Flâneur

Wisdom

Dear John, I understand your personal reluctance to take a visible interest in politics, both of the office, and of the national, variety. Engineers generally don't want to be interested in politics. It gets in the way of getting stuff done, and feels like a petty pastime of vindictive, childish people. I get all that. I also realize that you are a highly agreeable person. You'd much rather talk about things you are excited about than things you dislike. You don't want to squabble. I respect that. In fact, I agree with that. Sometimes I wish that I, myself, were a less disagreeable person and wasn't constantly talking about things I dislike, and debating with people I wish to get along with. But I have realized that there is a time, place, and purpose for disagreement, just as there is a time, place, and purpose for politics. Sometimes, even if you're not interested in politics, politics becomes interested in you. And when we are aware of this, we sometimes need to get our hands dirty in a simple act of self-defense (and the defense of others) against politics gone bad. What happened to Palmer Lucky isn't just about Palmer Lucky, and the effects were not limited to him. I was employed by Oculus Labs, for the space of a year, some time after this incident. My ability to work effectively in this position lasted about two weeks, until the moment I dared, over the lunch table, to criticize a socialist government policy that another member of my work group brought up for discussion. After that day, all communication, including work-related communication, with me, by any other members of my team, effectively ceased. I was given no tasks, and my efforts to find ways to make myself useful were ignored. For the remainder of the year, I was effectively a ghost, paid to occupy a desk, but not spoken to or acknowledged in any way. Eventually, a way was found to quietly manage me out of the organization. The precedent, you see, had been set that this was okay. Palmer Lucky was visible to you and to the outside world, but there were many others like myself who weren't. I did not quit software engineering immediately after this, but the sense of disillusionment and futility I felt certainly contributed to my eventual decision to quit and become a writer instead. Witch hunts happen, not merely because malicious people start them, but because others do not wish to get involved. It has been said that the only thing necessary for a triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In the past ten years or so, we have certainly, across a broad spectrum of our civilization, had front row seats to that which can only be described as a triumph of evil. You, in particular, are obviously a good man, and with that upright character comes a disinclination to engage in petty squabbles. But sometimes we cannot afford the luxury of clean hands. Nobody wanted to be labeled "far right", because the same communist lunatics who were carrying on these witch hunts in the first place had convinced the public zeitgeist that "far right" meant something horrible. But at the same time, they were labelled the basic philosophical underpinnings of our society, from freedom of conscience to freedom of religion to freedom of expression to freedom of association, as "far right" ideals. Many of us, over the past years, have failed to defend those basic principles of our civilization because we "didn't want to get involved". What I am trying to say here is that there is value in being a disagreeable person. If you're not willing to risk looking like a bad guy, you can't take the kinds of action necessary to stop bad guys. That's why stands on principle, even when they seem like an absurd expenditure of effort, even when they seem like distasteful petty squabbling, can sometimes be necessary, because we aren't just defending a person, we are setting a precedent. Which sometimes means some of us have to be willing to take one for the team. Willing to be that grouchy bastard who says "No, I will refuse to go along with this even though it hurts me, because it cannot be allowed to stand." I'm not trying to lecture you on what you should or shouldn't have done, or even advise you on what you should or shouldn't do in the future. But the next time you see someone engaging in what appears to be petty, politicized squabbling, please try to remember what some of us may be fighting for.

i’ll defend devin and their team here. most of the critique here are things you’d hear from a senior engineer (dinosaur) who’s watching over your shoulder and constantly negging you. it’s completely regarded most of his arguments are strawman - devin used an incorrect version of pytorch (duh, knowledge cutoff) - “it took 36 minutes to do this task but took devin 6 hrs” (i think the fair comparison is how long it’d take an average upwork tasker to do this) - devin could have read the README (instruction manual) and saved installation time with a command. (honestly who does that. any good engineer would just starts playing with the thing and poking holes instead of following the instruction manual word for word) - code quality was nightmarish (no comment)

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