Measuring developer productivity should, in my opinion, have one dimension for speed, one for quality, and one for user impact. LOC can be fine as a measurement for speed, you just don’t want to look at it in isolation. You would want to also measure, for example, escape rate and usage for the features the developer worked on, and be willing to change or refine these if circumstances require it.

You also need to look for different profiles based on the developer’s level of seniority. A senior dev probably shouldn’t be writing as much code as a contributor, but their user impact should be high, and escape rate low. Analyzing differences between teams is important, as well. A team that has a lot of escapes or little user impact probably has issues that need management attention, and may not have anything at all to do with individual developer productivity or ability.

In brief, the numbers are there to help you make better management decisions, not to relieve you of having to make them.

While it’s mostly a laugh (a shock?) to read Guénon and Marcuse side by side, I think Vico is really misunderstood and under-appreciated in our present cultural moment and I think a lot of good could come from a revival of his thought. He’s influenced a diverse array of characters, from Marx to Rosmini-Serbati, and I see a lot of his thought in Horkheimer and Habermas (I.e., the side of the Frankfurt school that rediscovered the big questions in a non-reactionary, non-nostalgic way).

There was no liberal freedom or value of toleration as we understand it prior to the resolution of the wars of religion. There was, however, a variegated patchwork of ad hoc arrangements based on custom, convenience, common interest, charity, forbearance (notably NOT liberal freedom or toleration) that allowed people with different religious beliefs, practices, and levels of commitment to live together in relative peace over long periods of time.

He also gives material evidence of how the reformation, counter-reformation, wars of religion, and the emergent nation state systematically destroyed these intricate arrangements.

[0]https://books.google.com/books?id=wGJjSvehY5MC

That said, I stand by every word of my argument.

I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).

When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.

As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.

(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.

(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves. The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.

(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.

To paraphrase Einstein, the challenge of our age is the greatest proliferation of means paired with the greatest confusion of ends.

As for jazz, I love and play jazz music. I don’t disagree that there are excellent and innovative jazz musicians, and I think the acceptance by jazz musicians of rap music is a positive, if overdue development. That said, I read your words, and I see described exactly what I meant: a genre with a peripheral cultural presence, that means nothing in the lives of anyone outside of a small, dedicated fan base. Certainly nothing approaching it’s time as a cultural protagonist, which remains indisputably in the past (but may it rise again).

Mid-career, Duke Ellington chafed under the racist and unadventurous expectations of his audiences, and charted a new musical path, making music that was primarily aimed at pleasing other musicians. Many of these compositions are now jazz standards.

In modern classical music, 20th Century figures like Boulez, and even earlier composers like Wagner thought their audiences were hopelessly sentimental and complacent, and worked intentionally to disturb them. A great many of the household names in modern classical music meet this description, and they certainly set the direction of classical music to follow.

Now to my point: I think some of these artists made good, enduring art. But if we look at the media in which they worked — Jazz and Classical music — these forms are, I regret to say, completely culturally irrelevant. They’re dead media; the only interaction that classical music has with the culture at large is through movies and video games, and jazz is publicly perceived as a novelty genre at this point. It’s hard not to see some truth in the above post’s sense that the net result of these artists’ influence was a kind of wish granted by the monkey’s paw. They set out to destroy the idols of their day and succeeded, and the long run outcome was essentially suicidal.

I wonder if we need to re-examine the trope of the iconoclast, in hopes of finding new artistic pathways that are capable of expressing new ideas and asking new questions without destroying the traditions that give rise to them.

There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just doesn’t seem to me to beget a workable understanding of reality.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that I like reading HN, and I’d like it if this place didn’t descend into the kind of friend-enemy thinking so prevalent on much of the internet.