Re: [9fans] John Floren, Im trying to make the world better

[Laurent Malvert <laurent.malvert@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 9:14 PM,  <mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com> wrote:
> John Floren wrote:
>> [what everybody thought, in about 140 chars]
>
> [another > 2K chars rant]

(I'll give a shot to the > 2K chars approach thing)

mycroftiv, I don't think Floren was denying that you are trying
to make the world a better place, or being oblivious to your
honesty, or implying that your goals aren't noble in any way.

Also, I haven't read any answers that seemed to talk negatively
about ANTS either - though granted I skimmed through some of this
Homerian epic. In fact, I don't think that, apart from the
occasional expletive about how you're pressing for feedback and
invaded the mailing-list (some might say "polluted"
or "violated"), I didn't feel like anyone wasn't listening to
you (at first). If you look around, it's usually a rather quiet
group here, with some occasional heated debates. It looked like
folks were taking a reasonable amount of time to digest a large
dump of information, and without any immediate harsh reaction or
negative assumption about you and your objectives here or at
large.  Which is really what you'd want from people reviewing
your work.


So you can probably assume a combination of the following:

 - people have not tried ANTS thoroughly enough to give you
   quality feedback (yet);

 - people liked ANTS and didn't say anything (usually the
   likelihood is higher that the disgruntled users would be
   the more vocal ones, which is a *good* thing for you);

 - people got very, very confused about ANTS and figured
   they'd come back to it later;

 - people wanted to try ANTS but suddenly got a glimpse of what
   it might feel like to be an innocent passers-by being taken
   hostage with a gun to their head in a bank robbery, or meeting
   a cross of Pennywise, a doomsday prophet and conspiration
   theorist in closed room;

 - spam filters hesitated but finally had mercy on 9fans readers.


As others said, we may have lives, stuff to do, projects and
things that matter to us as well probably as dearly as they do to
you, and we can't jump on every bandwagon.  And I have to say
that coming back after only 6 days off-line, your emails, while
representing a significant chunk of my mailer's payload, are way
down in terms of priority.  There's the word "fans" in this
group's address after all, and while sometimes borderline
fanatics as well, it's still hobbyism for the large part. I don't
think many are paid to read and reply here, or that they have
huge amounts of time to do so.

Patience is a virtue, silence is golden, wait and see and all
good things come to those who wait would be good colloquialisms
to keep in mind while you give 9fans peace and quiet to take a
look - extended or not, but at least a look - at your effort and
get back to you if they *want*.
You can't force people into doing things, but you can surely put
them off of doing them. Folks here are rather curious by nature,
so don't scare them away.


I'm impressed though at how many of us you managed to awaken from
stasis, and at how it triggered rather insignificant discussions - in
the context of that list, that is. Whatever magic you used to do that,
please stop it, it's giving us the creeps.

And yes, patents suck, but the solution to fixing them isn't here.


PS: ANTS looks interesting. That's all I know and can say for now,
and I don't guarantee further feedback.

--
Laurent Malvert
(a usually very passive/read-only 9fan)