Another Walk in the Woods

Accepting Leadership

Today I had a nice walk to the nearby river. It was quite a 2+ hour journey all in, and it was worth its time in gold. Just awesome to get back in nature after so much head-down time.

I was supposed to have a reflection day today, but I wasn't able to get TAR1 out on time. Sucks, but I'll get it going ASAP and fingers crossed have a weekday off for it by SFA flights. Really wish I had another few to use the last couple of days on my ski pass, but I guess that's just loss aversion kicking in given the insane rates they charge.

Anyway, before that reflection journey today, I came to peace with the reality that Enrique will probably not get the DRS stuff anytime soon, and he certainly 100% will not get it from me. It's a shame how that relationship developed, but also a refreshing experience to see someone so technically minded for the first time, really. Never had such an extended dialect over the course of months with someone whose definition of documentation is the source code—really cool guy.

Encouraging GitHub Work

Chives is starting to get into the flow of PR review comments, and I think he just uncovered commit comments. He's the main source of inspiration for this reflection because of how I handled a recent micro-directive prompt, which wasn't ideal. For context, he was just getting started with reviewing and such, so he did a PR where he added line-by-line comments in the markdown.

I will get to that in a sec, but first I want to address that I've been using "they" over and over to refer to Chives. This relates to my default habitual tendency over the last couple of years to write more inclusively, especially when dealing with pseudonymous contributors. Part of "permissionless" means contributing without barriers such as revealing your (gender) identity, leaving the work content to get judged on its merits. Whether or not women should be required to work because of the inflation and degrading equality of capitalism in its centralized form is another question I choose not to address here.

When I was walking back from the stream, I saw so clearly the contrast between a decentralized and free natural world full of beauty contrasting with the daily nothingness of centralization present at a stoplight ahead of me. I thought so deeply about this present opportunity to bring decentralization ethos to the "blind" following the old centralized model of life in all its quandaries. And part of that really stems around impersonal identification, where I can lead a charge and leave the individualized items up for implementation by the compounding mass of the self-incentivizing community.

All this to say that I've thought a lot about introducing any form of hierarchy into effort organization since that's the first step towards centralization. Obviously, we've had to do a little bit with the write access to Git repos, but I've tried and furthered (by removing org teams today) to keep everything as individualizable and peer-to-peer as possible. Thus, even in very close relationships like Chives, I sometimes fall back to "they" in the impersonal, general sense as my default dialect when referring to the much larger number of individual contributors in their own capacity (rather than a collective).¹

The Mistake

My error was in a response after DMing Chives in gratitude for some notes they added where I had a note to myself that I needed sources for citation. Chives kindly added those sources! So I thanked them in a DM when I came across it secondarily, as my first pass through I was completely enamored by the style of cited reference rather than the object of form.

Chives is always so fast on the replies, which sometimes gives me pause to message over silly small things like that. But I figured in the moment it was just such an exceptional contribution that showed them² going above and beyond again.³ My initial response was to 💜 his reply.

But then I added in a written response saying, "I could never have found these sources" because I am not a GME expert like them or some horseshit. It was food in the sense of a self-deprecating whip meant to inflate the recipient's ego, which would have been more appropriate in a conversation with someone I'm less familiar with, like Enrique (although I doubt they'd care one millimeter). It just felt wrong bringing it up there, sort of like the feeling I got DMing Limegreen about my GitHub Sponsors profile in re: economics chat.

You don't have to give up your dominance or strength with friends who care about you. I'm so thankful to see the redundant meaninglessness of this 3D interpersonal influence psychology. This kind of "politicking" might be needed in B.S. centralized companies where your pay depends on how much you can influence and control thereunder, but it's completely meaningless in meritocratic distributed workforces.