There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly.

Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on other people.

This isn't really a problem with the decisions of the rails core team, it is the entire ethos accompanying rails. Authentication plugins I remember from 4 years ago are barely maintained today, and there are a whole bunch of new ones. I'm guessing my knowledge re: authentication has a half-life of approximately 1.5 years.

The implications are as follows:

(1) If you are a Rails developer you need to be a full-time Rails developer and not do too much else. You can't do Rails and a bunch of other things because Rails will take up a lot of your time.

(2) Think you can code, release, and forget about it? Think again. If you have projects, you (and the people who commissioned the projects) need to know that these projects need to have at least 5 hrs / week budgeted for the indefinite future (perhaps less, but the point is that they need a developer on staff -- they can't simply be released and forgotten about).

(3) Extra caution, since not all change is good change. You may end up to subject whatever is cool at the time. That's not to say that this really affects the core team, but there are a gazillion Rubyists out there attempting to change everything over to MongoDB that works just fine in whatever flavor of SQL they were running before. A lot of people have been burned here.

All of these take away from the promise and excitement of Rails for many people -- which was not simply "oh we can be on the cutting edge of technology," but "oh, we can have a sexy app with decent functionality up in a matter of a couple weeks with half the budget of what we thought." That second impression, which is what a lot of the Rails ecosystem is built off of, is largely false (esp. now that there are a bunch of other quickstart web frameworks).

When they're attacking Sony it's "righteous" and "good", when they're attacking companies we like they're "bad" and "immature". They've always stated their intention is to create "lulz" and just do whatever damage they can, apparently people overlooked this when they were attacking people everyone "hated". Luckily Minecraft wasn't down for too long, some of us are directly affected by this stuff, sigh.

The internet is a shitty place.

This reads like a load of pop-IT-psychology nonsense. Take a few terms and adapt them to whatever preconceived notions you have, and whammo, there's your thesis statement.

I've had the job titles "Software Engineer", "Software Developer" and "Computer Scientist" but I was basically doing the same job each time. A job title doesn't cause a fundamental change in behaviour or capabilities. If it does, then you have a whole other major problem.

FWIW, I always refer to myself as a "programmer" socially as it seems to be the simplest form for people to understand.

Thank you for writing this.

Edit to add value: "Same-day" special + email list of people with confirmed willingness to pay money and get pushed out of a perfectly good airplane = a win. Presumably your costs are pretty much fixed after making the decision to do a jump, so you could hit that mailing list with a special promotion multiple times per year. It's a Tuesday, congratulations, have 20% off if we push you out of an airplane, etc.

Attempting to exercise control over such a chaotic system with simplistic solutions like giant space mirrors strikes me as a very bad idea indeed. Until we have a complete understanding of how the climate is regulated naturally I really don't see how we can do any good at all.

Not to mention that, as you say, the politics are beyond us at the moment anyway (global consensus? yeah, right...)

I now understand that BitCoin is actually an experiment to teach people basic economics and why many of today's rules and institutions (e.g., banks) exist. Sorry for criticizing it. BitCoin is an awesome educational tool.

Its hard to trust a humorless judgement of humor.

While I haven't played the game myself, I'd like to point out to the author of the article that if attempting to describe why a something isn't funny, the best weapon in your arsenal would be humor, not simply sticking up your nose in disgust (though one could mix that in).

That said, a lot of the jokes in the game sound pretty straightforwardly shitty and weird. However I'm trying to imagine the author describing a Louis CK comedy set, a dirty comic I find hilarious, and I'm fairly sure he could ruin that in short order, so I'll hold off on my judgements.

Jason Calacanis runs a search spam generator (Mahalo.com) that pushes over-SEO'd content ranging in quality from mediocre to bad. (...something he has denied and outright lied about in public - http://www.seobook.com/black-hat-seo-case-study)

His opinion on web content, and web content quality, carries little to no water with me. This is like Uwe Boll saying that movie making is dead and stupid people should stop making movies.

This is where "state of the art" is really an apt phrase. Rails 3 is effectively a community consensus on the best way to make most webapps today. Rails 2 was the community's best stab at that same goal a few years ago. The distance between the two is explained by a changing state of art, and some ferreting out of weaknesses in the framework.

I think rails developers blindly upgrade their apps, just because they want to be on the hottest new technology. I know I am drawn by the glitter of rails 3.1 beta. But everyone should really weigh the business decision of upgrading; what do you really truly gain by being on the latest rails for all your apps? Sometimes the technical debt you take on by maintaining an old framework is less than the effort you have to spend to upgrade, especially for sunsetting apps.