Getting it wrong, but faster than anything else!

[pphaneuf]

Yesterday, I was told the truth, where most people would have given me an easy little white lie. I am very grateful.

Was NDF today, so I made a piece of our build system that annoyed me go twice as fast. It was really disgusting, and now it's all pretty and shiny.

I intruded on wlach's coding to have some of my whining monologue on how the computer industry is doomed and how sexy things are going to be the end of us.

I fixed myself some decent supper, which cheered me up. It was nothing that interesting, rather simple, but as things are at the edge of chaos around here, it holds more value to me than could appear to someone else, I think.

Then I tried to chat on Yahoo Messenger with azrhey and swestrup, which proceeded to almost entirely destroy my faith in my profession. It was such a circus, I have no words for it. Threw me back to being doomed and sexy things, especially as I was talking to swestrup, who tends to make me think of that (but not as much as _sps_).

I think I should become a monk, or some kind of hermit.

Comments

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

please explain, in detail and with material evidence, how sexy things is gonna be the end of us.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Heh, it's a thing between wlach and me. Okay, that wasn't such a good start of an explanation!

What we refer to as sexy things are ideas like distributed computing, object databases, artificial intelligence, network routing algorithms and other things that are extremely interesting to work on, but have just about no chance of having any useful effect in the short to mid-term (say, within the next 5 or 10 years), if at all. Unfortunately, these sexy things, they attract the very smart people like _sps_, swestrup, and sometimes, even wlach and me, away from the actual problems, and often, from actual sexy things as well.

Which is clearly wrong, right?

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

From Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You:

"These things might be good architectures, they will certainly benefit the developers that use them, but they are not, I repeat, not, a good substitute for the messiah riding his white ass into Jerusalem, or world peace."

And no, it's not even remotely a good substitute for sex, no matter what musicdieu (of all people!) will say.

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

MEH

I still think that keeping stupid people out of decisional places would solve A LOT of problems.

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

the only good substitute for sex is more/different sex.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Agreed, but there's just so many of them, we're overrun.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Hmm... more sex!

[azrhey.livejournal.com]

Contrary to popular beleive I am not a nice person.

And the human gene pool needs a good dose of chlorine right now.

[gregorama.livejournal.com]

Get a room already!