. I'm thinking about updating my OSS licences.

Seems fair enough to me... they're footing the massive bill of organising, transcoding, archiving and documenting all this. It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar but without GH branding nothing stops you (assuming you have enough cash on hand to pull it all off).

> they're footing the massive bill of organising, transcoding, archiving and documenting all this.

Which is done out of self interest and completely pales in comparison to the time that OSS contributors have donated.

> It's OSS, so if you want to do something similar ...

Yeah, yeah, just because you can does not make it right. See Google groups.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#58

The books under Fiction, Culture, and History - meant to demonstrate our "current culture" - include a number of pretty bleak titles.

On the topic of "bleak" and "societal collapse", it is notable that they chose "Blood Meridian" over "The Road" in Cormac McCarthy's works.

Blood Meridian is an account of how we got here. If civilization falls apart to the extent that they need this resource, they'll at least presumably know how they got there and won't need a fictionalized account of societal collapse.

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#59
post #5

The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.

I would be very interested to hear about important omissions due to that bias.

The "Fiction, culture, and history" section includes a bunch of works written in various languages, but apparently they're using the English translation. Surely the original is more representative of human cultures as a whole than its translation into English (which is more representative of anglophone cultures).

Re: GitHub Arctic Code Vault: Tech Tree

#60
post #5

The text uses the words "culture", "human history", and "the world/our world". But reading the list of sources included, it seems to mean "the English culture" of US + UK. That's a bit of a shame IMHO.

14 out of 34 of the writers in that list are from places other than US/UK [1]. Even the included works by US/UK authors like Shakespeare and Orwell and Huxley aren't merely Anglophone culture - I'd argue they're a part of human culture. Are films by Kurosawa like Ran (King Lear) and Throne of Blood (Macbeth) any less Japanese because he was inspired by Shakespeare? I'd argue not.

Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".

[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)

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