Hintjens' Hints

Short quotes with standalone value.

I've learned one thing from being an entrepreneur for 35 years: when there is unguarded money on the table, the wolves arrive. Call these as you like, their goal is to take the cash and blame someone else. They always use the same strategies, which I've documented extensively in my book The Psychopath Code. Divide and conquer. Charm and distraction. Promises and lies. Stealth, and violence.

Let me explain this as a murder mystery. We see a healthy person suddenly falling sick. We see a massive insurance policy being taken out. This person's demise is going to be extremely profitable. As investigator, you assume malice. You assume there exist people capable and willing to do anything if the price is right. You look for motive, means, opportunity. You follow the money.

I'm a writer. My position is, I write what I see. My interests are truth and knowledge. There's no profit in this.

There is a classic pattern here. Woman claims sexual harassment from powerful man. Man denies it. Woman goes to social media and makes her case in court of public opinion. Man cannot disprove a negative. Woman gets crowd of sympathetic admirers. Some may hate men. Some may feel guilt at their own misdeeds. Some may hate what that powerful man stands for. Some may just like being part of a mob.

Talking to a professional victim always leaves one with a nasty, unpleasant feel. There's no honesty there, just a shadow person who is good with charm and words.

No boy-met-girl story ever contained a 12 page presentation with bullet points.

Truth is an absolute property of 4-dimensional space-time. We can never reach the truth, only build theories that approximate it better and better.

C++ is the Scientology of programming languages.

Road rage is a basic survival instinct caught in the wrong context.

To value individual human intelligence is like looking at an ant colony and saying, "look, that ant is super smart!"

The problem with small groups of experts is that they are usually stupid. Like laser light, they think coherently, with the same education, culture, language, motives. They can solve the wrong problems perfectly, over and over. And most software teams (especially commercial ones) are like this. Perfect idiots.