Re: General advice beyond Org

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2018-05-23, at 06:04, edgar@openmail.cc wrote:

>> It helps to develop a rational attitude to morality: you do not have
>> influence on everything, not even all the results of your actions, and
>> hence you do not bear responsibility for what you don't influence.  (Of
>> course, that doesn't mean you don't bear any responsibility for what
>> you
>> _do_ influence.)
>
> Do you mean pragmatic or short-sighted by rational? I don't think that
> philosophers are necessarily irrational :) (to name a few).

I mean neither.  By "rational" I mean "guided by reason".

>> For instance, you go to the bakery, buy the bread and pay the baker the
>> money.  He then takes the money and goes to buy a gun to kill his wife.
>> Are you responsible?  I don't think so (at least under normal
>> circumstances).
>
> Ah, but you showed a queen of diamonds to the baker, who was
> conditioned to kill as soon as he saw that! :P LoL. Agree.

;-)

>> (BTW, by "rational attitude to morality" I mean "attitude to morality
>> which takes morality seriously, and at the same time takes seriously
>> the
>> _reality_, i.e., not some nice-looking theory which does not work in
>> practice, nor any way to just say that morality doesn't matter.  IOW,
>> "rational attitude to morality" is just "the Catholic attitude to
>> morality".)
>
> Yes. I think that this is closer to what I wanted to say earlier.
>
>> Again, too simplistic and not true.
>
>> FWIW, I work in a small software house which mostly uses open-source
>> software (which is not the same as free software, but has a big
>> intersection with it).  We use Node.js, Vagrant, Ansible, PostgreSQL...
>> And our boss encourages us to "give back" to the larger community by
>> bug
>> reports, pull requests and open-sourcing small utilities we write.
>
> I think that it's worth a lot! Shut! if half the companies did that...

Yes.

Maybe we tend to forget what a "commercial company" is.  On the one
hand, it is (by definition) a means to make money.  If it doesn't make
money, it does not fulfil its primary purpose, and this means its
broken, and should be either fixed or abandoned.  On the other hand, it
should not be just the instrument of greediness of the owner(s).  They
in turn are people, and their primary purpose is completely different.

If you identify yourself too much with any kind of commercial endeavor,
it is a sign of very serious problems.

>> *Very true*.  We have one person using MacOS.  Every time there's some
>> problem, someone says "It's because it's Apple."  Yes, it's a joke, but
>> it's symptomatic.  We also run a small, jocular version of "editor war"
>> between Emacs (me) and Sublime Text (most of the other developers).
>
> I like these type of running gags myself :) .

:-)

I taught Emacs to a friend, whom I sometimes show cool tricks.  Once
I showed him multiple cursors, which required some choreography from my
fingers, but I thought it was quite impressive.  Then he nodded and
asked "I'm wondering what were you doing with your feet."

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl