• Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 days ago

    I wonder if language and other cultural fields are the only areas where Linus’s law are impossible to safely apply. Programming seems quite easy by comparison.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Hmm, the law begins with “Given enough eyeballs”. So it’s explicitly not about small-language Wikipedia sites having too few editors.

      It also doesn’t talk about finding consensus. “All bugs are shallow” means that someone can see the solution. In software development, that’s most often quite easy, especially when it comes to bugfixes. It’s rarely difficult to verify whether the solution to a bug works or not. So in most cases if someone finds a solution and it works, that’s good enough for everyone.

      In cultural fields, that’s decidedly not the case.

      For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.

      How to make government fair? How to get rid of crime? How to make a good society?

      These things have literally been issues since the first humans learned to speak.

      That’s why Linus’ law doesn’t really apply here. We all want different things and there’s no fix that satisfies all requirements or preferences.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.

        That’s because people generally don’t know or understand these solutions. One can’t raise above separate human’s ability to understand any system. And I mean any. Doesn’t mean a housewife has to know electrical engineering, but enough people in any group reliant upon any system should have passive knowledge and understanding.

        So, thanks to AI translators and such, I can now link https://kvant.digital/ here.

        The very first problem in the very first issue of that journal is very enlightening.