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In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenari

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive" Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built it again with a modern stack. Chesterton's fence, metacognitive ability, overconfidence effect, those who do not learn from history, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42920285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42920285

dvh 2y ago
I think rewrites are popular in part because during rewrite it is possible to drop features, either voluntarily or because of deadlines, while it would probably never fly to drop feature from working, existing implementation. Also your theory doesn't hold up for cases when you rewrite your own code. I've rewritten my old code hundreds of time because I was "idiot" in a sense that it was unmaintainable with new changed requirements. Rewrites are sometimes necessary.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- silvestrov 2y ago
  Rewrites of other peoples code/laws also allows you to think "I'm much smarter than they are". Governance has a lot more "unknown unknowns" than you expect.
- indigo945 2y ago
  A rewrite enables dropping features including, but not limited to: checks and balances, due process, a government for and by the people, and certain inalienable rights. And just to make it clear: I am not being facetious, I am very concerned that all of these are under serious attack. Checks and balances are already broken because of DOGE, because the Department of Justice simply ignored a court order to stop the funding freeze, and because the firing of FBI career employees was probably illegal [1]. Due process is coming under serious threat due to the building of camps in Guantanamo and El Salvador, where detainees will likely have insufficient access to legal counsel. A government for and by the people will be replaced by fascist "network states", sovereign territorial entities under authoritarian control by a "CEO", i.e. dictator [2]. The goal is to enable ultra-wealthy individuals to freely "exit" democracies, to live and govern without any rules. Inalienable rights are explicitly under attack by the ultra-libertarians in Musk's circles. Nick Land, one of the main thinkers behind this neo-fascist brand of thought (branding it as "Dark Enlightenment"), quotes Patri Friedman, who runs Pronomos Capital, the corporation that builds these network states for Peter Thiel and others: > Patri Friedman remarks: “we think that free exit is so important that we’ve called it the only Universal Human Right.” [3] Id est, building a privately-owned, corporate-controlled, dictatorial "network state", which is exactly what "free exit" means, justifies abolishing all human rights. The worst thing is that this all sounds like an insane conspiracy theory, but this is operating completely in the open. The statements of Peter Thiel, Patri Friedman and others are freely available, and they make very clear (Peter Thiel): > Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. [4] [1]: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-totally-illegal-andrew-weissmann-on-trump-s-effort-to-dismantle-the-fbi-purge-career-employees-230983237629 https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-totally-il... [2]: https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism [3]: https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDarkEnlightenment.pdf https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDa... [4]: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
rayiner 2y ago
But sometimes these people aren’t wrong! Microsoft Teams really does suck. And while not all of the federal government is Microsoft Teams, the State department definitely is.
jalapenos 2y ago
A more likely scenario is they're now fully aware how little time they have versus how long things take and how much heal dragging they're going to face every day of it. So they've decided this time to rampage straight out of the gates and sustain it as long as they can. This is a key weakness of central planners - the centralization and the slow rate of development of the bureaucracy. It takes far more effort to develop an invasive and parasitic bureaucracy than it does to blow it to pieces. So this is a natural strategic asymmetry that makes perfect sense to exploit. Enjoy!
- rayiner 2y ago
  Shock and awe.
  - apawloski 2y ago
    Using this military metaphor to describe operations against America's own government is absolutely wild to me. It's legitimately shocking to me how extreme people have become over the past ten years. The size of the federal workforce has not grown in 50 years. These cuts will make no impact on the federal debt. DOGE is breaking every federal records law there is with no oversight. Elon Musk has clear, undeniable conflicts of interest at play here. But people are celebrating because the federal government is .. slow, relies on the interpretation of complex law and procedure, and I guess is nice to women and minorities.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Executive branch employees coined the term “Resistance” to declare their opposition to the democratically elected president’s agenda in 2017. So the war metaphor seems quite fitting. The shock and awe will stop when the public can be confident that civil servants will work just as hard to implement the agenda of the president regardless of which party wins the election. That is fundamental to our system of democracy. And the unelected government isn’t nice to us “minorities.” it’s full of ideologues who categorize us into meaningless groups like “Hispanic” and “Asian,” fund random NGOs that we have never heard of that purport to speak for us, and want to implement a system of racial preferences in gerrymandering. I’d love to see how many grants went to “Asian” organizations that promote the idea that “AAPI hate” is more of a problem than rising crime or affirmative action.

dvh 2y ago

I think rewrites are popular in part because during rewrite it is possible to drop features, either voluntarily or because of deadlines, while it would probably never fly to drop feature from working, existing implementation. Also your theory doesn't hold up for cases when you rewrite your own code. I've rewritten my old code hundreds of time because I was "idiot" in a sense that it was unmaintainable with new changed requirements. Rewrites are sometimes necessary.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
silvestrov 2y ago
Rewrites of other peoples code/laws also allows you to think "I'm much smarter than they are". Governance has a lot more "unknown unknowns" than you expect.
indigo945 2y ago
A rewrite enables dropping features including, but not limited to: checks and balances, due process, a government for and by the people, and certain inalienable rights. And just to make it clear: I am not being facetious, I am very concerned that all of these are under serious attack. Checks and balances are already broken because of DOGE, because the Department of Justice simply ignored a court order to stop the funding freeze, and because the firing of FBI career employees was probably illegal [1]. Due process is coming under serious threat due to the building of camps in Guantanamo and El Salvador, where detainees will likely have insufficient access to legal counsel. A government for and by the people will be replaced by fascist "network states", sovereign territorial entities under authoritarian control by a "CEO", i.e. dictator [2]. The goal is to enable ultra-wealthy individuals to freely "exit" democracies, to live and govern without any rules. Inalienable rights are explicitly under attack by the ultra-libertarians in Musk's circles. Nick Land, one of the main thinkers behind this neo-fascist brand of thought (branding it as "Dark Enlightenment"), quotes Patri Friedman, who runs Pronomos Capital, the corporation that builds these network states for Peter Thiel and others: > Patri Friedman remarks: “we think that free exit is so important that we’ve called it the only Universal Human Right.” [3] Id est, building a privately-owned, corporate-controlled, dictatorial "network state", which is exactly what "free exit" means, justifies abolishing all human rights. The worst thing is that this all sounds like an insane conspiracy theory, but this is operating completely in the open. The statements of Peter Thiel, Patri Friedman and others are freely available, and they make very clear (Peter Thiel): > Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. [4] [1]: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-totally-illegal-andrew-weissmann-on-trump-s-effort-to-dismantle-the-fbi-purge-career-employees-230983237629 https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-totally-il... [2]: https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism [3]: https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDarkEnlightenment.pdf https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDa... [4]: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

rayiner 2y ago

But sometimes these people aren’t wrong! Microsoft Teams really does suck. And while not all of the federal government is Microsoft Teams, the State department definitely is.

jalapenos 2y ago

A more likely scenario is they're now fully aware how little time they have versus how long things take and how much heal dragging they're going to face every day of it. So they've decided this time to rampage straight out of the gates and sustain it as long as they can. This is a key weakness of central planners - the centralization and the slow rate of development of the bureaucracy. It takes far more effort to develop an invasive and parasitic bureaucracy than it does to blow it to pieces. So this is a natural strategic asymmetry that makes perfect sense to exploit. Enjoy!

rayiner 2y ago
Shock and awe.
- apawloski 2y ago
  Using this military metaphor to describe operations against America's own government is absolutely wild to me. It's legitimately shocking to me how extreme people have become over the past ten years. The size of the federal workforce has not grown in 50 years. These cuts will make no impact on the federal debt. DOGE is breaking every federal records law there is with no oversight. Elon Musk has clear, undeniable conflicts of interest at play here. But people are celebrating because the federal government is .. slow, relies on the interpretation of complex law and procedure, and I guess is nice to women and minorities.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Executive branch employees coined the term “Resistance” to declare their opposition to the democratically elected president’s agenda in 2017. So the war metaphor seems quite fitting. The shock and awe will stop when the public can be confident that civil servants will work just as hard to implement the agenda of the president regardless of which party wins the election. That is fundamental to our system of democracy. And the unelected government isn’t nice to us “minorities.” it’s full of ideologues who categorize us into meaningless groups like “Hispanic” and “Asian,” fund random NGOs that we have never heard of that purport to speak for us, and want to implement a system of racial preferences in gerrymandering. I’d love to see how many grants went to “Asian” organizations that promote the idea that “AAPI hate” is more of a problem than rising crime or affirmative action.