First Principles vs. The Bureaucratic Wall of 'Sources'
Description
This is a 'Chad vs. Soyjack' Wojak meme contrasting two approaches to knowledge. On the left, a calm, bearded 'Chad' character represents simple, undeniable truth, with the equation '1+1=2' written below him. On the right, an agitated, screaming 'Soyjack' character is surrounded by a cloud of text representing arguments from authority and process. These phrases include 'Source?', 'That's misinformation!', 'I learned the answer is actually 5', 'Your source is not on the list of trusted and credible sources', 'Is it peer reviewed?', 'Going to need a trusted source on that', 'That's been debunked', 'I trust the experts', and 'You've been fact checked!'. The meme critiques the modern discourse where fundamental logic is often dismissed in favor of appeals to authority, approved sources, and procedural gatekeeping. For senior developers, this is a deeply relatable scenario, representing the frustration of proposing a simple, effective technical solution only to be blocked by corporate bureaucracy, process zealots, or stakeholders who demand validation from 'approved' articles or consultants rather than accepting demonstrable proof and first-principles reasoning
Comments
43Comment deleted
Yes, I know the handwritten SQL query is faster. But our 'Center of Excellence' debunked it in a whitepaper from 2018. Please use the ORM, even if it generates a 50-table join that times out
Submitted a one-line PR: “1 + 1 = 2.” Review thread: “Please attach the ADR, SOC-2 control mapping, RFC for the ‘+’ operator, and a chaos test proving commutativity under partial outages.”
This perfectly captures that one architect who demands a formal RFC with three competing implementations and a proof of concept before accepting that your O(n) solution is indeed better than their O(n²) one - but only if you can cite a paper from a FAANG engineer published after 2020
Same energy as the PR comment thread where 'this is O(n²)' gets met with 'do you have a link to a blog post saying that's bad?'
When your pull request gets rejected not because the code is wrong, but because you didn't cite three peer-reviewed papers, get sign-off from the architecture review board, and prove you have a PhD in the specific framework version being used - even though the fix is literally changing a typo from 'flase' to 'false'. Sometimes the simplest truths require the most Byzantine approval processes
Nothing like a PR where '1+1=2' gets blocked until you attach an RFC, reproducible benchmark, and a JIRA - meanwhile production quietly reports it’s 5
Tried to commit 1+1=2; governance blocked it with “source?” because the vendor whitepaper says it’s 5 - turns out in distributed orgs, truth is eventually consistent
Peer-reviewed like a PR with one approval: 'LGTM' from the author, debunked by CI fails
Real story lol. It’s me on the right side Comment deleted
А я слева Comment deleted
use english please Comment deleted
Ah sorry Comment deleted
Well we all know cases when it’s wrong. E.g. in binary Comment deleted
same Comment deleted
translations: > I'm on the right > Oh im on the left Comment deleted
> I'm in the middle Comment deleted
> "1+1=2" > "The answer was never 4" Comment deleted
The answer is one. Because 1=2 is False, which implicitly converts to 0. 1+False equals 1. //my native language is not JavaScript Comment deleted
Lol Comment deleted
actually... 1+1=2 Uncaught SyntaxError: invalid assignment left-hand side 1+1==2 true 1+(1==2) 1 Comment deleted
1 + 1 = 2 means that you give to a "1 + 1" valuable value "2". But since there's no quotes, it can't do that. And == just compares Comment deleted
what about pascal Comment deleted
idk anything about pascal Comment deleted
They use := assignment iirc Comment deleted
who on earth uses pascal? Comment deleted
...but just few years ago Microsoft bough a piece of software written in Delphi (Object Pascal) for 8.5 billion USD. You might have heard of Skype. https://www.quora.com/Is-Pascal-still-used (a question from 2014) Comment deleted
when was ir written? Comment deleted
So what? If you spend a 10-figure sum for a software written in bloody COBOL, you are not rewriting it for nodejs when you need to add a function. You unpack your cobol books from seventies and write in bloody cobol. Comment deleted
well im not skype developer Comment deleted
However I think Microsoft did exactly that. Initially they had "Lync" and "Skype", they renamed "Lync" to "Skype for business" and at some point they just killed the original Skype in favor of a Lync'ish version. But Microsoft has a rich history of killing such projects. Comment deleted
And the question itself was answered in 2014 Comment deleted
Total Commander Comment deleted
and skype is shit, it's easy to see that it's on pascal Comment deleted
have you seen how they make direct calls when BOTH recipients are behind NATs? It's some pretty cool shit dude. Comment deleted
still better than its successor, teams… Comment deleted
there are tons of ways hoe to communicate through voice except those two Comment deleted
Oh, no, Skype is amazingly great! I mean, it was, before Microsoft completely ruined it Comment deleted
well, when it was not Microsoftish, it was great comparing to its times. Since it's still on those times' level, it isn't great anymore Comment deleted
to my knowledge, they decided against using a TURN server and used essentially a udp bomb attack instead. Two servers hitting a NAT from both sides on random ports until they accidentally get a direct connection. But I have read it somewhere and didn't check it myself. Comment deleted
1+1=10 Comment deleted
And yes, Borland Pascal compilers were so good that it still on par in terms of performance with well-written C++ code. Because of, both, how well language is designed and how well designed and written compilers (currently maintained by Embarcadero) for it Comment deleted
Somehow in those days when C-like syntax languages became so popular that most people hate languages with not C-like syntax by default Comment deleted
why Comment deleted