I opened the video. Saw that it is edited (It does not show the entire meeting from the beginning to the end unedited. He puts clips of himself in the middle. He does his signature "ask for donations" thing. Etc). Given literally the entirety of his work history, I know it is going to be misleading if not an outright lie. So I spent 1 minute realizing it won't be worth my 30 minutes and closed the tab. And if you are going to argue that this is not enough to refuse to believe the video and I should present more concrete evidence, I will refer you to the bullshit asymmetry principle: twitter.com/ziobrando/status/2896350607…...

This is a slanted screed by a guy who publishes nothing but nuclear-shilling and attacks on renewable technology[1]. I don't know why anyone would read it, except to catalog the cherry-picking, omissions, and outright falsehoods. It is basically an example of the Brandolini Principle.[0] So, to make the ad-hominem explicit, consider the source. [0] twitter.com/ziobrando/status/2896350607…... [1] forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/#…...

I just left a project after I was unable to make peace with being the cleanup guy for an endless, never-improving stream of mediocre code. I am convinced that it's faster to write solid code in the first place. Once there are two or more interacting layers of code, it gets really hard for the refactoring to catch up. If you fix a bug in a basic layer, the leaves of the codebase break. If you fix a bug in the leaves, you never get to refactor the core. If you want to stop the world and refactor everything at once, you get in the way of your quicker counterpart. Or think of a multithreaded codebase without any synchronization. It definitely works well enough for demoing an "almost finished" product, but cleaning it up requires a lot of time and can introduce temporary regressions (deadlocks) that are worse than the bugs that the cleanup is supposed to solve (very spurious data corruption). It's a bit like the bullshit asymmetry: twitter.com/ziobrando/status/2896350607… Ruby on Rails (from the OP) makes it easy to build many kinds of maintenance deathtraps.

This tweet really expresses one fundamental problem of sites like this: twitter.com/ziobrando/status/2896350607… "The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

There are at least two ways to refute Brandolini's Law, both work. The first refutation is in response to a steelman version of the argument. It's simply that that you often can't know whether a claim is or isn't bullshit until someone manages to refute it, or tries to and fails. Thus even if this claim is correct, it doesn't matter. People will just have to spend the energy in order to discover what's true. The second refutation is to observe that Brandolini's Law is itself bullshit. Therefore anyone presenting it as relevant to a debate on free speech is in fact arguing in bad faith, as you put it, whether they know it or not. Where does this "law" come from? Calling it a law makes it sound like it's got some empirical basis in fact, and it's phrased in a mathematical way, but in reality it's literally a snarky tweet made in 2013 by some rando programmer [1]. Not only was it presented with no evidence but when asked "How do you know that" his reply was "Just read #ThinkingFastAndSlow ... then everything will fall in place". But very ironically Thinking Fast and Slow is a book famous for being built on bullshit. Many of the studies within it don't replicate, and the author later admitted that he relied too heavily on underpowered studies for his claims. Even if this book wasn't full of bullshit, nothing in it is about the claim Brandolini made! So we have something that pretends to be some sort of scientific law but isn't, and which is justified via a bullshit irrelevant reference to a book that doesn't make that claim and which is itself full of bullshit studies. It's a fractal of bullshit. Brandolini's Law is a good example of why we need an open and uncensored internet. Far too many people are willing to take claims at face value because they are phrased in ways that sound superficially scientific or authoritative. Our only defense against this is when people are free to refute such claims in public, extensively and robustly, without being moderated into oblivion. Only then will we be able to inch slowly closer to a truth-based and shared reality. [1] twitter.com/ziobrando/status/2896350607…

Bullshit. It's perfectly possible to get warrants to track down the bad guys in a case like this. No surveillance state needed. mobile.twitter.com/ziobrando/status/289…...