Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

« In F/LOSS, openness relies on a steadfastly closed epistemological frame that not only constitutes technology as apart from persons, but shapes this separability in such a way that code is more than just outside the realm of the social: it is downright FREED from it. The social here is not exactly orthogonal to the technical as F/LOSS imagination has it; rather, social forms shape how ties are SEVERED, as well as how they are built, between people. Not needing to know with whom code is being exchanged, or having a stake in their concerns, is as central to F/LOSS as open scrutiny to improve code quality. »

the couple of paragraphs which include this do pack a theoretical wollop, but unfortunately Dawn Nafus does not have the rhetorical prowess of Marx

« Community members are decidedly NOT free to build ties that might oblige others to explain themselves, which is exactly what women’s groups do, and exactly why they are considered problematic. If someone does not like being in one software project, the accepted course of action is to simply start another project else- where, not create an obligation for that community to include you. This particular form of exchange means that others can push the technology along further only AS individually willful agents who have taken it upon themselves to ‘read the f***ing manual.’ »

@gaditb https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444811422887

« Members often describe their work as ‘scratching an itch’ by producing something tangible and craft-like. Scratching an itch is a common reason why people become involved with communities and why they stay. Yet tradition and repetition, key elements of other forms of craft production, have no place other than as building blocks upon which to take one’s own work further. Re-doing work similar to that of other coders does not scratch the itch satisfactorily, whereas it generally does among craftspeople. In this way, the craft system looks suspiciously like a system of science. It is not considered interesting to just make a media player or word processor, but only NEW KINDS of media players or word processors that exemplify some transformation in knowledge. »

my very asleep girlfriend just woke up enough to flop on top of me and pin me to the bed

oh nice new BERWYN

there are definitely engineering decisions which are complex and weigh a lot of factors and require technical and theoretical expertise to evaluate, but those tend to be interesting problems

hard problems tend to be more like “i have known what needs to be done for six months but it is so aesthetically repugnant that i can only work on it for a couple of hours a week before my brain loses the ability to focus”

a hard problem is simply a problem that is hard