12 ms·

Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy this rage against the machine. Nowadays the common engineer sees it as unprofessional, coarse.. but it's the old Zeitgeist of

Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy this rage against the machine. Nowadays the common engineer sees it as unprofessional, coarse.. but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends.

kodah 6y ago
I think the problem is that the temperature in the room has changed. I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well. If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  For what it’s worth my objection isn’t the content or that there’s politics mingling in an open source project - it’s that the specific message was unbelievably asinine and so stupid as to cast doubt on the competence of the developers (for the same reason it isn’t assuring to read a manual for your television and discover a long rant about Flat Earth - it’s not a strictly fair metric for their technical competence but it’s a huge red flag about their general seriousness and reasoning ability). Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Found the mobile game dev ;) Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it? The two main points seem, to me, to be: 1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit 2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige Both of these are quite defensible.
    - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
      There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence (like say Factorio), the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over (any game with grinding), are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value. The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own. Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance: >Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say, and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS. Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    Man, you are going all over this thread angry that someone put a clearly marked piece of satire regarding _games_ in a _game engine_. Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Chill out. These guys are developers, not world leaders. Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful. At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN. As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.
  - wruza 6y ago
    Does the sudden revelation that we all are people with own quirks really shock you that hard? You maybe believe that there is regular people and there is serious people, who work at the serious business, which is by itself serious af.
  - thefz 6y ago
    > Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed. Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.
- eternalban 6y ago
  The Clash with Allen Ginsberg, making quite "overt" statements. Ginsberg spares no one here. The Clash / Allen Ginsberg - Capitol Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es
- not_a_moth 6y ago
  Discourse degraded or maybe it's the coordination of thought made possible from the consolidation of media and the internet, that's made it now possible to target those who seem to threaten the ruling class and their ways.
- freshhawk 6y ago
  Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously. Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic. It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.
  - bgorman 6y ago
    Your statement rings hollow to me. Previous generations were literally sent to die in the world wars, Korea and Vietnam. The current generation of recent college graduates has had less suffering than any prior generation. It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a Republican or Democrat if you just look at the results and not their rhetoric.
    - conception 6y ago
      500k dead Americans disagree.
      - akotlar 6y ago
        Are you arguing that Covid disproportionately kills the young (current generations)?
  - alsetmusic 6y ago
    > Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously. That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey. There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.
  - spiralx 6y ago
- danaliv 6y ago
  Someone on Instagram told Tom Morello to stop talking politics and stick to music. Tom fucking Morello.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    Don't know about Morello, but Dead Kennedys definitely should: https://archive.md/F5pu9 https://archive.md/F5pu9
    - nivenkos 6y ago
      They died when Jello left...
  - old_fart_dev 6y ago
    I'm dying. Thank you for the laugh.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  I think this is a phenomenon that happens through stereotypical radicalization. The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect. What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot? I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society. Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion. What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate. I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society. And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.
clairity 6y ago
reading the comments here made me think it was going to be a self-serving and possibly offensive screed, but instead it was a mirthful critique of the human condition under captured capitalism, in the service of ‘justifying’ encrypted save files (where the summary answer is to prevent cheating).
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
What has changed is that it's not funny anymore, it's quite real.
throwawaygh 6y ago
> but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends. With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.
catmanjan 6y ago
As someone born in the 90s, looking back at the "rage against the machine" culture in software seems very fake for an industry that went from academia to an extension of the financial services sector...
- hluska 6y ago
  If you're ever interested in embarking upon an interesting cultural study of the 1990s, look at some of RATM's label mates on Epic Records. It was a strange decade...
- DaedPsyker 6y ago
  They weren't the same people though. Even the academic types were the type of sandel wearing, long bearded hippies (not an insult BTW) that nixon raged against. Followed by the tinkering kids and phreakers etc. There was never a single overarching software culture.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  It seems like a fallacy to go backward from "Things are this way in 2021, therefore it could never have been any other way in the 1980s-early 2000s". Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing. Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy. You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web. The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".
thefz 6y ago
I live with a simple principle: Does it make me think, does it make me feel something? then it's art. Video games a re definitely art as a means to express a thought or a feeling. Let's not drown that in the flow of soulless triple A sport sims.

kodah 6y ago

I think the problem is that the temperature in the room has changed. I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well. If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
For what it’s worth my objection isn’t the content or that there’s politics mingling in an open source project - it’s that the specific message was unbelievably asinine and so stupid as to cast doubt on the competence of the developers (for the same reason it isn’t assuring to read a manual for your television and discover a long rant about Flat Earth - it’s not a strictly fair metric for their technical competence but it’s a huge red flag about their general seriousness and reasoning ability). Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Found the mobile game dev ;) Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it? The two main points seem, to me, to be: 1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit 2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige Both of these are quite defensible.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence (like say Factorio), the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over (any game with grinding), are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value. The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own. Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance: >Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say, and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS. Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Man, you are going all over this thread angry that someone put a clearly marked piece of satire regarding _games_ in a _game engine_. Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Chill out. These guys are developers, not world leaders. Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful. At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN. As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.
- wruza 6y ago
  Does the sudden revelation that we all are people with own quirks really shock you that hard? You maybe believe that there is regular people and there is serious people, who work at the serious business, which is by itself serious af.
- thefz 6y ago
  > Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed. Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.
eternalban 6y ago
The Clash with Allen Ginsberg, making quite "overt" statements. Ginsberg spares no one here. The Clash / Allen Ginsberg - Capitol Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es
not_a_moth 6y ago
Discourse degraded or maybe it's the coordination of thought made possible from the consolidation of media and the internet, that's made it now possible to target those who seem to threaten the ruling class and their ways.
freshhawk 6y ago
Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously. Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic. It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.
- bgorman 6y ago
  Your statement rings hollow to me. Previous generations were literally sent to die in the world wars, Korea and Vietnam. The current generation of recent college graduates has had less suffering than any prior generation. It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a Republican or Democrat if you just look at the results and not their rhetoric.
  - conception 6y ago
    500k dead Americans disagree.
    - akotlar 6y ago
      Are you arguing that Covid disproportionately kills the young (current generations)?
- alsetmusic 6y ago
  > Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously. That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey. There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.
- spiralx 6y ago
danaliv 6y ago
Someone on Instagram told Tom Morello to stop talking politics and stick to music. Tom fucking Morello.
- ttt0 6y ago
  Don't know about Morello, but Dead Kennedys definitely should: https://archive.md/F5pu9 https://archive.md/F5pu9
  - nivenkos 6y ago
    They died when Jello left...
- old_fart_dev 6y ago
  I'm dying. Thank you for the laugh.
cookiengineer 6y ago
I think this is a phenomenon that happens through stereotypical radicalization. The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect. What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot? I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society. Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion. What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate. I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society. And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.

clairity 6y ago

reading the comments here made me think it was going to be a self-serving and possibly offensive screed, but instead it was a mirthful critique of the human condition under captured capitalism, in the service of ‘justifying’ encrypted save files (where the summary answer is to prevent cheating).

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

What has changed is that it's not funny anymore, it's quite real.

throwawaygh 6y ago

> but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends. With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.

catmanjan 6y ago

As someone born in the 90s, looking back at the "rage against the machine" culture in software seems very fake for an industry that went from academia to an extension of the financial services sector...

hluska 6y ago
If you're ever interested in embarking upon an interesting cultural study of the 1990s, look at some of RATM's label mates on Epic Records. It was a strange decade...
DaedPsyker 6y ago
They weren't the same people though. Even the academic types were the type of sandel wearing, long bearded hippies (not an insult BTW) that nixon raged against. Followed by the tinkering kids and phreakers etc. There was never a single overarching software culture.
unethical_ban 6y ago
It seems like a fallacy to go backward from "Things are this way in 2021, therefore it could never have been any other way in the 1980s-early 2000s". Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing. Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy. You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web. The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".

thefz 6y ago

I live with a simple principle: Does it make me think, does it make me feel something? then it's art. Video games a re definitely art as a means to express a thought or a feeling. Let's not drown that in the flow of soulless triple A sport sims.