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If you wondered why I’m mostly boosting humorous takes on xz drama it’s because I find almost all serious takes absolutely nauseating. So much serious thinking by people who have never maintained anything of substance in their whole life.
@hynek there's a bit in my stand-up comedy about how one way you can tell the difference between someone who's been responsible for a complicated system lots of strangers depend on, and someone who hasn't, is whether they ever say "why don't they just....?"
@brainwane Yeah, “Why don’t they just…” is the “I’m not racist, but …” of FOSS 
You just KNOW nothing good comes after.
@hynek @brainwane "just" used in that manner nearly always indicates a lack of understanding on the part of the speaker, or a disregard of the reasoning or concerns of the subject. To me, it indicates naive thought up to callous disregard. I've virtually eliminated "just" as a preposition from my vocabulary.
@colindean @hynek @brainwane It’s shocking how different that sentence comes off if you remove that one word. Genuinely feels curious rather than judgmental.
@nick @hynek @brainwane absolutely.
I owe a lot of my early feelings on that word to a great teacher I had in HS. She was my media productions teacher, having undertaken a subject outside of her particular expertise and relied heavily on me and 2 other students to help guide an inaugural class. She'd get frustrated when she felt like there was a simpler way to accomplish something but hadn't yet understood why I was doing something the way I was doing it. She said "just" often.
@nick @hynek @brainwane in retrospect, that experience probably contributed a big part of what people in my professional sphere know as "Colin-level verbosity" or "Colinistic detail" wherein I end up telling a story about how I arrived at a certain conclusion and path forward with the result is completely sensible once all the details are surfaced.
It frustrates the crap out of people who prefer brevity when they have trust issues.
@brainwane OK since I’ve gone semi-viral while on a plane and Delta has semi-decent wifi, I’ll give you one tepid take: the key problem is, once again, that ppl can’t hold more than one thought at once.
I’m maintaining Python packages that cumulatively rake in 230+M downloads per month. That’s almost quarter of a billion. Not sure how to count my GitHub Actions. (1/8)
My output both in code & blog posts & videos would be A FRACTION of it, if it weren’t for @tidelift & the amazing folks on https://github.com/sponsors/hynek. Heck, I wouldn’t be on a plane to #PyCascades right now!
So, if you like my work, don’t listen to OSSF smartasses that money doesn’t solve anything. They paid me for a year and I’m confident they got their money’s worth. (2/8)
But it’s just that: harm reduction, if you will. It’s necessary but it doesn’t mean that there’s not a ton of other problems that need to be tackled or pondered or acknowledged. Not even in the interest of the maintainers, but rather in the interest of users! Lasse clearly would’ve been fine if no PR ever landed in xz again. As far as I’m concerned, attrs and structlog are feature-complete! (3/8)
People talk about helping maintainers, but turns out, most people don’t care enough about the projects—or simply don’t have the skills nothing wrong with that—like the maintainers do because we have to keep sheparding the code when the contributor has long switched to the management track. It’s almost always easier to do it myself than help someone land a PR. But it feels good to help people landing PRs! (4/8)
I’ve seen the pressure of justifying one’s presence floated around. Hi, I’m the guy everyone @‘s whenever they switch to dataclasses or Pydantic or Ctuhulu knows what. Whenever someone mentions structlog, someone else asks why anyone should use it over $SOMETHING_ELSE.
How does one balance people telling you how much they learned from you with your latest article suddenly being buried from HN rank 10 to 98 with the top comment calling it “that fucking article”? (5/8)
Again! None of this are really complaints from my side. I’m taking care of my body, I meditate, and I have enough peers to bitch to. In fact, some amazing friendships and aquintances have flourished this way. The crash in sponsorships everyone got was painful, but still I FEEL the support. Many things are frustrating, but I’m making my choices because of the impact I can have and the support I’m enjoying. I could and would stop any day. (6/8)
The question is what do YOU want? What do you want me (and my peers) think of on a Saturday morning when my partner is still asleep and I’m feeling my first jolt of caffeine? I can do freelance work for a friend for ~100 € / h or I can create something for YOU and everyone else. This is not a purely monetary decision! But I do feel I owe my supporters something and that’s fine, I shouldn’t take sponsorships if that bothered me. (7/8)
Now, do you see how complicated this shit is and how there is no “just do X” solution? Nobody is in FOSS for the money and yet it plays such a huge role. We want to create and yet having a world-writable TODO list in the shape of an issue tracker is anxiety-inducing.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Again: for hot takes get me drunk in Seattle. This was the tepid one. (8/8)
@brainwane @hynek I have a personal rule that I can’t use “just” unless I’m the one who has to “just” do the thing.
@mpirnat @hynek My bit on the topic is less funny than @brainwane 's
@mhoye Bookmarked for future reference. That’s great.
@mhoye @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane there's a great French slang word for this: yakafokon (https://fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yakafokon).
"y a qu'à" and "faut qu'on" are two ways of saying "you just have to". So 'yakafokinisme' is the practice of making really simplistic suggestions.
@christianp @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane
I love this.
@christianp @mhoye @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane
a whole lexical item for https://xkcd.com/793/ !
@christianp @mhoye @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane
Is further refinement of those suggestions called "yakafokon shaving"?
@christianp @mhoye @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane And since “connerie” means stupidity, a good coinage would be (la) “yakafoconnerie”.
Bonne idée, non?
@mhoye @mpirnat @hynek @brainwane
I believe I snapped this pic in the green room before you gave that talk.
"Just" is where all the detail is hidden, along with the devil.
@mpirnat That sounds like a nice rule. Gotta tell that to my manager who names every other ticket "*simple* feature x".
@mpirnat @brainwane @hynek
My personal rule is that if someone says "why don't we just", I estimate 6 months, for the whole team, minimum
@mpirnat @brainwane @hynek @stevegis_ssg That is kind to others, but perhaps not to yourself. I’ve been working on extracting it from even the latter usage.
@brainwane @hynek are there videos?
Yes! I think this particular jest was either SeaGL or !!Con 2022: https://www.harihareswara.net/texts/talks/#stand-up-comedy
@brainwane @hynek I sometimes catch myself saying "just". I usually correct myself. "We could just -- I mean, we could, considerable effort -- do xyz"
@brainwane @hynek We used to say it as an inside joke at a previous job. That and "how hard can it be?"
@boxed @brainwane @hynek
"DNS is just naming things and cache invalidation; how hard can it be?"
@brainwane @hynek I try to always put "Just" in quotes whenever I say that.