Pieter Hintjens
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Thank you for the gifts
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
Podcasts/Interviews
Software Engineering Daily
Interview by Adam Dymitruk
Ruby Rogues #188, Community Building
Talks on video
"De afspraak", VRT, May 2016 (panel discussion)
RTL TV, May 2016 (panel discussion)
DomCode 2015, Nov 2015 (keynote)
Coding Serbia, Oct 2015 (keynote)
Euroscipy, Cambridge, Aug 2015 (keynote)
PyGrunn, Groningen, May 2015
Craft Conf, Budapest, Apr 2015
QCon London, Mar 2015
Code Mesh London, Nov 2014
Build Stuff, Vilnius 2014
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Nov 2014 (interview)
Coding Serbia, Nov 2014 (keynote)
Devnology, Leusden, Oct 2014 (keynote)
EuroPython, Berlin, Jul 2014 (keynote)
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Dec 2013 (interview)
Build Stuff, Vilnius, Dec 2013 (keynote)
Code Mesh London, Dec 2013
DevOps Days, London, Nov 2013
NDC Oslo, Jun 2013
CERN - Geneva, Jun 2013
Tech Mesh, London, Dec 2012
Strange Loop, St.Louis, Oct 2012
ZeroMQ@PDX part 2 - Portland, Feb 2012
ZeroMQ@PDX part 1 - Portland, Feb 2012
FLOSS Weekly, Petaliuma CA, Dec 2011
FOSDEM 2011, Brussels
Berlin Buzzwords 2010 (keynote)
FOSDEM 2009, Brussels
Hellenic FOSS Conference 2008, Athens part 1
Hellenic FOSS Conference 2008, Athens part 2
Email me at moc.snejtnih|reteip#moc.snejtnih|reteip if you'd like me to present at your event, or in your organization.
Comments
I found this series through a fellow programmer that I have high regard for. It's interesting, a really tricky subject to cover, which is probably why it's not covered that often.
A challenging aspect of such a conveyance, especially Part 2, at least for me, is the colloquial "set of all psychopaths" grows with each passing sentence. But in reality, many of the people in that expanding set are either a) people that I would not label as psychopathic at all (correlation is not causation) or b) all of them are psychopaths such that the 4% figure you consider is actually the "sane" ones. Sadly, the definition of normative and normal is not the behavior of the minority.
It's completely reasonable to debate whether it is possible to effect positive change in the world without being a functioning psychopath as the ego required to do so is well beyond what the majority of people in the world would consider healthy. [edit for clarity] I would say one hasn't truly gotten to know a visionary if they also did not uncover significant issues in that the person has battled. As the saying goes, "everyone has a battle you know nothing about".
There are no innocents, the difference between a Larry Ellison and a top contributor to Github or Stack Overflow is often not much. People contribute for merit and the hope of future contributions to society requiring less work via increased clout. It is simply a matter of degrees between someone who wants his pull requests to be applied when they are fresh (less work) than someone who is "lazy" and a burden on society. I am not arguing that this is not an earned privilege, only that both the psychopath and the overachiever both have the same goals of reducing work.
As such, a separate part ought to be devoted to the situation where the reader is the psychopath. You've taken liberties to dismiss a very large dragnet of society and argue to just isolate them, but this is the easy way out. You know the difference here very viscerally: It's easy to talk about problems in a piece of code, but such criticisms that are paired with a pull request including unit tests and documentation create a very different conversation.
Note that this is not the same as engaging with the psychopath since the internet acts as the intermediary. The tools that you present to disengage with the problem are valid, but it will also cause the ostracized to simply "up their game" to a higher level of complexity. Worse, it increases societal bifurcation, and the end of that spectrum is social delamination of the highest order. The problems we have here are minute compared to such an outcome!
I hope you find these different perspectives helpful.
Thanks for the perspective. I take it you identify more with the spiders than the ants. This is quite common among people who have some of the traits of psychopathy, and question their own morality. I've asked myself this often too.
What drives a psychopath is more than just pragmatism and efficiency, however. If you work hard to get social clout, you are playing a very specific strategy, that of the collaborator. Whether you play it poorly, or very well, changes little.
It may be hard to see in a given individual, or yourself. However it is visible by reflection, that is, how one's actions affect others, over time. You can't take individual events, nor can you take artificially constrained contexts. You have to look broadly, and over time, and you can then tell: this individual invests in/with others, or this individual steals from others.
As for the long term, I've come to believe that we all affect positive change, no matter how we operate, no matter how large or small our egos. The point of my study, in the end, is to learn how to better co-exist in a deliberate, conscious manner. That does require a deep shift in perception and strategies.
Portfolio
Thanks for the dialogue. I don't know how to answer the identification question. I guess it depends on my environment. I try to go with the flow and "avoid the spiders" for the most part. But if they show up, I'm often the one pointing them out to the ants. Some of the spiders don't take kindly to that. Others of them might be imagined to laugh. An ant pointing out a spider that is playing an ant doesn't stop the spider from getting his meal. Like good crypto, a system that can maintain integrity with complete transparency is one that one that few can argue with.
Nature is actually very messy, for the most part humans seem to have have created a paradise for themselves, even when things aren't nearly as great as they could be. Yet at the same time, we live with a history of great man-made calamity (WWI/II) and are always thirty minutes away from extinction in WWIII. It's quite a spectacle.
To this end of "who is the psychopath?", it would be very interesting if there was a means for the psychopath to find the reflection you speak of. Instead of peeling back layers to find the root causes, established societies are more apt to slather a layer of plaster over the damage. People run these societies, and the damaged people cause chaos at many levels. Might be a great twitter bot, but who's to say that the racist homophobes aren't "right" and the pinko socialists aren't the enemy? How is the ship set on a straight course when the psychopaths are guarding the hen house and no true discriminator can ever be created?