Factorio Thread

The irony of course is that the Velvet Revolution that happened in Prague was a completely revolutionary protest and the sort of thing that would surely inspire the 'Occupy X' generation growing up but instead they ignore this because Communism wasn't that bad apparently. Pretty telling when the Chinese tried their own Velvet Revolution, the tanks turned them into pink paste.
The Velvet Revolution succeeded because the Soviet Union backed it. Despotic strongmen don't just give up their power because the commoners are mad, they do it because the even stronger men are leaning on them. It's not something that should really inspire anyone except deepstate kingmakers.
 
Easy there. They get free speech on things their government doesn't care about. But talk shit about the wrong things in a lot of those places and they risk losing more than "just" their jobs. Probably not so much in good ol' Czechia, but they're more the exception rather than the rule.
Post-communist countries (Czech Republic included) tend to prohibit promoting communism and sometimes also nazism/fascism/totalitarianism in general. Specifics vary by country but usually that's it (unless your concept of free speech is particularly broad, in which case you might be shocked for example by the fact that public indecency laws are often stricter than in the west due to cultural differences). Russia and it's satellite states are an exception however, basically no free speech there.
 
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Here is Uncle Bob's article.
Melissa McEwen said:

Tech Bullshit Explained: Uncle Bob​

If you've seen tweets about "Uncle Bob" and wondered who the hell that is​

An attempt to explain Uncle Bob to a lucky person who has never heard of Uncle Bob. I would never subject a real normal person to any of this.

"Wait why is he an uncle? Isn't that kind of creepy?"

Neither uncle, nor Bob, Uncle Bob's real name is Robert C. Martin. Why do people call him uncle? I do not know. It's his brand or something. It's creepy. And I've always hated it. It reminds me of Bob in Twin Peaks. Or Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons. The trope of the creepy uncle.

Either way it's his BRAND. He has a company called Uncle Bob Consulting. And Uncle Bob of course has a blog. Uncle Bob's Blog.

"So why is everyone talking about this Uncle Bob?"

Well it all goes back to the Agile Manifesto…

"The what?"

Oh gosh, I'm sorry I brought this up. I'm sorry to say I must now tell you about the world of software development methodologies. This deserves it's own article. But in short back in the nascent days of software, organizations weren't sure how to manage software projects. So people invented a whole bunch of weird pyramid scams for selling books, tools, and training. Oops I mean new "software development methodologies." Like one called Extreme Programming. I'm not joking.

There were so many of these cults that in 2001 seventeen white dudes decided to meet up at a ski resort to distill them into one big cult. They called it The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Uncle Bob was one of these white dudes.

The original is worth reading. It's short, just 12 principles. This Manifesto launched a whole industry. For a couple of hundred bucks you can become a Certified Agile Coach. And then train other people in Agile.

"OK so he's some kind of Agile leader?"

Uh he was also part of another movement. It also had a Manifesto. The Software Craftsmanship Manifesto in 2009.

"The what??"

Do they have all these manifestos in other industries? God I hope not. I once tried to tell this story in a serious manner. It's not easy. There is so much jargon it makes my head hurt.

They had to make Software Craftsmanship because Agile became too much about project management and not about code. This made software devs sad because they hate it when things aren’t about them. Uncle Bob and others thought too much code sucked. And people weren't paying enough attention to writing code that didn't suck. They decided the solution was to LARP as medieval craftspeople. And pretend they were making beautiful woodcarvings instead of pop up windows on websites.

That same year Uncle Bob also wrote a book called Clean Code, about how not to write code that sucked.

"What code? How can code be clean?"

Code quality is a nebulous thing, but a big fear of software developers is that they might write "bad code." Uncle Bob wrote Clean Code to cleanse them of their coding sins.

Clean Code's promises are seductive and prey on software developer insecurities. It also claims to be applicable to anything a programmer does. So people think they can read Clean Code and then pick up any one of the five bazillion frameworks. Over the years some people have pointed out that the code isn't even all that good.

I don't know, because I don't bother with books that aren't about specific frameworks. Every single framework has different standards for "good" code. That's not the point here, the point is Uncle Bob is famous and Clean Code is very popular.

Which is a problem because now he's really into being racist and sexist on Twitter.

"Wait what?"

Sooooo Uncle Bob has a long and troubling history of sexist remarks at conferences and in blog posts. He got especially really mad when people pointed out the "craftsmanship" name wasn't particularly inclusive. That led to a huge schism in the Software Craftsmanship. With most organizations devoted to it renaming and dissociating from Bob Martin. The annual Software Craftsmanship conference ended in 2018, its adherents unwilling to agree on how to move forward. Oh sorry this is probably extremely boring.

So back to the bad tweets. There are lots of them. Most recently Uncle Bob decided to tweet this about the police:

The police are not the problem. The police were never the problem. Defunding the police is a terrible policy that will put hundreds, if not thousands, of lives at risk.

Let's think about the context here. The US is in the midst of widespread protests against police killings of Black people. Uncle Bob has devoted 0 posts to supporting protests or even middling reform efforts. In this context, this Tweet is pretty damn racist.

In between tweets about software and Agile, Uncle Bob rants about "cancel culture" and quotes Trump.

"Oh YIKES. Has he been ‘cancelled’?"

No, not really. Uncle Bob is still really popular. In fact some tech people love him even more for it, because well… tech has issues. Uncle Bob’s increasingly obtuse followers rush to his defense. According to them since Uncle Bob never tweeted verbatim "I'm a racist", so he's not one. They don't have a strong grasp of things like context.

For a "cancelled" man he's doing pretty well. The has 150k followers, two businesses, and his most popular book Clean is #3 in Software Design & Engineering on Amazon. So then you gotta explain Uncle Bob to like every dude new to coding who thinks he's discovered the path to being a "software craftsman."

"Oh god why"

Yep, well that's the story of Uncle Bob. Hopefully helps you understand that when I dunk on Uncle Bob on Twitter, it's not about my family. And also a little bit about the total trash fire that is tech culture.

DISCLAIMER: This is a humorous newsletter please note there are many nice people in Agile and Code Crafting who make the world of work more bearable. But as someone who has had to endure many bad Agile "sprints" and Jira setups I reserve the right to drag it.
Melissa writes like a total dumbass and I thank God her idiotic article is mercifully short.

So the gist of it is that Uncle Bob supports cops & is therefore racist and got annoyed when people said the word "craftsman" wasn't inclusive. So Uncle Bob is a bigot because he uses a word with the three letters that spell "man" in it.

This is so fucking stupid.
 
Post-communist countries (Czech Republic included) tends to prohibit promoting communism and sometimes also nazism/fascism/totalitarianism in general.
What? No they don't. Most of them have fullblown communist parties running for office every election. The Czech communist party has like fifteen seats in their lower house right now and is part of the ruling coalition.
 
The Velvet Revolution succeeded because the Soviet Union backed it. Despotic strongmen don't just give up their power because the commoners are mad, they do it because the even stronger men are leaning on them. It's not something that should really inspire anyone except deepstate kingmakers.
the ussr didn't back the revolution lol, rather the ussr itself was so preoccupied with internal decline and disintegration that it wasn't able to keep propping up the puppet regimes in its satelite states, resulting in their collapse and fall from power
 
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the ussr didn't back the revolution lol, rather the ussr itself was so preoccupied with internal decline and disintegration that it wasn't able to keep propping up the puppet regimes in its satelite states, resulting in their collapse and fall from power
Credible KGB defectors have admitted that the USSR absolutely backed the revolution as a way of pressuring out the hardline communist government and replacing them with a reformist government more in line with Gorbachev's policies. Whether it backfired on them and slipped out of their control when the non-communist government was appointed, or whether they'd already given up on the plan and abandoned Czechoslovakia by the time that happened is anyone's guess, at least until the Russian government decides to declassify all that shit.
 
It's sad that post-Communist countries, despite not having explicit freedom of speech, are the only countries that seem to have any. You should probably consider getting protected free speech while you've still got the chance.
Sadly, the urbanites are really eager to import hate speech faggotry instead of any sort of free speech. After I saw couple years ago some whore college student parasiting in Prague whine about nigger-word, I started to exclusively use it in public when in Prague centre, but so far their tough words never led to even verbal confrontation. But that cancer is inevitably spreading.
 
Sadly, the urbanites are really eager to import hate speech faggotry instead of any sort of free speech. After I saw couple years ago some whore college student parasiting in Prague whine about nigger-word, I started to exclusively use it in public when in Prague centre, but so far their tough words never led to even verbal confrontation. But that cancer is inevitably spreading.
In the end the United States, for all its faults, will be the only true bastion of free speech simply because it's at the root of all our legal bulwark, meanwhile the rest of the world can always backslide into tyranny because none of them have an equivalent. It should be noted that corporations are the only vector that could be used to fuck with you in that manner, but that's tied to other concepts like the written word as a product.
 
Buying video games to spite people who you politically disagree with / to support someone you politically agree with, rather than the actual video game, will be forever more autistic than whatever meltdown do on either side
Thankfully, Factorio is actually a good game. Even my wife, who's far lower on the autistic spectrum than me, enjoyed playing it even if she never got to the end of the game before losing interest.
 
What a sad man.
He's ugly as fuck. Like shockingly ugly. Like, fetal ugly syndrome ugly. No surprise he turned to furrydom, ACAB, tr00n degeneracy and putting down intelligent and accomplished Czech developers on twitter. This guy, with his weird beady far-apart eyes, greasy hair, rejected vegetable shaped facial proportions, thin and balding abnormally separated eyebrows, tiny mouth, jaundiced skin tone, prepubescent werewolf facial hair, and ridiculous soy voice isn't getting a fulfilling relationship ever in his life. His mother probably cried when he was born.

And lol at him acting like him not applying for a job at Wube Software was a loss for them. Imagine working with this creature. It would bring down the morale of the entire studio.
 
This is a weakness of the political right. They have no way to get stuff like the Factorio cancellation attempt into normal public discourse.
If they could, do you see them benefiting more from getting normal people to realize how much of this shit is going on for dumb reasons and thus get more afraid of the left, or from showing that these people aren't as powerful as they like to act?

TL;DR radicalize the normies or fight back against overton window shifting?
 
To my understanding, the purpose isn't about going after products, but after creators. To remove them from the product as much as possible and remove credit, merit and generally devalue their work. Prime example Notch and now recently, to a lesser extent, Scott Cawthon.

I know it's epic to "just don't give in to pressure 4Head", but threats to your pregnant wife mess with any man. Harassment works. Hope based Czech man doesn't bend, but yeah
He's already kinda bending, but he'll learn soon enough.
 
I've really given up on the conversation, they can always fall back on "It wasn't communism because communism implies no state", the thing is, the only way you can be a "stateless country" is if you don't have sovereignty.

Example, Catalonia, Hong kong, etc.
Its a strange thing. They have the theory and the practice, and swap between the two at convenience to obscure things.

Critical Race Theory? In Academia it means something entirely different from progressive stack, white rage, and Talcolm X reparations. They point at its use as an academic tool and ignore what school boards are actually doing.

Communism? They talk about the theories. From Marx's materialistic critiques of capital to all the breadtube inspiring anarchist books. In practice? They vote for the government big reformist party, and distance themselves from every "successful" Marxist-Leninist revolution by calling them attempts... all the while still praising the great "failed attempts" like the Soviets, Chinese and Vietnamese on various policies. Even a self-identified anarchist will often defend a Marxist-Leninist regime despite those regimes arguably being worse than capitalism from their self-proclaimed ideology.

If they could, do you see them benefiting more from getting normal people to realize how much of this shit is going on for dumb reasons and thus get more afraid of the left, or from showing that these people aren't as powerful as they like to act?

TL;DR radicalize the normies or fight back against overton window shifting?
This isn't about now. Its about the long game. Look at Gamergate. There are plenty of great youtube videos explaining it. Can you cite them in a serious academic work? No? History will be written with all of the shitty articles you see.
 
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