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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from On the nature of Hacking
  • " The Right Thing " –
    • what a good meme – it encodes something that is invisible yet palpable to those with the right mindset. An aspiration. There must be something analogous in other fields, some platonic aim.
    • If there is a spiritual component to hacking it is probably to be found there.
from Worse Is Better

The Right Thing

30 Oct 2021 - 15 Jan 2026
Open in Logseq
    • This is a bit of hacker jargon, which like most of the languages and concepts of the computational world, encodes a deep philosophical position in a non-serious manner.
    • The implications are that there is some Platonic ideal out there, and our technical decisions should be evaluated in terms of how close they approximate this ideal.
    • But there's also a performative, social aspect to this term. It implies or creates a certain brotherhood, those who are adept enough to know what the Right Thing is like, those qualified to speak in its name. The speaker not only implies a bond, it creates it.
    • A certain spiritual quality to it, an acknowledgement of seeking something. Not
    • The real pull of Lisp languages is related to this.