<p>After seeing yet another large OSS project encountering a giant tarpit of debate, I&#39;ve thrown together a minimal CoC for ngscopeclient.</p><p>It&#39;s intentionally very basic to avoid being unreasonably restrictive; additional rules will be added if/when problems arise that dictate they be created.</p><p>Open to suggestions on phrasing and clarifications, but these rules are fundamental enough that their basic core is non-negotiable.</p><p><a href="https://github.com/ngscopeclient/scopehal-apps/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">github.com/ngscopeclient/scope</span><span class="invisible">hal-apps/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md</span></a></p>

<p>Nobody actually doing this stuff wants an informed opinion. To the extent that they engage in rhetoric, it is merely as chaff, to slow everyone else down, to drag out false deliberations until they&#39;re done doing what they were going to do anyway, and then to defer consequences for what they&#39;ve done by filibustering for as long as possible about pointless irrelevancies. It&#39;s all misdirection.</p>

<p>Anyway every fucking piece of news these days (LLMs, tariffs) reminds me of this. Nobody actually needs my input, but it feels like it demands a response. But the response it demands is always the same: this is a bad idea, for very obvious reasons, I am not really an expert in this but I don&#39;t need to be, anyone who is actually paying attention can see that this is stupid, please stop. And it&#39;s equally futile.</p>

<p>The one thing I *did* learn from this period was a much more visceral understanding of that Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. I misunderstood my role; I was expected to be a &quot;smart guy&quot; rubber-stamping bad proposals so that they could proceed. I did not initially understand that they were going to proceed regardless of my input, and that the value of my input was just social proof, not analysis.</p>

<p>I was stunted because there is no challenge or practice in repeating: &quot;Your proposal is a mistake. I know this because it is a common mistake, that a lot of people in your position have made before. It worked out badly for them; it will work out badly for you. It would be a waste of both our time for me to investigate the specifics of your situation further because I already understand the reasons you are making this mistake and there are no specifics which would make it a good idea.&quot;</p>

<p>At one point I had a job where I was frequently consulted in an &quot;advisory role&quot; for a bunch of projects making the same series of bad decisions and having to re-explain some very basic principles of technical decision making. Nominally I had a tremendous amount of flexibility and agency but in practice I was stagnating and stunted in my career growth. 🧵</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://tilde.zone/@BryanBennett" class="u-url mention">@<span>BryanBennett</span></a></span> tell me what your reference is :)</p>

<p>New theme song for the economy.</p>

<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux" class="u-url mention">@<span>gamingonlinux</span></a></span> good, Ember Knights is one of my favorite games and it would be awful to see it suffer a terrible fate like what happened to Risk of Rain 2</p>