Your remarks on the Wiki

[Brian T Rice]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Jeff Cutsinger wrote:

> Brian, i want you to know i appreciate the effort you put into TUNES. I
> think what you've done is full of merit, and what you're doing is
> useful. That said, i don't like your attitude, and it's clear that many
> people here don't either. It's unpleasant to talk to you. This is mostly
> due to the derogatory "tone" you often take, but also (this may just be
> me) i don't get what you're talking about half the time. This gets
> compounded then because i'm afraid to ask you about it.

Well, you're right about me. Right now I'm very frustrated with the TUNES
membership in general, and I'm particularly concerned with people not
putting forward effort on their own to interact with TUNES ideas. This
list is filled with discussions between people who are working on the
basic ideas and people who don't have a grasp /but believe that they do/.
(I'll ignore the third group which doesn't even pretend to understand and
just lurks.)

I'm directing that frustration at anyone who aggravates it, which winds up
involving everybody at some point. The TUNES membership is a horrible
group of parasites for the most part, expecting specifications to be
written some day magically on stone tablets handed down from On High,
along with a magical HLL which will (1) satisfy everybody (har har) and
(2) be comprehensible to people used to Visual Basic, PHP, and C++
(actually, even the Haskell and Common Lisp and Forth users will find
issues with it). Oh, I forgot: (3) comes with a magical self-optimizing
super-dynamic compiler architecture which will not require some serious
work to support everything we need. Don't even get my STARTED about TUNES
as an Operating System.

TUNES members need a jolt to get their attention. My administration of
that is obviously hampering reasonable debate. I have no suggestion, but I
will try to back down. I will not back down to simple-minded suggestions,
however. People /need/ to be well-read in order to discuss this project's
advancement. I cannot emphasize that enough. I recall that you, Jeff, have
spent the last six months reading up on user interface ideas and you are
STILL not at the point where you can make solid recommendations. That's
nothing against you, it's just an excellent example of what it takes to
speak intelligently about TUNES matters. Here's a TUNES CLiki node which
illustrates what /not/ to do as a suggestion for TUNES:

http://cliki.tunes.org/interfaces%20that%20learn

It's not a poor idea, it's just too half-baked to do anything proper with,
and none of the terms can be agreed upon easily, let alone manipulated
into something that works.

I've considered various solutions to my "attitude":

(1) Taking all the ideas and forming entirely new content out of it, with
a new website and everything, to avoid copyright infringements with Fare.

(2) Still working on TUNES but not interacting with anyone on it.

(3) Forming a commercial venture and foregoing all the noble free software
rhetoric just to get enough money that I don't need to rely on people
easily swayed by simple ideological essays.

(4) Giving up and just improving something else without giving it any
formal connection with TUNES whatsoever. This includes academic research
projects that I would initiate.

Obviously if I'm having personal issues which are affecting how I interact
in this group, that's something I deal with regardless of the political
solution, but it's not guaranteed to work when the source of the
frustration is still present.

> Now, to apply this to the context of this thread, i'm trying to figure
> out your intention in writing this seething email to Tril. Did you want
> him to reply? Think if your situations were reversed. Would you? If so,
> would it be a logical discussion, or simply a flame to match the
> original? I have a theory, which may or may not be true. Tril has
> briefly talked to you about Max, and it was probably a very unpleasant
> discussion for him. I'm thinking that, in order to avoid further
> discussions with you, he wrote what he did.

It's simply confounding to see someone comment that they won't participate
in the mailing list discussion /off/ of the mailing list and publically on
our web site. I don't care if he doesn't want to participate (actually, I
do, since he's working on Max which is respectable but closed-
development), but this should be something he places into the same forum.
He doesn't deserve the privelege of avoiding interaction entirely because
he's the list and site administrator, or even because he knows how to use
the CLiki.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/