Enough of What “Most People Think,” Tell Me What You Think or STFU

Seeing as how Bitcoin is here and Computer Times aren’t going anywhere fast, it’s time to tend to a few things we’ve been brushing under the rug.i It’s time for a little self-improvement. And that starts with the self. Yes, you!

While it’s become fashionable to plug one’s ears while screaming “LALALALA” in an attempt to block out the downright unfair good for nothing trolls, this is no longer satisfactory.ii Calling an argument “trolling” or “racist” in no way addresses that argument any more than calling a movie “good” is in any way informative, useful, or productive. It matters not one iota what you think or feel if you’re unwilling to develop and thence utilise the language faculties necessary to convey this information to the world.

By the same token, when you’re grasping for straws, struggling to solidify the soup in your skull and bring those nebulous notions into the virgin world, for the love of all that’s good and holy and right, use your own fucking words!iii

Using the words of others isn’t in and of itself a crime. Quoting Shakespeare, Kant or de Tocqueville can do wonders for a conversation. It’s the argumentum ad populum shit, that is, arguing that something is good or bad because “most people” do or do not agree with it,iv that sends any pretense at constructive, enlightened conversation down the drain and drives me so fucking insane.

This type of logical fallacy fails due to the following implications:

1. The masses are not in the conversation to confirm or deny the accuracy of your representation, potentially diverting the argument to one over said accuracy.

2. Popularity is not the same as authority.v Specifically, who fucking asked them?

Invoking appeals to the masses only serves to demonstrate your shameful unwillingness to be a fucking man, that is, a fucking sovereign individual with your head on your own fucking shoulders. This is very easily the most important point here because it’s quite impossible that you’ll succeed in this life, by any measure you so choose, without ownership of yourself, your words, and your actions. What, you think Napolean won a lottery and it could’ve just as easily been Simonique, the shy son of a baker in Toulouse, who conquered Europe ?

So while there are an apparently infinite number of “communities,” your self-proclaimed identity or deference to any of them in no way illuminates you with reflected glory of the accomplishments of people actually doing shit. If you think talking about communities matters, you have a serious and probably terminal case of first, largest, bestest thinking.

You are only a participant in anything to the extent that you add value. This is non-negotiable. Your knowledge of a thing, particularly if it’s as cursory as seems to be the fashion, has absolutely no impact whatsoever. As such, “raising awareness” is just about the single most insanely stupid fucking waste of time and energy on this planet, followed closely by argumentum ad populum and the rest of the logical fallacies you really ought to read up on.

So enough of the fallacies. Enough of the other derps. Tell me what you think.

Better yet, tell me what you do.

 

___ ___ ___

  1. The most seemingly innocuous things can tip-off an avalanche of positive action. Take the current excising of the Phoundation crud from the Bitcoin code as a recent example. What catalysed this violent reaction? Historians may well find themselves divided by this. I’m inclined, without a shred of humility, to believe that it was my fiddling with a former Lord’s node script and my interest in updating it to avoid the latest Power Rangers’ latest braindamage. Others may see that as necessary but not sufficient and point to Stan D’s quest for a hardbound version of the source code as the straw that broke the camel’s back. Then again, what matters is that it’s happening. And that these pages helped push the stone up the hill. Fucking blogs, y’know?
  2. Derpopolous block retweets
    Derpopolous can block me from retweeting his shit all he wants. He’s still a fucking shill and I’m still a fucking Lord.
  3. You don’t want to end up like “a” or “Tal” do you?
  4. Note very fucking clearly that the “most people” shit has everything to do with what those sheep think and not what they do. The huddled masses cannot act and they know they cannot act. They know full well that only individuals can act and that all the group can do is derp. So… that’s exactly what they do, even though their power is entirely limited in their ability to guilt you into conformity. This is incidentally why opinion polls are garbage of the first order. No skin in the game.
  5. What is this, some twerpy democracy ?

11 thoughts on “Enough of What “Most People Think,” Tell Me What You Think or STFU

  1. pankkake says:

    That’s not an “update”, please avoid associating your nonsense with my script. Your “solution” provides no easy maintenance and comes with greater hardware requirements (as with anything pre-0.8), but I suppose you guys are pretty much clueless on this. Also conveniently forgetting that 0.9 introduced the possibility of disabling the wallet functionality altogether.

    • ben_vulpes says:

      a) Nobody’s claiming any sort of update.

      b) Hardware requirements are entirely orthogonal to decrufting the reference implementation. If you don’t have the resources to run a bitcoin node with a full transaction index, you’ve no business running a node.

      c) If you’re going to derp about useful functionality from releases post 0.5.3, start with this ilst. The only actual important fixes after the release in question are:
      – importprivkey
      – various ddos prevention measures

      d) disabling wallet functionality is, like most post 0.5.3 changes, pure cruft masquerading as some sort of a “feature”.

      Were I pressed to identify other even faintly useful contributions since the release in question, even “regtest” would fail to qualify as it arrived glued in with the glass of ChainParams. Most amusing is the “feature”s utter uselessness, given that nodes can be trivially isolated from the network and set to mining on their own chains.

      But I suppose that you’re utterly clueless about what it means for a piece of software to be a “rigorously tested” “reference implementation”.

    • pankkake says:

      I’ve seen your list, which is exactly why I wrote the “Also conveniently forgetting”. Your list is just that – forgetting stuff, arbitrarily declaring old is better, and using a slow, buggy, less modular piece of crap for no valid technical reason.
      As for testing, does 0.5.3 even have unit tests? Or did you conventiently forget that too?

      It’s like talking to a wall. There’s no use arguing with a cult.

      I just ask that you don’t associate me to it.

    • Neither arguing something stupidly nor arguing for something stupid gives one license to declare the unconvinced-looking mugs all around “a cult”.

      You’re more than welcome to your mistaken political views, but you don’t get to hide that a) they’re mistaken or b) they’re political under the guise of throwing words around. If you’ve learned anything during your lengthy stay in #b-a, it’d best be the sort of honesty where people actually call a spade a spade.

      But anyway, carry on.

    • ben_vulpes says:

      That list is “notable features”. The option to run without a wallet is no feature in my book.

      Regarding unit tests: some, not enough. Many of those that I’ve found in 0.8+ would be more generously termed “integration tests”; of which many are only implementable with unnecessary modularity like “chainparams”. The correct approach to that kind of modularity is configurability, but don’t expect that from the current maintainers of the mainstream client – they’d prefer to code magic network values and other shit like “stop mining after 1 block if in regtest mode” (hardly a regression testing mode) into the actual codebase.

      You misunderstand my goals. My goal with 0.5.3 is not to produce a high quality implementation of the bitcoin protocol from Satoshi’s work (people interested in such should take a dependency on software that’s actually rigorously tested like the Conformal codebase. Comparing the tests for *any* version of the Satoshi codebase with the Conformal implementation is like comparing the tests of a first-year Ruby web developer using Selenium to exercise his hand-cobbled JavaScript to those of Netflix and their Chaos Gorilla), but to distill the reference implementation into something that can fit in a single human’s head and rip out braindamaged code-arson like the moronic “wallets” and their change behavior.

    • Pete D. says:

      @pankkake No maintenance? Au contraire. What’s “easy maintenance” anyways? Nothing worth doing, certainly nothing this important, is easy.

      comes with greater hardware requirements

      Is that so? We shall see.

      @ben_vulpes I might’ve dropped the “update” bomb… Perhaps, “altnernative” would’ve sufficed.

      b) Hardware requirements are entirely orthogonal to decrufting the reference implementation. If you don’t have the resources to run a bitcoin node with a full transaction index, you’ve no business running a node.

      This is a point. Hardware requirements are nowhere near the most significant limitation when running a node. Bandwidth on the other hand…

  2. As with decentralization system design concepts (Bitcoin, WoT, etc), the use of a crowd in decision-making can only be a passive/defensive maneuver.It can provide some robustness and stasis. Decentralization (crowd) forces dissipation, distribution, etc.

    As with centralization, a sole voice in decision-making is a an aggressive/offensive maneuver. It can provide efficiency and change. Centralization (individual) forces concentration, accumulation, etc.

    A representative and leader a are not the same thing.

    “Being a man” is merely existing as individual in whichever context you choose. It’s impossible to “be a man”, to exist, to lead (even if only oneself), when relying on a faceless crowd to speak for you.

    To a leader, a crowd is merely an egg. He is the only thing protecting it, and the most likely thing to eat it.

    • Pete D. says:

      To a leader, a crowd is merely an egg. He is the only thing protecting it, and the most likely thing to eat it.

      The farmer is the turkey’s best friend for their first 1,000 days together. Then comes Thanksgiving…

    • This is fucking stupid, incidentally.

      The vast majority of leaders in the world are parents. Leading their children. Just because a bunch of idiots in the English speaking failed states and their satellites readily abdicate from this fundamental part of life (too busy being consumers or w/e) it doesn’t follow you may now ignore it – the redskins may not know how to use the crude in Texas either, but that doesn’t mean there’s no crude in Texas.

      So, this said, how many parents eat their children, since roughly the days of Kronos ?

  3. […] always prided myself in maintaining an independence well past the point of sociability, pankkake’s is a perspective worth exploring. Have I unwittingly joined my first cult? God knows he’s […]

  4. […] say nothing of the argumentum ad populum fallacy, Ethereum market cap fallacy, and so many other logical fallacies.  […]

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