> Sure you get crackpots still,

They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good enough mathematician to prove - were pretty damn odd, but his writing in 1989 on how it would be vital for an interconnected network of computers for information sharing to treat censorship as damage and route around it and some ideas for doing this was bang on the money (as we now see) and his writings on how American business management methods result in the worst possible outcome for everyone that's not already a billionaire have also proven oddly prophetic.

So maybe there's something in the crackpots after all.

▲

aidenn0 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe lots of (most?) people are crackpots about something, but they lack the time and/or resolve to do something about it.

	▲	ErroneousBosh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder what I'm crackpotty about? Forth, probably, although I did actually port Dave Dunfield's 6809 Forth to a mid-1980s sampler. It boots off a floppy, I know what the memory map is, if it boots off a floppy I can make it run anything, right? How about this crackpot view? Perl vs. Python, which I guess has been replaced by Rust vs. Go - I prefer Python and Go to Perl and Rust, simply because I know them better. If you want me to work in Rust or Perl I don't really care, they're just languages. I'm not as proficient in them, expect it to take longer. Rewrite it all in Rust? Sure. I'd prefer not to, but if that's today's project then shut up and pay my invoice. Let's see, what other things are wild crackpot ideas around here? I don't think LLMs are very good. I don't think self-driving cars solve the right problem. Permaculture would be better for long-term ecological sustainability and food security than "everyone should be vegan". Bikes would work perfectly well in American cities if you used enough of them.