In Philosophy obscurantism is defined as the practice of "deliberately presenting information in an abstruse and imprecise manner that limits further inquiry and understanding of a subject". Apparently many philosophers and authors have found a good use of obscurantism. Karl Popper has criticized Hegel of using it when he talked about sound (Popper 2013). And John Searle says that Foucault used to do it to make sure he will be sound to the French intellectuals.

Today, I read this post Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity, which talks about an attitude similar to Foucault's with the French intellectuals, that is, designing complex over simpler one, so mangers can say that your intellect has merit to it, since simple design, although sometimes so difficult to achieve, might be perceived naively. Generally, I'm interested and curious about the sociology of knowledge, that's how I call it because I'm unaware of a good term, but I define it as the field that ask questions like, was a subject of knowledge affected by utilities? Like a novelist making their novel different to serve commercial purpose, or a moviemaker changing the story because they can not afford an actress to cooperate, or in this case, an engineer creating complexity out of no-where to ensure credibility.

Looks like obscurantism seems to be a social strategy in any place where recognition depends on appearing profound. The simple solution looks trivial, while the convoluted one looks intelligent. In such environments, complexity becomes a signal rather than a necessity, and obscurity a currency of prestige. Maybe then we should really question our measures of what counts to be profound. #Philosophy

From Who Writes the Bugs? A Deeper Look at 125,000 Kernel Vulnerabilities;

• Commits made on weekends are 8% less likely to introduce vulnerabilities, but those vulnerabilities take 45% longer to fix.
• Saturday commits have the highest vulnerability rate (9.55%), while Sunday commits have the lowest (6.99%).
• The Linux kernel is primarily developed by individuals (50.1% of commits), with Intel being the largest corporate contributor (8.4%).

#Programming

There are two aspects to this. The desire to learn and the utility of learning. These are two very different things. Arguably the best programmers I have known have been explorers and hopped around a lot. Their primary skills have been flexibility and curiosity. The point here was their curiosity, not what they were curious about. Curiosity enabled them to attack new problems quickly and find solutions when others couldn't. Very often those solutions had nothing to do with skip lists or bubble sort. Studying algorithms is useful for general problem solving and hey, as a bonus, it helps sometimes when you are solving a real world problem, but staying curious is what really matters.

We have seen so many massive changes to software engineering in the last 30 years that it is hard to argue the clear utility of any specific topic or tool. When I first started it really mattered that you understood bubble sort vs quicksort because you probably had to code it. Now very few people think twice about how sort happens in python or how hashing mechanism are implemented. It does, on occasion, help to know that but not like it used to.

So that brings it back to what I think is a fundamental question: If CS topics are less interesting now, are you shifting that curiosity to something else? If so then I wouldn't worry too much. If not then that is something to be concerned about. So you don't care about red black trees anymore but you are getting into auto-generating Zork like games with an LLM in your free time. You are probably on a good path if that is the case. If not, then find a new curiosity outlet and don't beat yourself up about not studying the limits of a single stack automata.

by jmward01. Although I disagree a bit, I believe that cs fundamentals are very essentials to programming and can be never replaced, we had software libraries and STDs out there much before having agentic models, but I like the emphasize on curiosity #Modus Vivendi

• [2026-03-16 Mon 15:15]
  Same did Hal Finney, who was also in the group.

TIL that, not only K. Eric Drexler was a part of the Extropians mailing list, he also "arranged to be cryonically preserved in the event of legal death". My man is really not into death.

From YOU JUST REVEIVED:

Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.

In fact I feel a bit revived knowing that the Vodafone's bs is not something that goes on in my country. #Egypt