Secret Society Ideology/Principles

There is somewhat lively debate about what founding principles should be included in the /prog/ secret society. We need a list of aims on which we can agree, and a list of problems to solve. Here is something to start, neither written in stone nor comprehensive:

Basic goals:
Freedom to conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells, to explore the universe, etc. etc.
Survival of the Society
Arcane power

We need a means for resolving disagreements. I suggested we ignore them insofar as it is possible to do so. E.g. "what is the UNIX philosophy and is it good?" is an entertaining question for debate, and an answer is probably necessary in the long term, but it does not contribute concretely to the goal of writing software. So membership should not require that an individual answer one way or the other on such questions.

Balancing freedom with economic sustainability
We want to give our software away, but we also want to be able to afford to write more software and engage in other activities. This is a structural conflict.
Best known solution: release software for free to the public, but at cost to governments and profit-making entities.

We need a name. We also need a motto. "We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells" has been suggested, and I support it.

Other?

Oh, also anonymity is important. Is it preferable to be able to identify one another (not necessarily correlated with the real world, but across individual communications), or to remain completely anonymous? Anonymity makes it much less likely that cliques will form, but also makes it impossible to know someone's abilities reliably.

>>2
All members should operate under the three person hypothesis. Me, you and THE SUSSMAN.

>>2
How about pseudonymity? Also one can use different identities for different projects and so on. The one thing I can think of that we'll actually need persistent pseudonyms for is for code auditing and signing (since that requires trust, and trust is built over time).

Best known solution: release software for free to the public, but at cost to governments and profit-making entities.

We need to talk to a nice and friendly lawyer and construct an actual license that does this. Maybe Michael Geist might be interested in helping out. It might annoy companies that they'll have to make 1000 small payments to 1000 different programmers every time they buy a software/OS distribution, though. It might also annoy programmers to keep accepting small payments and sending out receipts. One of us could create an intermediary company that manages that and takes care of splitting and merging payments to individual programmers.

Nenn es dann, wie du willst,
Nenn’s Glück! Herz! Liebe! Gott!
Ich habe keinen Namen
Dafür! Gefühl ist alles;
Name ist Schall und Rauch,
[b]Umnebelnd Himmelsglut.[/b]

Or: "Names are but noise and smoke, Obscuring heavenly light". From Goethe's Faust.

Pseudo-anonymity by using single-conversation DSA or well, why not, tripcodes, may be useful sometimes though...
but namefags do not belong to our secret society!

Admin: when are you gonna improve your parser?

>>5
"Name ist," not "Namen sind." Name is noise and smoke, and if I know my German writers, it means not merely the name to which he directly refers, but more deeply that the fame - the good name - for which Faust traded his soul was worthless. That is itself a valid point, and I therefore believe that we as an organization should not seek attention from the outside world.

At any rate, anonymity will not be possible for all of us for practical reasons, and is not desirable for all of us. I don't care much whether my name is known, to be honest. I think the best thing to do here is to use the conflict-resolution mechanism I mentioned earlier: those who wish to remain anonymous may do so, and those who don't care can be named when it is practical to do so.

This leads to a point raised by >>4. An intermediary company, or, I hope, a non-profit, is exactly what we should be doing. A side effect of this is that those of us who wish to remain anonymous but still receive payment will hilariously have to trust those of us whose names are revealed to be fair and honest with them.

And regarding payment: I am reluctant to discuss money, because it is a long way down the road and extremely hypothetical, but I suppose it best that we get it out of the way, as it's a dangerous thing to ignore. A thought I had was that individuals would be entirely responsible for allocating their share of money - on salary for themselves, on computer hardware, on office space or on machinery or anything else that seems appropriate or desirable to them; in this way the acquisition of wealth would be in direct opposition to the acquisition of power within our organization, which I find pleasant. (All this leads to agony for the poor soul tasked with distribution of funds to many people, and it would be fair to hire some hapless bean-counter for the purpose of doing the drudge-work.)

How one's share is determined will be a trickier issue. A simple hourly rate is not fair to the more skilled programmers, but skill is subjective. This is a problem to which I have not found an easy solution.

Re: licensing in >>4: I hope there are licenses already freely available; we'll have to see. Your suggestion of talking to Michael Geist is probably a good one.

>>7
We don't need to depend on a specific company.

a non-profit, is exactly what we should be doing.

Can this actually be a non-profit?

For the purpose of the following discussion let's suppose that in some country the company or non-profit is called Trent.

A side effect of this is that those of us who wish to remain anonymous but still receive payment will hilariously have to trust those of us whose names are revealed to be fair and honest with them.

Not necessarily; a pseudonymous author Bob is represented by their public key, and only he can sign receipts for purchases of commercial licenses of their software. Suppose Alice bought a license of the software. Then she can easily check that the license is cryptographically signed by Bob, and thus genuine. The only way Trent can screw over Bob is by requesting a bunch of signed licenses and not paying up (which could quickly turn into a civil lawsuit).

A thought I had was that individuals would be entirely responsible for allocating their share of money - on salary for themselves, on computer hardware, on office space or on machinery or anything else that seems appropriate or desirable to them; in this way the acquisition of wealth would be in direct opposition to the acquisition of power within our organization, which I find pleasant. (All this leads to agony for the poor soul tasked with distribution of funds to many people, and it would be fair to hire some hapless bean-counter for the purpose of doing the drudge-work.)

I'm not certain I understand this entire paragraph. Could you rephrase or something?

How one's share is determined will be a trickier issue. A simple hourly rate is not fair to the more skilled programmers, but skill is subjective. This is a problem to which I have not found an easy solution.

Oh this is going to be very tricky.

>>6
It's not his parser, it's Tablecat's.
http://tablecat.ipyo.heliohost.org/perl/read/1382232714

>>8

We don't need to depend on a specific company.

We definitely want our society to be distinct from any company or non-profit or Trent Initiative we set up; it would be a tool used by the society, which I will now call the Mage's Guild until someone tells me to knock it off.

I live in Canada, so my rules won't necessarily be your rules, but yes, it can be a non-profit. It would place limits on how we distributed the money, but not very serious ones. Basically, paying ourselves salaries as employees of a non-profit would be ok, but paying dividends would not. Pretty much anything other than paying profit to individuals who have not done work is ok (to oversimplify the situation). The benefit over a corporation is that we would mostly not have to pay taxes. That's pretty big, especially if our income took us out of small business territory. Again, this is for Canada, but when you gross over a certain amount your taxes go from something in the 15% range to more like 30% +. We also get discounts all over the place, for all sorts of services we'll need if this gets sizeable.

Re: anonymity: this could be a problem, not for structural reasons, but rather because the government of any country will be interested in who gets money. For example, if any of us were Iranian, we couldn't send them money from Canada because "muh freedumz". We could set up shop in some shitty third world country, and then we'd just have our money stolen. So basically at least one person - maybe a lawyer or some similarly disinterested representative - would probably have to know who each of us was. And the spooks presumably. The way around this is that pseudonymous people could contribute if we as a group agreed to spend their share according to their stated wishes without sending them actual money. Again, it would require trust on their part, but I don't see that as insurmountable. If someone were to violate our trust, we could just boot them out.

This leads to your question about what I was talking about in terms of dividing money. I'll give an example: Let's assume that we've all assigned one another an equal "share" of income from our Trent. Say there are ten of us and we bring in ten thousand dollars in a month. We would then have a thousand dollars each to route to whatever projects we felt needed and/or deserved them. So maybe some people want to quit their jobs, but can't live for less than $2000 a month. They could ask for funding from others, as well as directing their own money to themselves, and so could quit and work on something. Maybe other people want to get into robotics and decide to pool a few thousand to buy a CNC mill and electronic components. That kind of thing. So the direction the organization takes isn't determined by a leader, and no one necessarily has to choose one direction, but can rather express approval by kicking money one way or another.

If this were a non-profit, we wouldn't be shareholders in that we couldn't really just cash out every month, but on the other hand we'd have more resources to distribute.

Oh this is going to be very tricky.

Hey I know! We should determine programming skill by typing speed! Just like in a real company.

Did this thread really die so suddenly, or was the discussion continued underground?

>>11
basically, yes.

It is of my opinion that our focus should be replacing scientists with artists.

>>13
I don't want no fucking hippies around here

>>14
shut up, I like your idea >>13, actually I was going to propose something similar..

programming is art; engineers belong to the hackerjews enterprise, they ``code''

>>13-15
I am of the opinion that our focus should be replacing artists with autists.

>>13
An artist writes poetry, or sings songs, or paints pictures. A mime is an artist. The purpose of the artist is to evoke an emotional response; to entertain at best, and provide unsolicited, unwarranted, and unqualified commentary at worst.

To reduce the sorcery a programmer practices to art is a mistake. The realm and responsiblity of a sorceror isn't entertainment, it's to influence the real world by controling abstract and invisible beings. The abstract beings we control are called programs and data.

I consider this such a great insult, such a conflict of understanding and opinions that I have no choice but to leave.

I came here because my wizard's eye caught the unmistakable gleam of the scattering of magic in this place. No doubt this was mostly the trace of the great sorceror Nikita whose Symta was an act of great Lisp wizardry, there is also one or maybe two others, but I don't know if they are here anymore.

The majority here seems to be a bunch of UNIX loving, ``elegance'' loving, ``simple'' loving, ``minimal'' loving suckless.org style beaner morons who hate JavaScript for all the wrong reasons and none of the right ones and have interest in only summoning shitty spirits that just knock things over and don't work because their inferior mastery of sorcery doesn't let them effectively wield and control more complex beings.

Goodbye /prog/.

(also I got a job again so no more fucking around).

>>17
Don't leave. I too am a sorceror, although of a different school. This is the least shitty place on the net; don't let a few recent troll immigrants colour your impressions.

I still have hopes for a mages' guild.

>>17
fuck you white racist cunt

Art: Bach, Homer, Rembrandt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiOl2iV1MU8

>>17

wahhh my pop music is art!! muh entertainment

nigger

>>17

Dear lamer-bō,

You are pathetically arrogant, and your extremely narrow point of view about art is a shame for humankind.
'
>entertainment
..you would never be accepted in the Secret Society, so please don't come back.

'

entertainment

What the fuck are you niggers doing? First the "muh" shit, now this?

Go back to /g/.

WHAT'S A GEE? HEIL HITLER

HEIL HITLERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
DFGDFG HEIL HITLERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR\

HEIL
HITLER

HEIL HITLER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4eNT-MN1eg

>>24

gers doing? First the "mu
k to /g/.

mfw.jpgXDDDD

http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=9&url=bbs.progrider.org/prog

>>17
Don't leave, I share your convictions and I am committed to staying here. The Guild doesn't need to be single-minded in its internal affairs. There will be conflicts in ideology, periods of agitation and repose, and these should be welcome things. It will allow the Guild to grow organically.