←back to thread

“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 2 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.541s | source
Show context
VikingCoder ◴[12 Jul 18 16:40 UTC] No.17516310[source]▶
I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos.

For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it.

Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it.

Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it.

And on and on...

I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws encoded in Github, and Github itself enforces the governmental system of checks and balances. Congress. Senate. President. Veto. Overriding a Veto. Laws of succession. Elections. On and on.

replies(5): >>17516391 #>>17516404 #>>17516453 #>>17516506 #>>17516988 #
_wmd ◴[12 Jul 18 16:49 UTC] No.17516404[source]▶
Technology cannot solve social problems
replies(3): >>17516645 #>>17516711 #>>17517490 #
jpfed ◴[12 Jul 18 17:20 UTC] No.17516711[source]▶
Wasn't it nice that you could reply to this comment over the web rather than physically going to the commenter and telling them what you thought? Boy, this technology sure gave a helpful assist to the social problem of communication.
replies(2): >>17516890 #>>17517057 #
1. sincerely ◴[12 Jul 18 17:58 UTC] No.17517057[source]▶
That's not a social problem being solved, that's a technoogical problem. a social problem of communication would have much more to do with the behaviour of people communicating, and one could argue that the internet has made this worse
replies(1): >>17517336 #
2. jpfed ◴[12 Jul 18 18:32 UTC] No.17517336[source]▶
The underlying point is that technology facilitates changing the state of social problems (whether those changes count as solutions obviously depends on one's subjective viewpoint on what those problems are).

Now, it may be that you mean that the changes induced by technological solutions never actually affect some imperturbable "core problem" that is what people mean when they talk about "social problems". That would be a counterintuitive use of language but there'd be no sense in me attempting to persuade people to use language differently. Instead, what would be productive would be to identify what core, unchanged problem really does remain.