… putting the “odious” back in theodicy?
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I recommend to follow Jon Worth over on Mastodon (@jon@gruene.social) also for his takes on the British politics omnishambles and european train travel. See also https://jonworth.eu/
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notable only for this bit
After laying off roughly half of Twitter’s entire staff following his takeover, Elon Musk tweeted that he had “no choice” but to make the cuts since the company is losing more than $4 million a day
Otherwise,
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Ohhh, burn…
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And everyone that writes tight code, or solves a problem by removing something rather than adding to the codebase that must be maintained. He’s just a typical bad boss that doesn’t understand the work
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That was my immediate reaction as well, and I’m a Boomer whose only programming course was Pascal in the early 1980’s (when there were only mainframes taking up entire basements of government and university buildings).
I don’t know any of the languages being used these days, and even I know he’s just admitted to being utterly stupid about programming as a whole.
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I remember getting an assignment in a C programming class and the source code (ETA: as I wrote it, based on how I’d figured it out) went on for a page (printed, in 1994) or two. The next class, the instructor showed us 2 lines of code, 1 of which called a library.
I’ve gone on before how I don’t even write code (but for the occasional batch/script file) but every so often someone will ask how many lines there are. It tells me that person doesn’t know how my system works, which is fine, but they’re also not in charge of entire companies where the employees do write code.
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https://twitter.com/MattOben/status/1588617845424148480?s=20&t=YP1IhphcHRHX20jfkbNnrQ
I remember a story about this, from the early days of Apple
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.
He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw’s region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.
He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied
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That is the most logical and coherent reason for actually leaving that I have read in a while. Still not deleting, not until it will be more of a pain under GDPR, but I have activated TFA on the account.
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and after all it was blaise pascal who said:
“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte”… “I only made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter”
though it’s often misattributed to twain:
( apparently twain never said any such thing. but i’m sure he meant to. just never had the time )
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Several other historical figures did apparently write variations on Pascal’s sentiment though, including Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson.
It fittingly took a couple centuries before people got the sentiment down to the briefer versions we are most familiar with today. (Brevity=witsoul)
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Just about everything attributed to Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein or most other famous thinkers are misattributions. The internet is a hot mess with this stuff.
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Anyone who has written abstracts for highly competitive scientific conferences can relate to this sentiment. With 250 words to convey a year or more of research, you agonize over every character.
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Grant applications, too. Strict limits on formatting and page count. Fun times (for very small values of “fun”). 
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As Gandhi once said:
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Isn’t this how capitalism works? voting with your wallet, the dead hand of the free market, etc…
Of all people, Mr Musk should be very grateful of this demonstration of libertarianism in action
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Not exactly the same but I share the pain. As a technical interface person to project management, I often find myself in the position to condense in two lines some extremely niche and hard to understand technical point that makes little sense to outsiders, but has measurable and critical impact on time and costs.
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