I'm not making the distinction because I was talking purely about the desire to be able to understand everything, not the desire to actually do so at all. So your attempt to split hairs is purely irrelevant to my point.
Even the desire to be able to is one I find absurd, and as I said fundamentally based on an irrational fear of the unknown — specifically the fear of having to rely on something that you may not be able to perfectly understand or control — and a prideful desire to not only control everything but not have to rely on the expertise of others. Moreover it is a mindset that is simply not practical in any other field of life, in modern society, and while it may once have been possible in the software industry, I don't think holding back software from the many benefits more complex and complete software can bring making it easier to use, handle more edge cases, solve problems more completely and from first principles, have more useful features, integrate better with other things, and so on just to preserve that state, th)at sort of atavistic design philosophy, is sensible either. It seems like a monomial pursuit of the optimization of one variable, namely a certain specific sense of reliability where edge cases and the fragility of the integrations between things and the lack of accounting for various use cases necessitating piling on more ad hoc tools, are not counted, at the expense of many other things.
> Arguing for choosing complexity that removes that option because otherwise we're irrationally afraid of the unknown is really one heck of a take.
It doesn't seem like a particularly crazy take to me at all. Perhaps in the software industry it is, because there has been such a cargo cult like obsession with the Unix Philosophy for a very long time, but I've always been a crank and have no desire to apologize for that, and it's a trade-off we make every day in other areas: choosing something that even if we wanted to we probably couldn't fully understand all of the intricacies of because it serves our needs better on a practical level is something every person in modern society does every day with a vast panoply of things, including software, because the division of labor and specialization and so on is actually a very important part of what makes the modern world with all of its advanced technology and convenience and so on possible.
> I can't understand every intricacy of my systems, but I know several NetBSD developers who have intimate understandings of literally every aspect of their computers.
I'm not so sure that's true, except on an abstract architectural level probably, in which case the second part of my argument above would come into play.
> Because this is possible, and because people with this level of understanding exist, I trust what comes from the NetBSD project more than I trust anything from any of the Linux distros.
> fundamentally based on an irrational fear of the unknown — specifically the fear of having to rely on something that you may not be able to perfectly understand or control — and a prideful desire to not only control everything but not have to rely on the expertise of others.
That's you. Please don't project your inabilities on everyone else.
> I'm not so sure that's true.
Interesting that you think it's OK to simply assert something based on absolutely no actual data, information or experience, in direct contradiction to what others personally know and experience. What a take!
You're making an argument that looks like this: things happen, and we're OK with them. Therefore, we should be OK with the same things happening with other aspects of life. Simply, no. I can accept that I know very little about how municipal water systems prevent contamination, growth of microbes, et cetera, but how ridiculous is it to suggest that because I simply accept that it's done reasonably well, I have to do that in other areas, too? Do I need to accept being as ignorant about the intricacies of something as everyone else, even when I'm an expert in that particular field? That's absolutely ridiculous.
> simply not practical in any other field of life
Bullshit. I can think of many, many examples where this is plainly not true. See my previous statement.
The fact that you think this complexity that defies understanding is required to handle problems that can't be handled more simply shows you have a shallow understanding of things. I genuinely don't know if you can't understand this, or simply choose not to, but I'll say that you giving up does not have any impact whatsoever on those of us who haven't. Needless to say, arguing for others to give up wanting to understand something that you seem to lack understanding of is, in basic terms, gatekeeping. You're no different from people who say to not self-host email because they can't self-host email (or for whom it's too much "work", or takes too much energy). Likewise, if you don't want to do something, that's really not an argument for telling other people to not want to do something. What kind of person does that?
I'm not making the distinction because I was talking purely about the desire to be able to understand everything, not the desire to actually do so at all. So your attempt to split hairs is purely irrelevant to my point.
Even the desire to be able to is one I find absurd, and as I said fundamentally based on an irrational fear of the unknown — specifically the fear of having to rely on something that you may not be able to perfectly understand or control — and a prideful desire to not only control everything but not have to rely on the expertise of others. Moreover it is a mindset that is simply not practical in any other field of life, in modern society, and while it may once have been possible in the software industry, I don't think holding back software from the many benefits more complex and complete software can bring making it easier to use, handle more edge cases, solve problems more completely and from first principles, have more useful features, integrate better with other things, and so on just to preserve that state, th)at sort of atavistic design philosophy, is sensible either. It seems like a monomial pursuit of the optimization of one variable, namely a certain specific sense of reliability where edge cases and the fragility of the integrations between things and the lack of accounting for various use cases necessitating piling on more ad hoc tools, are not counted, at the expense of many other things.
> Arguing for choosing complexity that removes that option because otherwise we're irrationally afraid of the unknown is really one heck of a take.
It doesn't seem like a particularly crazy take to me at all. Perhaps in the software industry it is, because there has been such a cargo cult like obsession with the Unix Philosophy for a very long time, but I've always been a crank and have no desire to apologize for that, and it's a trade-off we make every day in other areas: choosing something that even if we wanted to we probably couldn't fully understand all of the intricacies of because it serves our needs better on a practical level is something every person in modern society does every day with a vast panoply of things, including software, because the division of labor and specialization and so on is actually a very important part of what makes the modern world with all of its advanced technology and convenience and so on possible.
> I can't understand every intricacy of my systems, but I know several NetBSD developers who have intimate understandings of literally every aspect of their computers.
I'm not so sure that's true, except on an abstract architectural level probably, in which case the second part of my argument above would come into play.
> Because this is possible, and because people with this level of understanding exist, I trust what comes from the NetBSD project more than I trust anything from any of the Linux distros.
Trust about what? That's kind of my question.