bvt's backtrace

This article is written around one month after the events that led to break between Mircea Popescu and Stanislav Datskovskiy, so it focuses less on the conflict itself and more on the sadness situation. It is much shorter then its draft was even two weeks ago - others have already said much of the things I wanted to, much better than I ever could. As far I can see, both Mircea and Stanislav are happy about the outcome, so the conflict, after a month of observing, comes off as an improvement. It is easy to see what drives Stanislav in his work, just as how Mircea's approach to work would be almost incompatible with Stanislav's. Thus, I will focus only on a few things that I feel were not well addressed.

The point about constant retreat to downstreams is very real¹, though I am not sure whether asciilifeform has anything to do with it - when reading discussions involving him, these things always came up when talking about distant future (when we finally have gossipd, etc.). However it is obvious how it is a problem for TBF². IMO one of the lessons is that even if the underlying software is rotten, the actually interesting thing must still get it's share of attention and not stop the operation.

I do not think that the solutions by Stanislav were a problem at any point. The problem, however, in the context is: what was not built because of waiting for X? What opportunities were delayed and then lost in the long shelf? Seems to be a purely retrospective analysis sort of activity, I don't expect that anything would have to be torn out as a result of this analysis, because IMO what MP calls the poisonous offerings manifests itself as dead companies, not as shitty tools.

In this regard, I would say that software is useful as a leverage to promote useful changes in the environment, not as an inert isolated object of beauty³; so for example TMSR OS project makes sense to me as a product developed for S.MG, or for potential trinque-managed consultancy, or Trilema servers, or could have been developed for TFB, but not as a thing in itself. To what real-world problem will it get applied, and what are requirements for that use-case? Just building the new distribution "because we can" is not a good idea, and as far as a training is concerned - Gentoo is already producing potential distro-builders at the rates ancient Athens were producing boat rowers, so I don't think anyone here needs more training. What work plan trinque expects to make for it, I don't know, but I half-expect it will be something more just porting ebuilds to Cuntoo and adding static linking⁴. Anyway, the bigger part of work for distribution might be backporting⁵.

Finally, as far as 'would you even talk with an unperson?' questions asked in #asciilifeform are concerned, no, I do not mind talking to/buying stuff from asciilifeform, nor do I think that MP would drum anyone out of #trilema for doing so⁶. I did find the early discussion there to be too heated to participate, but now the atmosphere has calmed down, and the future will show how it will work out.

1. "We can't go to war with the enemy, AK-47 hasn't been invented yet!!!" [↩]
2. Would it not have been better to do a Keccak regrind of TRB ASAP (for last year) to restart the flow of patches, set up an mpwp blog where something press- and user-helpful could be written, even if the programmers can't do proper communication? Someone would still need to do this when suitably humanities-oriented person finds his way to #trilema. [↩]
3. But thoughts are given for action’s government; Where action ceases, thought’s impertinent. [↩]
4. Some more notes: I haven't seen any statically linking distributive being alive beyond the first year or two for which its authors had energy (or the fly that was biting them had energy) to do the work, I expect in big part because this projects were driven by ideological purity arguments, and not by desire to apply the results somewhere. As far as a NixOS-like structure is concerned, for all its benefits it looks like an attempt to pull an owl of ...whatever it is, over the globe of Unix, so to speak - the human-incomprehensible setup of *[_]PATH is just bleh. [↩]
5. Have a much older Firefox work with a bit newer ffmpeg (if X11 is ever added into the mix), fixes to GCC4, etc. [↩]
6. Just as I don't mind getting drummed out if the bar gets raised above me or ratchet leaves me far behind - in any status - otherwise the time to leave for me would be now. [↩]