hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!
If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.
Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […]
Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.
I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body
So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it’s up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated.
…this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn’t it.
for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!
Pre-ESR Jargon File, along with RMS, is more “society should be more like university” than anti-capitalist.
@self I like watching that thread piss on ESR for ruining the jargon file, when in general the oranges tend to *like* whatever garbage ESR says.
exactly! almost everything proposed in the thread is basically ESR but more so too. it feels a lot like they’re shitting on him because it’s popular, while rebroadcasting his philosophy because it’s one of the major influences that led to the formulation of what hacker news thinks a hacker is
(not to imply that shitting on esr because it’s popular makes it at all wrong; fuck esr, and fuck the corporate hacker culture he popularized)
@self We just had a fight in my house over whether RMS is worse than ESR or vice versa. I think we settled on two people who are both overwhelmingly gross, like trying to decide if Jackson or Trump was a worse president. Why not both?
you’re right, there’s nothing anticapitalist at all about esr’s jargon file. I feel like hacker culture as it originally existed pre-esr had strong anticorporate elements (such as open access to systems and knowledge with no profit motive, including via what’d later be known as software hacking and piracy; this shit got whitewashed to fuck by esr and others to make hacker culture more palatable to corporations), though to be honest that’s probably wishful thinking on my part. either way that ideal largely got swept away by the greed surrounding the first AI bubble
I definitely love a good hbomb. gonna put that one on in the background while I reassemble this semi-busted Pinebook
Did the jargon file fail to evolve, or did Raymond just stop maintaining it? It roughly coincides with when the full extent of his brain breakage became apparent (“anti idiotiarian manifesto.”)
Or maybe it represents the end of when the Stallmanites, The corporate types (incl. Raymond) and the Linux Fandom actually saw eye-to-eye.
