Well, that’s boring. You sure there weren’t any juicy details that would cause a lad of delicate sensibilities such as I to face-palm?
Yes. One can’t really call them software engineers until they do understand that, though.
7 Likes
Great summation. I agree 100%. JLW thought that thread was going to be a puppy pile of love. I bet his eyes had cartoon dollar signs as he posted that thread. Just shows how disconnected he is with the community. I’m sure he talked us up how we love technology (left out we care about secure technology) and the VPN company got all excited and then showed up to everyone giving their honest thoughts on the product. That shit show lands squarely on the owl. But when they say toxic I’m sure that is code for blame the community for the owls shitty management.
Yes, same for me. But if you build a community of people on a regular diet of technology and security criticism and then sell cheaply made insecure products what else do you expect that community to do. Not everyone is going to ignore the massive hypocrisy of selling the same junk they bash and then trying to censure all the critics (which they also regularly slam when done by others).
12 Likes
Now explain that to my last managing director, who thought that the newer the graduate the more up to date their ideas.
9 Likes
@jannamark I was saddened to see you leaving the Other Place but I’m glad you’re able to contribute here.
Same goes for all of the other Refugees that have decided that it’s not the place for them anymore – and I know a lot of you have made your way here and for that I’m thankful.
I still post fairly regularly on the Other Place but it’s definitely not the same anymore. So much high quality conversation went away after they decided to shit on the Regulars and the Cheeto Owl is just as cranky as ever. I basically mute every post of his now rather than inadvertantly get dragged into the frustration of interacting with him.
14 Likes
Well, I can give it a shot if you want, but it sounds like it might be a case of slamming the barn door shut after the horse has fled…
4 Likes
[/quote]
Sure, Jeff’s own obtuse gender-biased comments fell flatter than a pancake; but it was an excellent and rare opportunity to pwn him and call him out on his shit, and the commenters did just that:
The one saving grace that Jeff has over jason is that he seems a wee bit less thin-skinned and far less likely to vindictively abuse his permissions by deleting comments he doesn’t like or agree with.
#This, 100%.
Though Mr Peterson makes excellent points about the site being his bread and butter, and that people shouldn’t make a big deal about most of the benign income generating ads and links,
that still doesn’t excuse how he treats the community even when the revenue streams have nothing to do with it.
The St Elsewhere’s Massacre is a perfect example; that kerfuffle had nothing to do with anyone jeopardizing his income and everything to do with jason’s overblown egomania and need to control others.
22 Likes
Yes indeedy. His insecurity and thin skin makes him overreact. His ego leads him to double down rather than apologize. And his perception of us as ungrateful, entitled whiners makes him disinclined to rethink his approach or even to treat the readership with friendliness and dignity. All that combined leads to the toxic, antagonistic relationship that exists there today.
10 Likes
It was actually pissing all over my carefully crafted secure communications and extremely fast to load web pages with a pile of php and Javascript and a load of insecure libraries.
9 Likes
Well, drat! You made me look, at least to read those comments! 
More seriously, Jeff’s misogyny (and his lack of recognition of it) is just a facet of his overall besetting sin, hubris so thick that a knife can’t cut it - you’d need to outfit an angle grinder with a cutting wheel and use that. He is so sure he has or can come up with the answers to all sort of vexing human problems, and the ones he can’t solve aren’t problems at all. He doesn’t really recognise the dude bro in his thinking. I’ll tell you that this made using his SE site an inhuman experience. I’m a good, old-fashioned Canadian boy: I like teaching, I like being helpful, and I like good manners. All of those are beside the point in SE.
Jason seems to think that this will improve his bottom line. I’m not so sure. I wasn’t on the bad side of TPTB; I left the entire site, blog, bbs, ads and all, with nary a word of complaint, and I doubt that I was alone in this. I know that the ratio of lurkers to participants on bbs is/was non-negligible. How many of them left without a word? I don’t know, but I’m also pretty sure that neither does Jason. That should worry him (“Out of little piles are big piles made” applies equally to bad things as to good), but I don’t think he’s really equal to his task.
That’s what I meant about the horse having already fled - too damned late for me to have that little talk with your ex-boss. (“OK, wise guy, listen up, or does I hafta break your legs?”)
19 Likes
There’s an old saying in retail “for every customer that complains, there are 100 more who felt the same way but didn’t say anything, just never bothered to come back.”
Hell, had the Massacre just been a few months earlier, I might not even have joined. How many people have made that same decision? You are right, and he shouldn’t just be worrying, he should be undoing suspensions like mad. But to his mind, hits are hits and as long as no one can prove that they’re the kind of people even worse than what he had (or bots), he doesn’t care.
Which will bite him later on, but Silicon Valley’s greatest flaw is that it’s denizens are horrible at long-term thinking.
19 Likes
Not just Silicon Valley, I’m afraid. Long term thinking went out of fashion in business a few decades ago, and society has been suffering the loss ever since.
12 Likes
17 Likes
Holy fucksocks. Engaging a man instead of a woman is because he doesn’t want to “punch down”. SMFH.
14 Likes
My bad, I’m at work so there’s no time to make decent screenshots of the whole exchange.
##Precisely.
It’s to the point that I relish every opportunity to call him out on his fucked up subconscious mentality, letting him know that his genius at coding does NOT mean that he’s “a genius” when it comes to dealing with other people, and especially not women.
I agree that the conceit of having created the very platform we’re using to communicate impedes his ability to see any flaws within himself, particularly when it comes to personal bias regarding gender and race.
Learned Coward really got in his ass, especially after it was pointed out that Jeff was basically ignoring everyone in that thread except LC, who presents as male.
Then Doop finished him off by pointing out how he does that shit regularly, indicating that Jeff seems far more interested in just hearing himself talk than he actually is teaching or (heaven forbid) learning anything.
19 Likes
but like, that’s not accidental. “The Community” isn’t his construct. It’s ours. That’s most of what I am trying to say here.
It isn’t his community, it just grew on the hull of his boat.
I’m suddently thinking of ST:TNG and the new life form that started taking over the Enterprise, and how unlike JLP is JLW? is he even French?? 
11 Likes
No worries, just teasing a bit. I’m not that rigid about not going back, not when there are primary sources germane to the topic there (especially when it’s a nice, juicy, well-deserved dogpile on Jeff).
Dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Schülern gelernt. (I have learned this book from my students.)
Arnold Schoenberg. You may or may not like his music; he may have been an arrogant prick in many parts of his life, but he was by far and away the best teacher of composers in the last century, with more great composers, none of whose music sounded like his, as students than any other teacher, and it was because he did have this fundamental humility: he was willing to listen to and learn from his students.
“Why try to be a Superman? Why not instead a whole man?”
Schoenberg knew his flaws and wrestled with them his whole life. I think Jeff has convinced himself that he is Superman. He can’t listen as a result (since by definition, no one else has his level of insight), and, because he can’t listen, he can’t learn, and, because he can’t learn, he can’t teach. This is rather scary, because his magnum opus is a site where people go to get answers in their field - it’s nominally an educational site.
Teaching is about getting into the heads of your students to figure out what they want to do, and removing the impediments preventing them from doing it. You can’t impose your way of looking at matters, because they may well surpass you if they follow their unique insights, and you may surpass yourself by learning those insights. Instead, you provide them the tools to learn those insights. I can’t see Jeff ever doing this. “Knowing it all” is a form of arrested development.
[If I use Schoenberg as the linchpin of this discussion, it’s because I too am an autodidact, and, warts and all (both mine and his), I learned a lot from his example, both technically and. umm… attitudinally (and my music doesn’t sound the least like his either ).]
Edit: The second quote should be “Why try to be a demigod? Why not instead a whole man?” I was working from memory, and unfortunately my memory is old. 
15 Likes
Yes and no. He does want a community of people that read BB religiously and occasionally buy stuff or follow affiliate links. What he doesn’t want is the body of thoughts that come with building such a community. He wants to be wildly popular and yet have no critics? And I guess he wants regular readers but wants them to not care about BB? Because a large part of caring about friends, family and communities is sounding the alarm when you see a problem. That he can’t see that is too bad.
It’s not that different from some bands, authors and directors (content creators in general) that build a large fan base and then at some point they and the fan base have a falling out.
17 Likes
Bad analogy.
It’s not jason’s boat, technically speaking.
The boat was commissioned by Mark & co, designed/built by Jeff, and jason is just the captain that they all hired; probably not knowing that he was an ‘Ahab.’
20 Likes
We’re mostly in agreement, though ‘the community’ is an outgrowth of the Discourse era, and that’s all Jeff has been around for (I mean, maybe he commented before, but I never heard of him before Discourse ). It really wasn’t coherent before Discourse arrived. I think the PTB preferred that, whomever they are.
At the end of the day, I like it here better. And beginning of the day too.
10 Likes
Has jason always been the publisher, even back when BB was a 'zine?
If so, then he’s still just the dude they hired to guide the boat.
10 Likes