trochee, 13 days ago

figuratively, "blue sky" is about halfway between "pie in the sky" (unrealistically optimistic) and "fair-weather friend/soldier" (someone who cannot be relied upon in hard times)

That they entirely overlook these rhetorical ankle-breaking potholes (as bad as "Uber", I mean, really) is the best evidence yet that the software engineering industry needs humanities people

2/2

xgranade, 13 days ago

@trochee See also: Soylent, Palantir, and anything involving the word "metaverse."

trochee, 13 days ago

@xgranade yeah,

"blue sky" absolutely feels like a Torment Nexus name

but swapping genre from SFF to whatever genre contains Office Space, Severance, The Office, Microserfs, etc

"fin-du-20⁰-siècle bureaucratic decadent"
"Dunder-Mifflinique"

xgranade, 13 days ago

@trochee Software engineering, as a discipline, seems to be almost immune to social critique.

irenes, 13 days ago

@xgranade @trochee sigh it's the ideological component

xgranade, 13 days ago

@irenes @trochee "Tech for the sake of tech is an inherent good" isn't that far from the "powerful are powerful because they are good."

timethief, 13 days ago

@xgranade @irenes @trochee

Are they not the same statement? I could have sworn you just copied and pasted to save time.

xgranade, 13 days ago

@timethief @irenes @trochee There's a slight gap between the two, I think: namely, the recognition that technology is a form of power structure and of capital in particular.

irenes, 13 days ago

@xgranade @timethief @trochee that sounds right

irenes, 13 days ago

@xgranade @timethief @trochee or we might more precisely say a form of power - structure is about how it's structured, which is not always the same and there's more to say about it

xgranade, 13 days ago

@irenes @timethief @trochee Ah, that's a good point. I was going for brevity, but in doing so oversimplified away a pretty important dimension to it all.

irenes, 13 days ago

@xgranade @timethief @trochee no worries, we're just always trying to be as precise as we can with this stuff :)

xgranade, 13 days ago

@irenes Precision in 500 characters is, contrary to popular mischaracterization, perfectly possible. It is, however, an art form.

OETearmann, 13 days ago

@xgranade @irenes @trochee sounds disturbingly like the logic of the divine right of kings, donnit?
SHUDDERS

xgranade, 13 days ago

@OETearmann @irenes @trochee I'd argue somewhat worse. Divine right of kings implies that it's inherent to the king, not a property of power itself. The tautology of power (to borrow Jeff Sharlet's term) goes further to say that power, no matter how it is obtained, is one defines one as being good.

xgranade, 13 days ago

@OETearmann @irenes @trochee (You'd be right to accuse me, though, of some hairsplitting at that point. They're all fucking bad.)