Rockstar. Mark all as read.

Use Your RSS Reader Like A Rock Star

Also here: https://amysampleward.org/2009/04/27/live-blogging-09ntc-mapping-your-social-media-strategy/

Carerev also lets bosses send nurses home early without paying them for the whole day – and they don’t pay overtime if a nurse stays after her shift ends in order to ensure that their patients are cared for. The librarian scholar Fobazi Ettarh coined the term “vocational awe” to describe how workers in caring professions will endure abusive conditions and put in unpaid overtime because of their commitment to the patrons, patients, and pupils who depend on them:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

For example, if a model works poorly in translating to a low-resource language because it isn’t aware of idiomatic phrases in that language, the model can’t reason its way out of this.

addresses the challenge of reloading specific sections of a webpage without triggering a full page refresh in Rails applications using Turbo. He critiques the native refresh action for being too broad, as it reloads the entire page, which can be inefficient and may disrupt the state of Stimulus controllers.

To understand how “best practice” is used productively, we need to step back and realize that all problem domains are not alike (analysis stolen from Cynefin):

Chaotic problems have no clear link between action and effect. Best practices are expected to have predictable effects, so they fail when applied to chaotic problems. Better to act first and analyze later. With a chaotic problem, almost any action will produce useful feedback.
Complex problems display a connection between action and effect, but only in retrospect. Applying a best practice will not get you what you expect. Instead, your best strategy is to invent an action based on first principles (like “move fast and break things” or “make decisions reversible”), and observe the results.
Complicated problems have a, well, complicated connection between action and effect, but at least they are predictable. A best practice is not effective, but choosing among a pallette of known-good practices is.
Simple problems have a clear, linear connection between action and effect. When solving simple problems, effort used to invent or choose between actions is a waste of time. Applying the best practice is efficient.

Did that require top-down direction? You can, in fact, generate nationwide programs with local offices doing strikingly similar things without top-down direction. The combination of a monoculture plus a policy direction that lower-level staffers believe in is often sufficient to make it happen. We have extensive experience of this in tech and finance, as discussed later.

Japanese has a beautiful world, sontaku, for the attitude and actions a diligent subordinate would take without his superior’s explicit instruction, believing them to anticipate his boss’ desires. Sontaku is a core skill in the American professional class. People possessing it are sometimes described as “motivated self-starters”, “high-agency”, “bold”, ”takes initiative”, ”acts like an owner”, etc.

First, I hope that framework proliferation slows down a bit. DORA, SPACE, DX Core 4 and so on are all great frameworks, but hopefully we reach a point where creating another framework is obviously not worth it. I think DX Core 4 could particularly contribute to this by emphasizing the calculation mechanism for DXI, and ensuring that access to that calculation is predictably preserved for even competitive companies to use.

Unless you’ve worked in Silicon Valley, it can be hard to fully understand the heady mix of process-phobia, individualism, generative approaches (performance-oriented), and pathological currents. People often point to the valley as being “agile,” and this is likely correct given a team-centric interpretation of the term, but when it comes to types of agility that are more collectivist and involve collaboration across groups, the picture is much more complex.

For sharing JavaScript code with the host application, like Stimulus controllers, create a partial Importmap configuration file and set the engine to merge it with the main one in the host application.

This is not really about hypocrisy. It’s about exceptionalism, a power-reliant assertion of who the rules apply to and who they don’t.

Thread.pass vs kernel context switch

So this entire process, in order to add “what is 2+2”, we do a non-deterministic a lookup from an enormous hashtable that contains the sum of public human knowledge we’ve seen fit to collect for our dataset, then we squeeze it through the tiny, nondeterministic funnels of decoding strategies and guided generation to get to an answer from a sampled probability distribution. These steps include a large amount of actual humans in the loop guiding the model throughout its various stages.

Without taking my word for it, consider how it show up in the economics: If AI companies could deliver the productivity gains they claim, they wouldn’t sell AI. They’d keep it to themselves and gobble up the software industry. Or consider the software products produced by companies on the bleeding edge of AI. It’s still the same old, bloated web garbage everyone else is building. (My LLM research has involved navigating their awful web sites, and it’s made be bitter.)

Write down five preexisting company goals or priorities that will be impacted by the decision. Focusing on what is important will help you avoid the rationalization trap of making up reasons for your choices after the fact.
Write down at least three, but ideally four or more, realistic alternatives. It might take a little effort and creativity, but no other practice improves decisions more than expanding your choices.
Write down the most important information you are missing. We risk ignoring what we don’t know because we are distracted by what we do know, especially in today’s information-rich businesses.
Write down the impact your decision will have one year in the future. Telling a brief story of the expected outcome of the decision will help you identify similar scenarios that can provide useful perspective.
Involve a team of at least two but no more than six stakeholders. Getting more perspectives reduces your bias and increases buy-in — but bigger groups have diminishing returns.
Write down what was decided, as well as why and how much the team supports the decision. Writing these things down increases commitment and establishes a basis to measure the results of the decision.
Schedule a decision follow-up in one to two months. We often forget to check in when decisions are going poorly, missing the opportunity to make corrections and learn from what’s happened

The ultimate goal of science writing is to increase collective understanding, but the immediate goal is acceptance (by the journal editors, the thesis committee, the boss, or whoever decides whether the report goes forward). And, for various reasons, it doesn’t seem that this acceptance requires or is even facilitated by a full and clear description of what you actually did.

Many people know about CIE Lab. It’s quite close to human perception of color, but the handling of hue is not great. For example, a gradient between blue and white turns out purple in CIE Lab, similar to in sRGB. Some color spaces handle hue well but have other issues to consider.

When I left my job in gaming to pursue education and consulting, I had a bit of time to tackle this problem. Oklab is my attempt to find a better balance, something Lab-like but “okay”.

When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.

But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day”.

How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded ourselves that it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving.

Or we could just stick with “Bob was an asshole,” and post it, and wait for the “likes”, and for the pro-Bob forces to rally, and the anti-barista trolls to anonymously weigh in – but, meanwhile, there’s poor Bob, grieving and misunderstood, and there’s our poor abused barista, feeling crappy and not exactly knowing why, incrementally more convinced that the world is irrationally cruel.

Fascism in the digital age really only has one coherent unifying goal which is false consensus.

Interesting usage of formmethod in a button_to nested in another form 🤯

Performance of getcalfresh vs benefitscal

The Turbo Rails Tutorial
Learn how to create modern, single-page, reactive web applications with Ruby on Rails 7 without writing any custom JavaScript code.

I think the mistake the industry has made is (and I had to learn this as well), that “we observed ab tests work really well” is really a statement that should read “the majority of the changes we make are characterized as hill-climbing growth of a post-PMF b2c product and ab tests work really well for that”.

That is to say: bank tellers work for an American corporation with an HR department. And bank tellers, in their hearts and in their actions, internalize the class that they must, must, must present as. There are classes of people that the bank does not want to do business with. (Banks are, as we have frequently covered, not allowed to say this in as many words.) The tellers do not want to speak to them, either, and this disdain radiates from them as palpable waves. The clerk at a check cashing business is not a bank teller. She does not disdain talking to poor people; being able to do that in such a way that most poor people end up liking her is her job. Don’t take my word for it; take the customers’. We have studied this industry extensively. We ran surveys. The customers keep saying things like “I like my local check cashing place because the girl behind the counter is kind and doesn’t judge me like those #%*(#%( at the bank.” You can present as being kind to almost all of your customers and be obviously unemployable as a bank teller.

Julián Pinzón Eslava dives into a test case that explains the behaviour of page refreshes in Turbo. He will show a simple Rails app and progressively enhances the user experience using Turbo.

Get a summary of any youtube video. Summarize podcasts, lectures, product launches, tech reviews and more. Quickly revise educational and how-to videos, enabling effective learning.

While P.J. and I were working on FamSpam, Tom Preston-Werner and I were working on GitHub on the side. We started in October working nights and weekends on it. We basically wanted an easy, pretty, and feature-rich way to throw our Git repos up and share them with people. Then as we got more into it, we realized how things like the dashboard could change the way we deal with open source contributions. After that, all the social features began to fall into place. Github private beta launched in january, and in april we saw the public launch

And thus, you have people with spare bandwidth making up their own goals, so that they have something to show in the performance review.

If we now revisit the situation from the employer’s point of view, it is no longer trivially wasteful, because everyone is always busy. However, it’s likely more wasteful than before, because people are building stuff you didn’t really need, and yet you almost certainly need now, because actually productive activities are hopelessly intertwined with this stuff.

This is a big reason why successful software companies end up with mountains of code. The cycle repeats and branches out exponentially, as every team who’s built the once-needless and now-necessary thing asks for more headcount, gets it, and inevitably ends up with some of it idle some of the time. Then these new people invent more goals to pursue, persuade everyone that these fake goals are actual sub-goals of the real goals, and entangle existing systems with their new systems.

Using LocalStorage event listener to sync changes

As such, I believe it’s good practice to ALWAYS redirect with a 303 See Other status code when using Turbo in a Rails app.

To use this feature, we need to set config.action_controller.use_custom_csrf_token to a lambda that returns the token to be used for the request. The lambda will then be called with the request object as an argument.

In environments with high psychological safety, trust, and an appreciation for complex sociotechnical systems, when a measure becomes a target, it can remain a good measure because missing the target is treated as a valuable signal for continuous improvement rather than failure.

The singular challenge.

This is a story about passion

Most orgs will tell you they’d love to have a passionate, engaged community using their products. And most will tell you a passionate, engaged workforce sounds way better than the alternative. So far, there’s not much to dispute.

But as two folks who spent decades building free, open source software, um, there’s a difference between saying you want that and actually wanting that.

Because…passionate and engaged people are a pain in the ass to deal with. The heat that they bring to your work cuts both ways. Your biggest advocates and your biggest detractors are often the same people. This is true for community management and for regular old management management.

These folks have high expectations. They will check you, loudly (and often publicly), if you veer off course. That’s not to say you can never screw up, but if you invite a group of people to follow along closely, you can’t be mad when they notice. And then want to talk about it. Courting near-obsessive engagement means courting a level of scrutiny that most corporations find uncomfortable.

academics devote our lives to producing ideas because we know that ideas matter, yet to admit that they matter would require changing everything about the institutions that nominally determine the value of our work.

I have been thinking for a while about how our attempts to define craft terms influence our students’ (and our own) aesthetics, and I have wanted to try other definitions. How to define “tone,” for example, seemed especially difficult. Here are some alternate definitions, for now:

How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time

You have to be a complete moron to not see what’s going on right now. I work in SEO, and I’m working on getting out.

Marx and Engels once spoke of a postrevolutionary communist society where one could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and write angry manifestos at night. After that they let the matter drop. Maintaining vagueness about the future is what now allows those on the American right with very different views of the past to share an illusory sense of common purpose for the future.

In fact, whenever you mention that Trump’s “very fine people” defended the Nazis, you’ll always get people—even proudly anti-Trump people, good liberals who want to be sure that no matter what we do in this struggle against facism, we always play fair—who rush in to take on the fascist framing uncritically, and let you know that well actually Trump was defending the non-Nazis that marched with the Nazis, not the Nazis themselves. It’s a distinction we are meant to find meaningful; a sort of indestructible exoneration offered to supremacists and their allies.

Revealingly, the exonerations that these sorts of fine distinctions allow are never extended to demonstrators whose cause is justice rather than supremacy. In fact, whenever supremacists commit acts of violence against demonstrators for justice, the blame for the violence gets attributed to all those who march for justice, not to the supremacists responsible or to the underlying injustice that made the demonstration necessary. This is a state of affairs that makes it impossible for a demonstration for supremacy to ever be considered intrinsically violent, and impossible for a demonstration for justice to ever be considered intrinsically peaceful. A litmus test for institutional supremacy if ever there was one.

EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with trying to figure out what reality is like. Some of my best friends are real. The problem is that reality isn’t fixed. It is not merely complex, as liberal handwringers point out incessantly. It is contradictory, riven by forces pulling it in different directions. It changes, and it changes not least because we change it. In trying to freeze reality into a cudgel that can be used to assault political opponents, the New Atheists and the liberal pundits who consciously and unconsciously imitate them end up committing the sin they claim to hate the most: They deny the observable evidence in front of them. It is entirely backwards to try to determine whether sex is immutable “in reality” in order to assess whether it’s “really possible” to change sex. In reality, people change their sex, so it cannot possibly be the case that sex is immutable.

For the same reason, it is a mistake to fault advocates of justice in Palestine for failing to understand the “reality” of the conflict, because it is this reality that they are participating in and reshaping. There is no essential thing called “the Israel-Palestine conflict.” There is just a place between the river and the sea, and the reality there is dependent, for better or for worse, upon the outcome of political struggle. Reality is a historical process, as Lewontin and Gould argued against the sociobiologists long ago. New Atheism will continue to haunt us for as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the way things are always includes the possibility that things could be different.

How to use a Reverse Dictionary

Have you ever had difficulty finding the right words to use but you know the meaning of said word. Enter the phrase, definition or description you are thinking of and this Reverse Dictionary will find the word that best fits that description.

the platform team must act like a company, then it should act like a struggling company that’s desperate to keep its last few enterprise customers. This implies a very different strategy than that of a startup. Change as little as possible and put the bulk of your energy into efforts that increase boringness: documenting, simplifying, and fixing. Don’t build anything exciting if you can avoid it, and if you must build something, build it in service of boringness.

Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks. In purely commercial terms, an album with 20 two minute tracks will generate double the revenue, per play, than an album with 10 four minute tracks.

The problem with Future of Work as a beat is that you’re covering prospect. Not news. You’re not ambulance-chasing a thing that has happened. You’re trend-chasing what organizations say could happen. Or what they expect will happen. And we already have a name for the optimistic business communication that organizations share with the world. That’s called Public Relations.

But you know what is working like a hot damn? Drugs.

The Rails Core member on new releases and balancing pushing the community forward with stability.
….
So just to reiterate, it’s mostly individual driven

It’s your job to make them understand what is time consuming and why. You are responsible for identifying areas of uncertainty to explore more deeply. It’s also your job to discover other dependencies outside the software that you need to be aware of, such as customer server training, ad campaigns, etc.

You may read this and think that the key lesson of this post follows the old adage that “if you can’t beat them, join them”. In some ways, I suppose it does. What I want to say is that if you start a project to try and position yourself as an alternative but better implementation of something, you are likely to find yourself stuck in a spot where you’re always playing catch up and living in the shadow of the canonical implementation. The canonical project keeps evolving, and you have no choice but to follow along with limited decisional power over where your own project is headed. That’s no fun. You may have better luck trying to join up with the canonical implementation instead. However, that’s only part of the answer.

Besides, there are worse things than being a little ridiculous. Being completely uninterested in the perspectives and suffering of others, for one.

an industry around delivering good feedback, such as the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) framework, and these things are useful guide rails for giving feedback. In particular, I think they’re the sort of thing you can actively practice for three months (e.g. spend time proactively framing every piece of your feedback this way) and reflexively deploy without much effort from that point onward. However, I see them get misused in two different ways.

First, often folks never really get comfortable with them and end up viewing them as “too heavy to apply quickly” so they start pocketing more and more feedback rather than delivering it. This is often net-negative because these trainings trying to help deliver better feedback result in folks getting significantly less feedback. If this seems surprising, then draw the Econ 101 supply/demand chart, and model the impact of the price of delivering feedback going up: the supply will naturally go down at any given point on the line.

Second, I see folks reject feedback because they don’t like how it was delivered. Essentially, they become feedback lawyers who fixate on the weakness in how feedback was delivered rather than trying to understand the content within the feedback itself. This lets someone feel justified in ignoring feedback because it wasn’t properly formatted, but doesn’t accomplish anything other than discouraging future feedback. Again, if we look at the impact of this behavior, it’s just shifting the demand curve on the Econ 101 chart down, once again resulting in less feedback.

The advice I give to people is that feedback recipients are obligated to extract the kernel of insight from feedback, even if it isn’t well delivered. Other approaches might feel better short term, but they don’t work.

murky consent should authorize only a very restricted and weak license to use data. Murky consent should be subject to extensive regulatory oversight with an ever-present risk that it could be deemed invalid. Murky consent should rest on shaky ground. Because the law pretends people are consenting, the law’s goal should be to ensure that what people are consenting to is good. Doing so promotes the integrity of the fictions of consent. I propose four duties to achieve this end: (1) duty to obtain consent appropriately; (2) duty to avoid thwarting reasonable expectations; (3) duty of loyalty; and (4) duty to avoid unreasonable risk. The law can’t make the tale of privacy consent less fictional, but with these duties, the law can ensure the story ends well.

Back when I used to wait tables, the other waitresses and I would joke to each other about our “waitress voice”, which were the personas we all subconsciously seemed to slip into when talking to customers. They varied somewhat, but they were all uniformly saccharine, with slightly higher-pitched voices, and with the general demeanor as though you were talking to someone you didn’t think was very bright. Every LLM’s writing “voice” reminds me of that.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, “you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform”. Three years later, something similar happens. “This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.” What’s the answer? “It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

10 years of experience or 1 year of experience 10 times

Problem with many-to-many dependencies

Have you ever been working on a Rails application, needed to use a configuration value within your code and then couldn’t remember whether it’s a setting, secret, credential, or environment variable? If you haven’t, this won’t be interesting, but if you’re like me, it might be worth reading on.

to listen, is your data is too narrowly focused on big sweeping data sets. You’re not actually listening to young people to ask them what are they experiencing and what are they deciding to do and why. Because they have autonomy in this. Young people don’t have to pick up their phones. They don’t have to install you know, Snapchat, that’s their choice. They’re doing it for a reason. Where are they getting out of it? You know, those are important questions that other researchers have gone through. Height had no interest in talking to the researchers who actually listen to young people about how they’re living and why they do what they do.

We noticed the same thing: giving more instructions, that would better detail the task, would sometimes give better results but would fail more often. The simpler the better. But we also need to think a bit like a LLM does to even improve your results: returning the country code is harder than returning the full country name for example, as abbreviating is another layer of complexity and there is maybe less examples overall of the abbreviate names versus the full name in the data set. Choose what must have been the most prevalent item in the training data.

internal change agents confuse what they want career-wise (to do X or Y as they imagine company Z does), with what their company needs right now and where they might help gain an advantage.

Even the ratings themselves are suspect. Most, if not all, of the workers who provide this feedback to AI vendors are low-paid workers who are unlikely to have specialised knowledge relevant to the topic they’re rating, and even if they do, they are unlikely to have the time to fact-check everything.
That means they are going to be ranking the conversations almost entirely based on tone and sentence structure.
This is why I think that RLHF has effectively become a reward system that specifically optimises language models for generating validation statements: Forer statements, shotgunning, vanishing negatives, and statistical guesses.
In trying to make the LLM sound more human, more confident, and more engaging, but without being able to edit specific details in its output, AI researchers seem to have created a mechanical mentalist.

A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase. A great editor I worked for during the second Pivot To Video, roughly 2013-2017, who, herself worked through the first, roughly 2003-2007, described it as a massive waste of resources that wastes more resources as it becomes clearer to everyone not directly involved how much of a waste of resources it is. I’m paraphrasing.

Having written about so many of these vintage FMV productions in recent years, I’ve developed an odd fascination with the people who starred in them. These were generally either recognizable faces with careers past their prime or, more commonly, fresh-faced strivers looking for their big break, the sort of aspirants who have been waiting tables and dressing up in superhero costumes for the tourists strolling the Hollywood Walk of Fame for time immemorial, waiting for that call from their agent that means their ship has finally come in. Needless to say, for the vast majority of the strivers, a role in a CD-ROM game was as close as they ever came to stardom. Most of them gave up their acting dream at some point, went back home, and embarked on some more sensible career. I don’t see their histories as tragic at all; they rather speak to me of the infinite adaptability of our species, our adroitness at getting on with a Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work out, leaving us only with some amusing stories to share at dinner parties. Such stories certainly aren’t nothing. For what are any of our lives in the end but the sum total of the stories we can share, the experiences we’ve accumulated? All that stuff about “if you can dream it, you can do it” is nonsense; success in any field depends on circumstance and happenstance as much as effort or desire. Nonetheless, “it’s better to try and fail than never to try at all” is a cliché I can get behind.

But I digress.

An Open API is simply a limited, revokable license to access and consume a certain subset of data and/or functionality that belongs to a closed silo. It is a visitor’s pass. The terms of the pass grant you limited access for a specific time. The terms can be altered — and routinely are altered — at the whim of the API owner. This is a painful lesson that many developers learned, for example, while working to add value to the Twitter platform by building Twitter clients. They were unceremoniously dumped after expending their energies to help Twitter build up its closed silo.

Decisions in statistical data analysis are often justified, criticized or avoided by using concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. We argue that the words ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ in statistics discourse are used in a mostly unhelpful way, and we propose to replace each of them with broader collections of attributes, with objectivity replaced by transparency, consensus, impartiality and correspondence to observable reality, and subjectivity replaced by awareness of multiple perspectives and context dependence. Together with stability, these make up a collection of virtues that we think is helpful in discussions of statistical foundations and practice.

Most of the best fun I’ve had in my life have been in big group projects that required lots of group decision making–putting together community circuses, political activism, starting a business, marriage. But, I’ve also spent a lot of time participating in group decision making for endeavors and institutions that were very, very far from the best fun. Democracy can be a joy, but it often isn’t, and I do wish the book attended more to designing for democratic joy.

Most of the best fun I’ve had in my life have been in big group projects that required lots of group decision making–putting together community circuses, political activism, starting a business, marriage. But, I’ve also spent a lot of time participating in group decision making for endeavors and institutions that were very, very far from the best fun. Democracy can be a joy, but it often isn’t. I do wish the book attended more to designing for democratic joy.

Mentioned here: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-sunday-papers-711?utm_source=feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed

Getting people to ask questions / say something at the end of a presentation / talk / lecture is difficult.

These thoughts might help:

Don’t ask for feedback, ask for advice

Cheap tricks for starting discussions in lectures

With a rough idea of the problem I’m trying to solve, the next step is build some low-effort prototypes and learn why my ideas are flawed.

I purposely call this “low-effort” instead of “rapid” prototypes. “Rapid prototyping” sets the expectation that we should invest in tooling so that we can think of an idea in the morning and have it on the lab bench by the afternoon, under the theory that faster iterations means faster progress.

The problem with rapid prototyping is that it differs significantly from production processes. When you iterate using a tool that doesn’t mimic your production process, what you get is a solution that works in the lab, but is not suitable for production.

As organizations increasingly prioritize AI above and over everything else, they risk forgetting that technology’s primary purpose is to solve problems. An AI-first approach could rapidly drive AI deployment across business operations, not because it solves “real” organizational or customer problems, but because AI implementation becomes an end in itself. The likely outcome is a lot of AI solutions in search of problems, or worse, solutions that create new problems.

Yet at times, even high-ranking managers in the Philippines were excluded from important decisions that would affect their teams. In one meeting I had with Carter, AllDone’s president, he explained that AllDone’s engineers had recently made a change that suddenly increased some contractors’ workload by 60 percent. “We should have told them ahead of time so they would know it’s coming,” Carter said, wincing a little and shrugging sheepishly, “but it just didn’t occur to us.” For most staffers at AllDone San Francisco, their Filipino colleagues were effectively invisible human infrastructure that they could take for granted.

As you grow, redundancy, sustainability, and reliability (of systems and people) all become more important than continuing to wear the extreme lean badge of honor. Investing in a pipeline of junior talent, giving your senior engineers time to coach and mentor those juniors, and slowing down your cadence to give everyone room to breathe in those new processes likely leads to a more successful company. It certainly leads to a more sustainable pipeline of talent moving up the ranks from junior to senior and beyond.

alternative way of building apps is narrative centric. Instead of creating a web of nodes with ripple effects, I want to write short stories, each living in an entry point (whether that’s a controller action, bg job, rake task, or test). Each story has a beginning (the initiating request/call) and an end (the response/output), with side effects in between. I love seeing a complete story where every major plot point is clearly visible at the controller level.

There were only three bits per host: drain, release, freeze. Not all combinations were valid.

It wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It was trying to tell you how to do software development, and it made deviating from that awkward

And now you will be able to preload just the last_posts like this:

Here’s how you fix it: Include the messy details and tell a story

I generally think of optimistic assumptions as ones that avoid or delay coordination, and pessimistic assumptions as ones that require or seek coordination. The optimistic assumption assumes it’ll get away with its plans. The pessimistic assumption takes the bull by the horns and makes sure it will.

Interactive tool for showing the names of URL components.

But when you say “extend that feeling,” is it cognitive understanding that you’re describing or an emotional response? At first it is cognitive. Then, over time, that does grow into the emotion. It’s the understanding of it that leads to the feeling. I’m sure you’ve had a situation where someone is explaining something to you, and at first you’re like, I don’t care.

A company does not have a strategy. The individuals in a company have strategies. Individuals may be better/worse at persuading others to adopt their strategy—or merge and adapt strategies—but there is no single strategy.

Ultimately, the Rot Economy’s core problem is that decisions are being made about the things you love that exist to satisfy a party — an algorithm, an executive, an investor — that has no real interest in the product itself.

Jemalloc configuration

Pretty good list of behaviors and some interview questions to suss them out

How options are passed back to lib-vips from Active Storage; also details on libvips automatically adding sharpening / unsharp mask

As a matter of law, Facebook need offer no explanation whatsoever for its content decisions, and need apply no consistent criteria. It has a First Amendment right to publish what it wants, just like The New York Times. Yet it adopts content moderation criteria, and subjects its decisions to review by the Oversight Board—not to forestall government regulation, which would almost certainly be declared unconstitutional, but to reassure its audience that it is adhering to a reasonable open access policy. It is certainly true that Elon Musk has made X much less desirable as a forum than Twitter, but as a result he’s lost audience share and advertising revenue. He’s being punished for his lack of legitimacy. Through perceptions of legitimacy, the market, in a sense, rewards good content moderation and punishes bad moderation.

Your bosses are people who got promoted for doing some other work, and are now trying to figure out this job. They’re accountable for your team’s work, but are gonna be all over the map in terms of competency and skillset to actually manage that work. You might get very lucky, or very unlucky, but for the most part they don’t want to hate their job and don’t need you to hate yours. They are just struggling to stay on top of it, and have less time for reflection and self-awareness than they, or you, would like.

Looking back, my time at GitLab is a mix of both incredibly positive and negative experiences.

Via https://mattstuchlik.com/2024/02/10/TIL-terrence-tao-machine-assisted-proofs.html

It feels like every decision you make will chip away at who will use it. Say you start out with 1,000 organizations who would use this thing. You make the decision to use Web Components, but 27 organizations just don’t like ’em so they’re out. You’re going to use Lightning CSS to modernize CSS, but 19 organizations can’t fit that into their stack, so they are out. Ninety organizations really just want what they consider to be really slick polished design out of the box, so they are out. Fifteen need a really specific open source license so they can’t do it. There are four organizations that just follow the lead of one that already ruled it out, so they are out. You haven’t finished your Code of Conduct yet so that turned off 8 orgs. What 13 organizations really need is a photo carousel component that has zooming and that’s not really on the roadmap right now so they are out. You’ve decided to go really heavy with CSS custom properties for customization but the way you’ve done it doesn’t slot in nicely with 3 organizations token strategy, so they look elsewhere. On and on.

Second, the reason we use the term visualization in our research involving blind and low-vision people is to challenge the misconception that being visually impaired excludes people from visualization altogether.

While vague, ambiguous instructions like “We work hard together so we can play hard together” and saying “our values are Entourage, the Kelce brothers, and espresso martinis” can describe more or less the same thing, only the former makes an already difficult tradeoff between making money and a company’s softer ambitions

The Javert Paradox: Suppose you find a problem with published work. If you just point it out once or twice, the authors of the work are likely to do nothing. But if you really pursue the problem, then you look like a Javert

Via r/glutenfreebaking

Andreessen has mashed various trendy philosophical and political influences together in an attempt to sell the spirit of his manifesto. He has tried to weld together the techno-progress cult of Silicon Valley, the boundless liberationism of free-market individualist liberalism, the Nietzschean vitalism of the neo-pagan and “neo-reactionary” corners of the online right, and the anti-Woke, anti-communist, anti-bureaucratic bonafides of American conservativism.

This doesn’t work.

The road to better recognition and fairer compensation for accessibility professionals is long, but it’s a journey we must take.

By understanding the true breadth and depth of accessibility as a profession, adjusting our expectations and valuing these professionals for the specialists they are, we can create a job market that not only attracts but retains the talent needed to make our world more inclusive.

Nice list of Rails linting and security tooling

Nowadays, user-generated content platforms are basically just widgets for JPGs.

What if we deconstructed code stewardship into evaluatable skills, too? Let’s try it.

At first the resources were just vector graphics, hence the name “TheVectorLab.” Then it grew to include Apparel Mockup Templates, Textures, Photoshop Brushes, Graphic & Logo Templates, and Graphic Design Learning Workshops.

Lessons from Grassroots Data Projects in the USA

Apple’s classic Pascal poster, remade as a nice clean vector image. Print at any size with the PDF link.

When William Wrigley Jr. started his new business in Chicago, he began by selling his father’s Scouring Soap, which he would entice customers to purchase by adding a free gift of baking powder. The baking powder offered ended up being far more popular than the Scouring Soap, so he switched to selling the baking powder instead. In 1892, Wrigley Jr. decided to give his baking powder customers a free gift, this time, attaching a few sticks of chewing gum to the box of baking powder.

The chewing gum was far more popular than the baking powder, so Wrigley Jr. again switched his business this time to chewing gum. In 1893, Wrigley Jr. introduced a new flavor of gum, Juicy Fruit, which helped the Wrigley Company to become the most popular and successful chewing gum company in the world.

When I see my coworkers’ anxiety spike, I no longer treat that as a problem to resolve at the symptoms level. Instead, I respect that the intelligent people I’m working with have life experiences and knowledge that is leading them to be stressed about the current situation. Anxiety is high, which means we need to sort through the situation.

Sometimes this just means they are lacking necessary information. Incomplete context can generate stress. But sometimes it means that the situation is bad, and we need to intervene in whatever ways are possible to modify the situation. Addressing the symptoms will not work, it is only by identifying the root causes and changing them that we can actually resolve the anxiety.

To do that, you have to trust that anxiety is a useful signal, and be curious about it.

A megadungeon only remains interesting when it’s both cohesive in its whole and distinctive in its parts. To return to that essay on aesthetic flaws, “whenever there are multiple forms of representation working together, there is the possibility of different aesthetic values about those kinds of representations clashing.” The smoothness of In Stars and Time greatly contributes to each loop feeling like an individual “floor” of something larger: every time something little changes, it feels sufficiently new. In contrast, each repetitive Diablo dungeon is alike in its structure and design, and since the differences mostly extend to visuals, I see that smoothness as a flaw.

The next step past this kind of repetitive design, or maybe a relative to it, is procedural generation; for instance, One Page Dungeon, which produces dungeon floor layouts and basic item descriptions. Using it feels like the place I eventually got to with my dungeon, when I ran out of inspiration: googling fantasy tropes or flipping through novels to imagine appropriate things to put in empty rooms. In other words, using it feels a little like cheating. With no shade to these kinds of tools – they do require human input, after all – I can’t not think of how people use AI to generate inspiration, a process that cuts off one’s ability to do so on their own.

TLDR: At some point, we told design they couldn’t sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites.

The three decision-making styles

The layoffs at Google at the beginning of 2023, didn’t impact me or my writing team directly, however they cast a shadow over the year. I try to look at difficult situations through a lens of what I can actually do to change things or improve the situation. At my level of management I’m not privy to layoff decisions, but I can be there to support my team and make space to talk about their concerns. I can strive to make sure our work and the impact of it is visible, and I can make sensible business decisions to make the most of resources in a more constrained environment. And so, after the initial shock of it all, that’s how I’ve approached this year.

ideally you’d try to see it as a funny story you can tell friends rather than a hurtful snub that needs to bother you.

Some posts about OKRs (mostly the bad stuff) from The Uncertainty Project

The three decision-making styles

Alternative BigInt ID identifiers for Rails

Turbo 8 Page Refreshes (+ Morphing) Explained at Length

the minute we trot out the term “tech debt,” everyone is upset but no one is listening

Footer gallery

In the heart of Minneapolis stands the Irene Hixon Whitney Footbridge, designed by Siah Armajani. Connecting the Walker Art Museum Sculpture Garden with Loring Park, it has inscribed in its lintel a poem by John Ashbery. Our film, Steel and Air, aims to capture and enhance Ashbery’s poem by chronicling a man’s journey through life.

A Management Maturity Model for Performance

The substitution of heroic developer narratives for user success happened imperceptibly. Admitting it was a mistake would embarrass the good and the great alike. Once the lemon sellers embed the data-light idea that improved “Developer Experience” (“DX”) leads to better user outcomes, improving “DX” became and end unto itself. Many who knew better felt forced to play along.

Questions for a new technology.
Feb 5, 2019

In my experience, engineers confronted with a new problem often leap to creating a system to solve that problem rather than addressing it directly. I’ve found this particularly true when engineers approach a problem domain they don’t yet understand well, including building prestige.

For example, when an organization decides to invest into its engineering brand, the initial plan will often focus on project execution. It’ll include a goal for publishing frequency, ensuring content is representationally accurate across different engineering sub-domains, and how to incentivize participants to contribute. If you follow the project plan carefully, you will technically have built an engineering brand, but my experience is that it’ll be both more work and less effective than a less systematic approach.

This repo contains code to experiment with different background jobs fairness strategies.

The primary way to empower the team is to help reduce cognitive load, not leave all the mess up to them.

This does give those people who want to change software engineering some pointers on how to do it. Firstly, overshoot, because everybody’s going to meet you a short way along the path. Secondly, don’t only talk up the benefits of your proposed change, but the similarities with what people already do, to reduce the size of the gap. Thirdly, make sure that the likely partial adoptions of the change are improvements over the status quo ante. Fourthly, don’t get too attached to the words you use and your choice of their meanings: they mean just what anybody chooses them to mean—no more and no less.

How modern software is made

To know how software gets built today, there are six core concepts that agency leaders need to grasp:

User-centered design
Agile software development
Product ownership
DevOps
Building with loosely coupled parts
Modular contracting
There’s a short overview of each of these in GSA’s “State Software Budgeting Handbook,” which I co-wrote in 2019, so I won’t re-explain them here. It’s not enough for agency principals to read a paragraph about each of these, though. Without about an hour of training in each of these subjects, agency leaders can have a good base of knowledge to how projects are being executed—or should be executed—by vendors and agency staff.

Once upon a time, it seemed like projecting antisocial behaviours was a rebellious move, but it feels increasingly as though the countercultural statement is just being nice.

TBM 257: How to Make the Case for Slowing Down to Speed Up

The component gallery

His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?

The open-science movement has always had a tension between burn-it-all-down and here’s-one-quick-trick. Put them together and it kinda sounds like a cult that can’t see outward, but I see it as more the opposite, as an awkward coalition representing fundamentally incoherent views. But both sides of the coalition need each other: the reformers need the old institutional powers to make a real difference in practice, and the oldsters need the reformers because outsiders are losing confidence in the system.

Good arguments don’t rest their weight on load-bearing ideologies. They’re so common-sensically good that they work with a wide variety of ideological or moral systems.

The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI

Summary: When interacting with generative-AI bots, users engage in six types of conversations, depending on their skill levels and their information needs. Interfaces for UI bots should support and accommodate this diversity of conversation styles.

TBM 256: The Slide

An example of an HTML Web Component

Reflecting on 18 years at Google

Here’s how to read and then rewrite the title and abstract of an academic paper.

Much like the United States has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that caseworkers for immigration and passport services should be staffed in every Congressman’s office and not at the agency that actually handles immigration or passport issuance, there very likely exist people at the bank whose job is working the bank more than it is working for the bank.

Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model”
and neither should you.

11 Dutch oven chicken recipes

PgBouncer

My general observation is that engineering organizations pivot to delivery as a proxy for success when they don’t trust what their product and design counterparts are doing. They stick to what they can control: delivery.

Preparing Conference Talk Delivery

Ok, 2PL is easy to use and has strong isolation, so this means we’re ready to go and don’t need anything better than 2PL, right?
I’m afraid not. 2PL has a couple of big disadvantages: poor read-scalability and live-lock progress.

A prioritization exercise.

Humans are weird. You may only be able to use this trick once.

If you’ve interacted in the product strategy sessions, you’ll find I’ve historically been opposed to A/B testing - to running behavioral experiments. Today we’re going to talk about why that is, and why we are moving away from A/B tests in product. Before we get to that, I want to talk about why making this decision matters, and how we’ve been down this road before.

In the project model, the best you can really ask for is time-to-market. But in the product model, you can focus on the much more impactful time-to-money.

What is especially ironic is that you might think that a time-to-market project at least would get done faster than a time-to-money product team would achieve an outcome. But so often it is just the opposite.

All sports involve some kind of disabling impediment, in the form of rules that restrict the ways in which one can achieve the object of the game.

Writing better Action Mailers: Revisiting a core Rails concept

Let me requote Cat Hicks’ wonderful Twitter thread on this:

Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems

What I mean is, sometimes it’s really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it’s often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work

I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It’s one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff.

What would it look like if we could ask, “how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving” instead of “how do I take away all these annoying hard problems.” The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish.

However, LLMs are not a direct solution to most of the NLP use-cases companies have been working on. They are extremely useful, but if you want to deliver reliable software you can improve over time, you can’t just write a prompt and call it a day. Once you’re past prototyping and want to deliver the best system you can, supervised learning will often give you better efficiency, accuracy and reliability than in-context learning for non-generative tasks — tasks where there is a specific right answer that you want the model to find. Applying rules and logic around your models to do data transformations or handle cases that can be fully enumerated is also extremely important.

Throttling Rails logins with Rack Attack

The Grug Brained Developer
A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained

https://gomakethings.com/the-most-important-articles-ever-written-about-web-development/

Supporting your customer support staff with internal service design
VIEWPOINT
For most organisations, the dream of providing an entirely digital self-service for customers is often far from reality. With many services, there is still (and always will be) a need to blend digital self-service with real-time help from customer support staff.

What Does it Mean to be Wholesome in 2023: An Analysis of the 2023 Wholesome Direct

PostgreSQL Lock Conflicts

This tool shows all commands and locks in postgres. If you select a command, it lists the locks that it acquires, commands that conflicts with it and commands are allowed to run concurrently with it without conflict. If you select a lock it lists commands that acquire the lock and what are the other conflicting locks.

The Source of Readability
Readability is often treated as a subjective thing. When someone says code is more readable, what they really mean is they can more easily read it. The straw-man goes, this is all taste and convention, just follow the team’s rules and use the auto-formatter.

The Hidden Complexities of Running Shell Commands in Ruby

I had the weird pleasure of listening to two books back-to-back that created a serendipitous connection. The first was Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, a behind the scenes first-person account of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its attempts to usurp democracy. The second was The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, a look into the strange history of the popular Myers-Briggs personality test.

When the Worst Happens (OS Feels 2016)

What follows is the text I used as my guide during my 2016 Open Source and Feelings talk When the Worst Happens. You can also view a video recording of the talk.

Breakdown of dam, like gdpr

This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding.

I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce outside of it, like writing letters and counting to 30 days. (People telling me they were incapable of doing these two things is why I started ghostwriting letters for debtors.) We now have literal computer programs exempting heuristically identified professional managerial class members from debt collection, inclusive of their legitimate debts, so that debt collectors can more profitably conserve their time to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit.

Administrative burden in the (regulated) private sector

Freakonomics and global warming: What happens to a team of “rogues” when there is no longer a stable center to push against? (a general problem with edgelords)

I’m a computer scientist, so I’m bound by law and custom to mention that this essay is an example of the process described in this essay.

Bi-temporal data has been around since the early 1990’s, based on the pioneering work of Richard Snodgrass

Track both the date it actually happened and the date that the system became aware of it (effective date and posted date)

When social apps launched select features

Jupyter notebooks and Ruby

What we talk about when we talk about System Design

Ruby ML

Rails rescue_responses

Ruby promotion

The paternalistic insistence that people be spoonfed content they “disagree with” on social media

People who argue that certain information should be pushed to everyone on a social media platform eventually need to just admit that the reason behind their belief is one of two things: either they agree with the viewpoints they’re saying we need more of, or they are simply unaffected by the consequences of those viewpoints.

I think it might just be that simple.

HOW
TO

MAKE

SENSE

OF ANY

MESS

Salmon soup

In my experience, engineers confronted with a new problem often leap to creating a system to solve that problem rather than addressing it directly. I’ve found this particularly true when engineers approach a problem domain they don’t yet understand well, including building prestige.

Anti-populism, and its cousin of anti-patriotism, is alluring for our elites. Many lack faith in fellow citizens, and think the work of convincing a large complex country isn’t worth it, or may not even be possible. Others can’t imagine politics itself as a useful endeavor because they believe in a utopia. Indeed, those who believe in certain forms of socialism and libertarianism believe that politics itself shouldn’t exist, that one must perfect the soul of human-kind, and then the messy work of making a society will become unnecessary. In this frame, political institutions, like courts, corporations, and government agencies, are unimportant except as aesthetic objects.

Anti-populism and anti-patriotism leads nowhere, because these attitudes are about convincing citizens to give up their power, to give up on the idea that America is a place we can do politics to make a society.

A common theme between the devs discussing why loading bars don’t move at a consistent crawl - we’ve all had loading bars that jump forward seemingly at random, or zoom to 99% before sitting there for an unfold amount of time - revealed that it isn’t because of the way games load (which loading bars don’t follow anyway), but because we as players simply wouldn’t believe them if they did.

“Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it,”….

Cuprite configuration

It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe the defining millennial experience is actually just a deep longing to make things that matter, the crippling anxiety about what that might actually require — earnestness, introspection, material risk — and the delusion that you can achieve mainstream acceptance and still be your raw, unflinching self on the largest possible stage.

But the book fails spectacularly because Kuang is more interested in supporting the established myths inside the design industry rather than investigating why those myths don’t line up with reality he reports.

People can read their manager’s mind

Cognitive Load Developer’s Handbook

Nice visual design tweaks, like centering irregular images.

A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring.

Jura Instructions

Nice list of open source llm models

Estimation. Cone of uncertainty. Some good lists.

How to scale a JavaScript project over time:

1. One file
2. One function
3. One class

American School of Geomancy
THE 12 BRANCHES OF GEOMANCY

So even beyond The Thick of It and Veep and In the Loop—the latter of which features David Rasche, AKA Karl, as the nastiest US senator ever put on-screen—Armstrong has done a lot of work that begins from the worldview that, because those in power can choose what veneer gets presented as “sane” and “rational,” the world’s afflictions arise from that dissonance between the things we’re conditioned to accept and the reasons we’re being conditioned to accept them in the first place.

From this vantage point, Logan is basically the horrors of the world manifested in human form: he holds no illusions, except that nothing else is possible, and alternates between a weary man who barely cares about the trappings he’s waltzing through and the sheer fury he fires off at anyone who dares to suggest that there’s more to the world than this.

Via phil gyford

Nice chart of what goes wrong with product market fit and startup stuff

Values and labels and variables. A nice definition

The equivalent of: I’ll know it when I see it.

Efficiency isn’t simply about maximizing throughput. It’s about finding the optimum balance between quality and quantity. I’m super intrigued by professions that use junk work as a buffer here. Filling out documentation is junk work. Doctors might not have to do that in a future scenario. But is the answer to schedule more surgeries? Or is the answer to let doctors have more downtime? Much to my chagrin, we tend to optimize towards more intense work schedules whenever we introduce new technologies while downgrading the status of the highly skilled person. Why? And at what cost?

Nice offsite or conference planning tips

I appreciate that it makes a distinction between the order to create the presentation, and the order of the presentation.

Math is great.

Rails generators can help remove significant friction from the process of spinning up new ideas, but you don’t have to limit yourself to the included generators. You can also create custom generators as long as you’re familiar with the available APIs and know where the speed bumps are.

One of the comments:

It’s always been my intuition that null-hypothesis significance testing is even more inappropriate in the tech industry than academia. The traditional framework considers an asymmetric standard of evidence between the null and alternative hypothesis, but oftentimes in industry settings there’s no natural choice for a “null hypothesis” at all. There’s no reason NOT to chase noise when all alternatives are costless or equivalently costly. But it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this even at big-name “independent thinker” firms. They end up tying themselves in knots trying to justify some arbitrary choice as a “null hypothesis” just to reshape the problem into something traditional methodology can handle–presumably because so long as they’re going with the state-of-the-art in science at the universities, nobody can blame them for how they’ve done things.

There is a natural social hierarchy, threatened by decadence, able to be overcome only through power centralized around the infliction of violence. You know, soft times, hard men, that whole fashy cycle.

Via Rob:

Found it: this is the blockchain security report I was thinking of. I remembered it more about security, but the actual angle here was “practically speaking, is this actually decentralized?”

They also have a BOM tool.

A few years ago we talked about the two modes of pop-microeconomics:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior.

Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-school teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficiency in the market.

The trick is knowing whether you’re gonna get 1 or 2 above. They’re complete opposites!

But Generation X, which came of age in a moment of political stagnation and cynicism and drift—and, for Musk and his cohort, came into mind-bending wealth through hitting it big on some technologies that have not on balance changed humanity for the better—has been spiking to the right for reasons that seem to go beyond the normal trend in that direction as people age. Forged amid a dead consensus of center-right managed decline, they did not really have much chance to participate in public life at a level above the affective, or theatrical. There was still politics—there is always politics—but it unfolded along a meaningless Coke/Pepsi binary.

Socialism and barbarism are now both back on the menu, and each on the ascent. But for members of a generation who saw their politics as inseparable from themselves without ever thinking nearly as hard about the former as they did about the latter, this is all still a matter of performance. Such politics are easy to change because they were never really anchored to any actual system of belief. An obliterating narcissism and sawed-off selfishness is latent in American culture like lead in contaminated water; in the absence of countervailing principles, it will naturally make its presence felt over time. If your politics is just about Opposing Authority, for instance, with no regard for or sense of the structural and material realities of actual power, then remaining true to those politics is just a matter of propping up new authority figures to rage against.

Any idiot can do that, and many idiots have.

The other thing about ARA I’d like to highlight was the de facto method of leadership—the anarchistic “leadership by example.” Instead of a top-down structure where a few intellectuals dictate strategy and tactics on the larger mass—ARA chapters made their arguments by producing real world examples of what they were talking about. Think we should all do Cop-Watch patrols? Show me what that looks like. Convinced we need to make feminism a core part of our culture? Build a crew that exudes that vibe. Want economic demands as part of the program? See how we are doing it in our town, etc. etc. etc.

Lecture 5: Peter Thiel "Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory" Notes

What a time it is to be a prison abolitionist! Millions of people filled the streets during the 2020 uprisings, forcing a national conversation around defunding and abolishing the police. The abolitionist lexicon broke into the mainstream. Suddenly everyone had—and had to have—an opinion on the movement. The newly invigorated abolitionist movement has faced swift […]

A deep dive into how Khan Academy took a 1 million-line Python monolith and split it into ~40 Go services in a more than 3 year-long project.

Also img2prompt

Dokku is dev ops for dummies and a cheaper alternative to Heroku. Recently I've migrated a couple of my projects to it. In this blog post, I will describe how to setup and migrate a Rails app to Dokku with PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis and Let's Encrypt or Cloudflare for free SSL.

MOST PEOPLE DON’T HAVE THAT MUCH DATA

Chocolate crumb cake is a moist coffee cake topped with big fudgy crumbs ~ breakfast doesn’t get any better than this!

Via https://mastodon.social/@fgregg/109730056199340303

Responsive scrollable videos without obscure video encoding requirements. Compatible with React, Svelte, Vue, and plain HTML.

The only sustainable counter to the fantasy of a lost racial or national solidarity that never was, is to build a real class solidarity in the present.

If you’re running an Nginx proxy configuration, you can run into the following error in your logs.

Substack is a new and improved way to write and distribute a book, communicate, and build a community while doing so.

Voice, Exit, Loyalty

Normconf was amazing!

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman famously characterized the choice that is faced by people within declining institutions as being between “voice” and “exit.” Either you speak up to change things, or you leave and look for something better.

“The body has a memory,” she told me, and looked at her hands. On one finger she wore a gold ring with a fuchsia stone. If you got close you could read, engraved in capital letters below the stone, TYSON. The ring, a gift from the company, had belonged to her husband. Her hands always hurt, pulsing as if they had been hit. She could no longer lift or open things—her fingers didn’t work as she wished. Yet in her sleep, she processed birds with such a ferocity that she would wake up covered in scratches and cuts. Her doctor gave her a cast-like glove to wear at night.

I never used to pair program, and then I spent four months on a pair-by-default team. Here’s what I learned.

When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we’ll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨

How can you work more effectively with diverse individuals and teams as a product leader? We all tend to have our “go-to” explanations when things go wrong at work. A couple of examples: You can usually boil things down to leadership issues. That and grit and perseverance.

A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring.

Thought: “action without strategy is chaos”

A modern Pinboard app for 2022.

People own what they help create
Real change happens in real work
Those who do the work, do the change
Connect the system to more of itself
Start anywhere, follow everywhere
The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.

via https://blog.mattedgar.com/2022/11/19/weeknote-14-to-18-november-2022/

John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process]….The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted.

Here are some strategy prompts to guide you through the perverse holiday ritual we call annual planning. Are these meant to be challenging? Yes. You’ll notice that each prompt explores a tension and/or polarity. Do organizations AVOID statements like this like the plague? Yes. Most do. Why? Because focus is a threat to whatever political stalemate exists.

The thing is with shops on the web is that once upon a time they made a ton of sense because people spent time actually browsing the web.

Today? Not so much.

Which is why we individual stores resort to aggressive email marketing, and the rest is dominated by retailed large enough to colonise mental real estate: Amazon basically.

You probably use some type of error monitoring software to notify you when an exception is raised in your application, but are you being notified when there is an anomaly in user behavior?

Inline validation in web forms is useful when it works, but frustrating when it fails. Too often it leads to an endless stream of disruptive error messages or dead-ends without any chance of getting out. Let’s fix it.

When a market is saturated, a better product wins. For example, it makes sense to build a better SQL because the market is already well educated about the usage of the technology.

When a market is new, better marketing wins. For example, it makes sense to educate the market about graphs, even with a simpler product, so devs understand when to use it and how. Not knowing how to position or market the software cost us dearly.

The stories are individual and nuanced, but the pattern is consistent. What they tell us about their people and about themselves is a thing you already know.

When you are doing work that…

you give a shit about

in an environment that supports you

…you are unstoppable. And when you aren’t, you aren’t.

Those two ingredients come up again and again. They’ve been the same ingredients since Andy Grove was writing about them when we were the kids playing with our dessert. They’ve been the same since Drucker before him. There’s a whole trade press devoted to re-discovering and re-naming them every five years. Is it “giving a shit,” or “ambition,” or “employee engagement,” or “hustle”? Is it “Quiet Quitting,” or is it “work to rule,” or is it “presenteeism”?

System programming for Ruby programmers.

Petersen’s most acute insight is perhaps in identifying a link between relentlessly optimized childhoods designed to prevent downward mobility, and the professionally competent but profoundly enervated millennials overwhelmed by the prospect of canceling plans, of keeping plans, of cooking food, of texting their mothers. I think she is correct. I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated. Unlike education and work, it offers no socially obvious meritocratic path. The moments where, like sourdough, it proves, are largely invisible — in cooking, in walking, corresponding with a friend, in chatting with a neighbor or registering to give blood. They cannot be tallied up and put on a resume. They are never “finished.” The progress you make is spiraling rather than linear; circling steadily, slowly, around your weak points, taking two steps forward and one step back, building habits so slowly that only in retrospect can you see your life become different than it was. And there is no one who can tell you that you did it right. But this is not the condition of life under capitalism, this is life itself. And it is a sad irony that though the fear of life may be produced by class imperatives within capitalism, the impulse to restrict it to a problem of capitalism is itself part of the same fearful rejection of the task of living.

Coming from SPA frameworks, Stimulus.js might feel underwhelming or frustrating. Here are some guides to help us take the best out of it.

Ruby Rails meetup

“indifference curves”

Finalist #1 of the Book Review Contest

mildly dynamic websites and the hackish state of jamming with php

the therapeutic is so wholly the established bedrock for any hope of “wellness” that it’s difficult for most people here to even understand how or why you’d question it as a metaphysics. The therapeutic proceeds from a mechanistic model of the human body and self. Its domains are full of useful information and even wisdom about that mechanistic how, but psychology should take up the same epistemic humility that’s crucial for all disciplines in making claims about the why of our lives.

Recently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors, as distinct from general engineering management:
I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have written I’m mainly looking for advice on how to manage projects from two layers away. How do I give managers creative freedom to manage however they like while also stressing the importance of deadlines?

What is Agile? And where does it come from?

And it appealed to managers because, as Nathan Ensmenger writes, “The essence of the software-engineering movement was control: control over complexity, control over budgets and scheduling, and, perhaps most significantly, control over a recalcitrant workforce.” This was precisely the kind of professional that waterfall development was designed to accommodate.

I have written a lot about the pendulum swing between engineering and management, so I often hear from people who are angsting about the transition. A quick recap of the relevant posts: The Engineer/Manager Pendulum Engineering Management: the Pendulum or the Ladder If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Engineering Isn’t A Demotion There are two anxieties…

I’m not a process freak, but I do believe teams should have their house in order. You can get by with very little process overhead. Too many teams are spinning in circles (or sprints). It often isn’t their fault, but still…the level of reactivity is so draining.

What I’ve found effective in these cases is to lead with constructive energy directed towards a positive outcome. Even if you can’t get your peer’s performance addressed directly, you can often overcome your peer’s bad performance by generating excitement in the direction you want to go. Enough excitement will give the resolution avoidant manager a way to solve their problem without actually engaging with the situation that they’re unwilling to address.

My read of “The Food Lab,” which I think is not uncommon, is that it’s a book built around the idea of optimization. There’s certainly, as you said, unpacking the science, and explaining why this or that recipe works. But it also implies that a recipe can have a platonic ideal, or a perfect state.

Certainly, I understand why you would read it that way, and why a lot of people would read it that way, but that’s definitely not where I am right now. My views on a lot of these things have changed in the last six or seven years. Even when I was writing “The Food Lab,” when I said something like “the best,” what I really meant was: “I’m going to give you some basic descriptions that I think a lot of people would agree are what ‘the best mac and cheese’ is. There are certain things that maybe not everybody agrees on, but here are my specific goals right now, which I think probably a lot of people agree are good goals to have for macaroni and cheese. And now I’m going to show you ways you can optimize those specific things. If you disagree that those are good things in mac and cheese, well, I want to provide you with enough background information so that you can then modify the recipe to make it to what you think is best.”

Anyway, what’s simple to you may well be complex to me, and what’s complex to you may well be simplifiable but if you stop at making it possible, nobody will get that benefit.

It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Perhaps understandably for a scholar with an interest in utopia, if less expectedly for a scholar of criticism, Nersessian believes in the importance of pressing forward with new visions rather than just critiquing existing ideas and systems. “I think lots of people believe the world right now is pretty bad—politically, ecologically—and that capitalism is responsible for a very large part of the situation. But being against capitalism doesn’t entail being for anything else,” she said:

It’s all very well to say “capitalism turns us into commodities, that’s degrading, human beings shouldn’t be degraded.” But how should we be treated, and how should we live? What would love and sex—among other things, like health care or having a job—look like in a good world? It’s important to take the risk of answering those questions, even if the answers are messy and provisional.

On the most basic human level, I suspect our generation still hasn’t processed our shared collective trauma of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and our anger is now still coming out in very unhealthy ways. With crypto we’ve decided to do the most American thing ever, to commoditize our rage at the financial system into a financial product. Because after all, we’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and the only problem with CDOs wasn’t the moral hazard, but that you didn’t have a piece of the action. This time you have a choice, but I suspect history is going to have the same lesson to teach us about the perils of greed untempered by reason.

A comprehensive, curated list of open-source Ruby on Rails applications.

In psychology, the term “insight” is used to describe a recognition of one’s own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one’s own behavior. It’s an example of metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, and it’s something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind.

Insight is precisely what Musk’s strawberry-picking AI lacks, as do all the other AIs that destroy humanity in similar doomsday scenarios. I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.”

kafka explained with otters

https://web.archive.org/web/20210817013129/https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/softwareisprocess.html

argues letting the rich keep their money can be deflationary as taxing it.

On feeling overwhelmed by systems. remove the stress first before fixing the system.

Discover the easiest way to get started contributing to open source. Over 61,239 devs are helping 6,439 projects with our free, community developed tools

Compliance vs. respect

“Once we realized we weren’t being offered a seat at the table, we pulled up our own with AFSCME. The people who work here have invested too much in this library to be so easily dismissed, and we hope to work as a union to protect our ability to serve anyone who relies on us.”

This denialism-as-counter-insurgency works because it goes beyond the political: it resonates with those who suffer a spiritual deficit.  That is to say, those who turn away from these moments of cathartic rebellion do so out of spiritual poverty. Or perhaps, more generously, we might attribute this abhorrent lack to a fear response that has been conditioned by deep trauma. The uprising calls us to live up to the historical task of our generation, but we turn away out of fear of repression, violence, prison, losing our friends or family. And then we deny the rebellion happened at all, or we deny it had any “legitimacy,” to avoid the shame of our own failure.

sukey.org

“Not only is it a burden on recipients,” she added, “but also, the senders still know that the recipients have to read [the posts] in order to [report them]. [The abusers] still get the satisfaction. It really needs to be disincentivized.”

Things you’re allowed to do

CRT embraces “race consciousness in the service of racial justice.” But, CRT teaches, we should be aware of racial inequality not because people of different races are inherently different, but because they are the same.

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

The reality is, when you’re a manager, not everyone will like working for you. You could be the greatest boss in the world and some people still wouldn’t like you. Partly that’s because being a good manager means giving feedback, addressing problems, and holding people accountable in ways they might not like. If you need to correct someone a lot, or have difficult conversations with them about their work, or say no to something they wanted, it’s human nature that you might not end up being their favorite person. Or you might have a style that doesn’t align well with theirs — maybe you’re very direct and matter-of-fact and that feels brusque to them, or maybe you’re a planner and a devotee of process and they work more spontaneously. That wouldn’t mean either of you is in the wrong; it would just mean you don’t mesh well together.

Sometimes, too, people dislike a job or a manager for reasons that aren’t as much about the manager as they are about other things going on with that person — a dislike of their career path, stressors outside of work, a generally bad fit with the role, or all kinds of things.

Or, frankly, you might be an imperfect manager — most of us are — but that doesn’t mean you’re a horrible one. Managing people is hard, and every manager will get things wrong now and then. Ideally you’ll establish a track record of fairness, transparency, and good judgment so your mistakes are judged within that context … but you still might encounter an employee who judges your mistakes harshly. You’re basically on a stage when you’re the boss; you’re going to be scrutinized by the people under you, and there will be things they take issue with. It’s part of the job, and you’ve got to be okay with that.

Or, yes, you might be a terrible manager! It’s possible. There are lots of terrible managers out there. But I’m skeptical that you’re terrible in the specific ways the review described (mean and intolerant of mistakes), because your detailed explanation of your approach to mistakes sounds pretty healthy and because you sound genuinely thoughtful and caring toward team members. People can delude themselves, of course, and managers aren’t always reliable narrators of their own management styles. But the way you talk about how you operate — and your reaction now — doesn’t seem to line up with that review or with the feedback people have given your boss about you. That doesn’t mean that review is definitely wrong. I obviously can’t say that with certainty. But I don’t think it warrants the self-flagellation you’re doing.

What is the difference between a bias and expertise?

In a previous newsroom she worked in, there were a few people who had pilots’ licenses. When a plane crash happened, those people were looked to as experts. Similarly, newsrooms seek to hire people with military experience, seeing that as expertise as opposed to bias. Many news outlets sent reporters to cover Hurricane Maria who were either Puerto Rican or had lived in Puerto Rico. Ho believes she’s a better business reporter because she worked in banking for three and a half years.

So why do we consider some lived experiences — being a woman, being a person of color, being queer, having had an abortion — biases, and others expertise?

At the root of the problem is that Google conflates the meaning of data with its physical representation. When you’re at Google scale, this sort of thing probably makes sense. After all, they have an internal tool that allows you to compare the finances behind programmer hours vs network utilization vs the cost to store
x
x
bytes vs all sorts of other things. Unlike most companies in the tech space, paying engineers is one of Google’s smallest expenses. Financially it makes sense for them to waste programmers’ time in order to shave off a few bytes.

Outside of the top five tech companies, none of us is within five orders of magnitude of being Google scale. Your startup cannot afford to waste engineer hours on shaving off bytes. But shaving off bytes and wasting programmers’ time in the process is exactly what protobuffers are optimized for.

Let’s face it. You are not Google scale and you never will be. Stop cargo-culting technology just because “Google uses it” and therefore “it’s an industry best-practice.”

As is often the case with tech companies, instead of having a thoughtful, careful analysis of what’s going on and creating a framework around that, they have simply cut out the process and thrown it in the trash. Negotiation around compensation is something that can, will, and in many cases should happen - if someone doesn’t feel as if they’re getting what they want, they should be able to express that, and a company should be open to that discussion. The blunt-force “no negotiations” policy doesn’t actually solve any problems because it doesn’t offer any solutions - it doesn’t address pay equity, it doesn’t address bias, it doesn’t address…anything? It mostly just says “trust us, we’ll pay people better, and we intend to pay people we think are doing good work more, because they’re good. Somehow this will not be biased.”

The De-risking Government Technology Project provides expert, actionable guidance to the public sector for delivering federally-funded, custom technology projects successfully.

“Because there must be no bad surprises,” Sedgwick writes, “and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.” In Curtis films, the bad news seems to be the only real news and it is always uncovered in roughly the same way. The banks take over, a high-minded experiment fails, the sexy Soviets come marching in, and an unidentified Black American nods off, too high to act.

“There’s this kind of left figure, but sometimes not really on the left, who tends to think of power entirely in terms of organizations and figures at the top and elites,” UC Berkeley lecturer Jasper Bernes wrote to me. “I think of Julian Assange as a kind of figure like that, or maybe Glenn Greenwald. There’s a left media sphere which really doesn’t see anything happening except these powerful people making decisions and producing discourse, which is really not the way societies and economies work.”

Racism [and] white supremacy are not things that are so convenient that they only happen when full intention is present, or true malice is present,” the employee said. “Evil is not required. We’re not so lucky as for this to come down to good and evil. It’s as simple as creating a space where people do not feel welcome.”

The employee continued: “The silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does. It creates that atmosphere that feels suffocating to people. It doesn’t require active malice. It’s not that convenient.”

How to take nonprofit board minutes that move your nonprofit forward and and don’t subject your nonprofit to unnecessary risks.

181 votes, 13 comments. This isn’t a professional “how to design 101” it’s just a process I have used to build and design websites without a design …

great statement

Serving ActiveStorage uploads through a CDN with Rails direct routes

if you try to cherry-pick any single issue, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Sometimes, Youtube wants us to think of its self-serve, algorithmic ad/publishing system as untouched by human hands, an interplay of pure math, initiated and steered by third parties whose choices are not Youtube’s responsibility.

Other times, Youtube wants us to think of it as a corporate person, with identities and values, priorities and ethics. The selective demand that Youtube be considered a moral actor – but only for the outcomes that reflect well on the company – leads to this contradiction.

Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.

But what senior developers are good at is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.

And this is because concurrency is too difficult for humans to understand and maintain. Maybe you can create a system that makes extensive use of it, and have it be correct for one day. But think of your team! Even if you’re a solo developer, you and you-plus-six-months makes you a team.

Finance for non-finance directors: Part 1

Our lives as UI designers have never been easier with a host of amazing tools at our disposal. In this article, Paul Boag explores some of the useful tools that he keeps close at his work.

scheduling points

.The basic problem that GameStop is revealing in our economy writ large is that as a society, we are increasingly putting our time, energy, capital and talent we could use to build fun or useful things into gambling or acquiring market power.

Gain a deep understanding of a particular system and its rules.
Step outside of that system and look for something surprising that subverts its rules.
Use what you find as the basis for making something new and creative.

The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

css

As long as tooling keeps privileging the manager who wants to grade their team rather than learn from the development process, these tools will be actively distrusted by the engineers who instrument them and create false confidence in managers using them. The right tool here should be designed exclusively from a learning perspective.

Alternatives jobs and roles for software engineers.

civic tech internal organizational culture change tactics

Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers (and what to do about it)

when to use agile or lean

Rather than simply letting people check a box for will/won’t participate in contact tracing, they broke down the process into its component parts. Those involve contacting public health officials, sharing personal information with them, and then self-isolating if conditions call for it.

lots of product ans strategy lists.

A psychology professor whom I’ve never met once wrote to me a mini-manifesto, disparaging my efforts as a critic. He wrote:

There are two kinds of people in science: bumblers and pointers. Bumblers are the people who get up every morning and make mistakes, trying to find truth but mainly tripping over their own feet, occasionally getting it right but typically getting it wrong. Pointers are the people who stand on the sidelines, point at them, and say “You bumbled, you bumbled.” These are our only choices in life. If one is going to choose to do the easier of these two jobs, then one should at least know what one is talking about. Sorry, but I think by and large you don’t.

I think this dualism is counterproductive. If, instead of dividing the world into “bumblers” and “pointers” (and let me not even comment on the ridiculousness of a research psychologist making such a categorization and saying “these are our only choices in life”), we were to consider “bumbling” and “pointing” to be two essential activities conducted by any scientist—and, for that matter, if we were to recognize that one can and should spend lots of time criticizing one’s own work (that is, “pointing” at our “bumbling”) and that we can and should consider criticism to itself be an ongoing development (that is, “bumbling” in our “pointing”)—then, I think our research and our criticism could improve.

To draw a humble analogy from my experiences on the street: If each of us were to spend some time as a pedestrian, some time as a bicyclist, some time as a bus rider, and some time as a car driver, than I think we’d all be able to interact more efficiently and considerately. But if we associate each person (or, in the sociology example, each area of expertise) with only one role, we get all kinds of trouble, as indicated by various psychology and biology researchers who can’t seem to handle open criticism.

A friend asked me to share a few favorite resources on design systems. I thought I’d share them with you, too.

It was, Rays manager Kevin Cash confirmed afterward, all Margot’s call. That’s part and parcel of how these Rays operate, seeking every edge to shorten the odds against what is undeniably a more talented Dodger team. It’s not just nerd shit, either. Those edges can be found on spreadsheets and in payroll forms, but on the diamond as well. If Margot, a fast and decently smart baserunner, saw something from third base that his coaches couldn’t see from the dugout, they’ve specifically empowered him to try to take advantage.

“We try to do things and make decisions that allow players to be athletic and be the athletes they are,” Cash said. “If Manny felt he had a read on it, for whatever reason, it’s tough for me to say yes or no just because he’s a talented baserunner. He might be seeing something that certainly I’m not or can’t appreciate in the moment right there. He’s trying to do something to pick his team up.”

There are many phenomenal critics speaking out about technology these days. To name only a few: Safiya Noble has written at length about the ways that the algorithms built by companies like Google and Facebook reinforce racism and sexism; Virginia Eubanks has exposed the ways in which high-tech tools of surveillance and control are first deployed against society’s most vulnerable members; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has explored how our usage of social media becomes habitual; Jen Schradie has shown the ways in which, despite the hype to the contrary, online activism tends to favor right-wing activists and causes; Sarah Roberts has pulled back the screen on content moderation to show how much of the work supposedly being done by AI is really being done by overworked and under-supported laborers; Ruha Benjamin has made clear the ways in which discriminatory designs get embedded in and reified by technical systems; Christina Dunbar-Hester has investigated the ways in which communities oriented around technology fail to overcome issues of inequality; Sasha Costanza-Chock has highlighted the need for an approach to design that treats challenging structural inequalities as the core objective, not an afterthought; Morgan Ames expounds upon the “charisma” that develops around certain technologies; and Meredith Broussard has brilliantly inveighed against the sort of “technochauvinist” thinking—the belief that technology is the solution to every problem—that is so clearly visible in The Social Dilemma. To be clear, this list of critics is far from all-inclusive. There are numerous other scholars who certainly could have had their names added here, and there are many past critics who deserve to be named for their disturbing prescience.

the matter at hand is not to ask “what kind of computers do we want?” but to ask “what kind of society do we want?” and to then have the bravery to ask how (or if) computers really fit into that world—and if they do fit, how ubiquitous they will be, and who will be responsible for the mining/assembling/disposing that are part of those devices’ lifecycles. Certainly, these are not easy questions to ask, and they are not pleasant questions to mull over, which is why it is so tempting to just trust that the Center for Humane Technology will fix everything, or to just say that the problem is Silicon Valley.

“In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.

“Here’s why this is your most important job. In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim. But then once you do, you need to become effective. And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Therefore, this is your most important job right now.”

I remember thinking at the time, wow, that sounds like really important advice, I should listen. And I did put in some effort; not nearly enough, in retrospect, but more than zero. Now, six months in, I’m not nearly at a point where I would consider myself “effective” yet – I still have a long way to go in that department. But that advice is paying huge dividends already; not only with my own initiatives but actually more so with helping other groups with theirs.

build trust first

While they have tested with users with accessibility needs, the focus seems to have been on whether they can use the digital service; not does the service actually meet their needs?

And perhaps one reason for that is that we decided early on that we would not participate in “on background” conversations with company officials and spokespeople. We tell every company that we contact for a comment that we need an on-the-record statement, and if they can’t provide one, we will not use any comment at all.
Not only that, but we also require that official spokespeople—who are paid to speak on behalf of their companies, after all—attach their name to their statements. We don’t publish company statements that a person would not, for some mysterious reason, want to attach to their name.
Our reasoning is simple: anonymity isn’t standard; it is a privilege that should be borne only out of necessity. We reserve anonymity for people who could face retaliation or undue hardship for the information that they are providing us in the public interest. Corporate spokespeople who are paid to provide information simply don’t meet the criteria for being granted anonymity.

Is there anything I do as a manager that’s particularly helpful for you or the team?
No manager’s perfect. What’s something I do that you find frustrating?
If you were the manager of this team, what’s one thing you’d do differently?

Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals

Lately I’ve been thinking of Deadspin as a strange machine. For more than a decade, the people charged with the maintenance of that machine were allowed to tinker with it according to their whims and idiosyncratic tastes. The result of all that tinkering was a machine which, for all its apparent wonkiness, worked brilliantly. 

The problem with a machine like that is that it’s difficult for anyone who didn’t build it, or doesn’t respect those who did, to understand exactly how or why it works. When Deadspin’s staffers and readers looked at the machine, they saw a wonderful and whirring contraption, but all Spanfeller and Great Hill saw was an odd collection of valves and pistons. They saw parts, but not the whole.

Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick discuss the final chapter of Agile Conversations. They look at how leaders can not only provide accountability for others, but be accountable themselves, including stories from the early days of agile and from today’s clients.

Yesterday I published the top 10 tips that came out of my research into job ads and descriptions for DDaT roles in public service. Then the new Government Chief Digital Officer role was published so I thought I would test my ideas against this high profile role! Now for the record I’m not having a…

One reason that Twitch is apparently resistant to the tag because of the potential for harassment, a fear that was also brought up to me by an anonymous non-binary streamer. “A Twitch representative told me that when there was a trans tag, moderation actions increased, which was ‘unacceptable’ to them,” Loehr explains. Twitch did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

It is, unfortunately, unsurprising that some would use the tag to target trans streamers with abuse. But tags are optional, meaning that any streamer who chooses to use them is making an informed decision. “Instead of either doing something to moderate their webpage themselves, or giving minorities the ability to opt into this responsibility, they removed the choice altogether,” Loehr says. “That’s just letting trolls have the ultimate victory, and hiding trans people away.”

Stimulus sprinkles interactive behavior on top of your boring HTML pages. By keeping your controllers small, generic, and composable you can build a front-end without the typical JavaScript mess.

The ultimate guide to dynos on Heroku. If you've ever asked "how many dynos do I need?" or "which dyno type is right for my app?", this is the guide for you.

Are you a manager, manager of managers, or manager of directors?
How long have you been in that role? The prior role?

When was your last promotion, and what was your internal headline for that promotion? (Example: “Reliable manager finally gets the promotion to a senior manager after the successful release of X.”)

Who are your credible sources of actionable feedback? What the most recent memorable feedback from one of these sources? Why was it memorable?

What are your areas of strength? How do you know that?

Where are you focusing on improving your leadership skills? Why?

Have you identified your next role? If so, what is it, and what’s your current plan to get there?

What’s your current most significant challenge with your direct reports? (A specific issue with one of your directs or an overall issue with all/many)

What’s your current most significant challenge with your manager?

What do you want to be when you grow up?

This Background Jobs style guide is a list of best practices working with Ruby background jobs. - toptal/active-job-style-guide

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. Our minds constantly dance across multiple time horizons. One moment we can be making a quickfire response . . . Read More

257 people responded to my survey about what job seekers are looking for from job desscriptions/ads. There is a lot to dig into properly and I intend to do some follow up interviews - and then share a bunch of the raw data (maybe not the free text? Will have a think.) Here are a…

Inevitably, I also notes from people who assert that financier domination is just capitalism in America, and always has been. Some (usually on the right) like this model of development, others (usually on the left) find it dystopian, but they are unified in a pervasive view that such market structures are both inevitable and long-standing. I find such an attitude bizarre, not for any philosophical reason, but because concentrating wealth and power in monopolized markets was just not accepted as a legitimate way to do business for most of American history.

From the 1600s to the 1970s, asking the question of how to constrain wealth and regulate prices was a core part of our tradition and ideology. Here is, for example, something from a 1779 pamphlet passed out in Philadelphia against profiteering during the Revolutionary War: “You that have money, and you that have none, down with your prices, or down with yourselves.… We have turned out against the enemy and we will not be eaten up by monopolizers and forestallers [aka speculators].”

That legacy, hundreds of years old, is why Americans are mad when we are mistreated or overcharged. We aren’t cynics and never have been, and we don’t believe that our corporations and governing institutions should be corrupt. We know at one point they weren’t. And that populist sentiment is bubbling up, in every nook and cranny of our society, because we know something about how we do business today is very wrong.

In the 1980s, most of our elites on the right and left were persuaded that monopolies were natural and, good or bad, simply the American Way. They changed policy accordingly, which is why most of the monopolies we know about were formed during or after that decade. But corruption and monopolization isn’t natural, or inevitable. It’s a choice we’ve made, and a choice we can always undo. Remember that.

With that in mind, here are a few more sectors that have been monopolized. At the end, I’ll offer ideas for what we can do about this problem (which isn’t actually that difficult to address.)

Of course, Ms. Sandberg, who has increasingly played blocker for Mr. Zuckerberg’s very bad calls, posted about the report in a who-me style that has now become a joke for those of us who follow the company. Noting that the report was “the beginning of the journey, not the end” for Facebook, she concluded that “what has become increasingly clear is that we have a long way to go.”

Whose essential freedoms were put at risk by the Bennet-Cotton episode? In the world of the Harper’s letter, the threat that mattered was the one to the careers of veteran editors—not the threat that had bullets and bayonets behind it, a threat that the president himself would offer again in his Independence Day remarks. The promoters of the letter cast themselves as persecuted heroes, putting their names on the line to defend an embattled conception of liberty. The people putting themselves in front of police lines have a more expansive vision of what freedom means, and what risks they’re prepared to take for it

How many of you know deep down that the team is working on something that no customer wants?

This is not an article about CSS positioning.
I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people recently about the difficulty of finding clients. The coronavirus has only made the problem the worse.
My friend Jonathan Stark recently ran a free positioning crash course webcast that’s available to watch on replay any time.
If you run your own business, you want to go watch this!
Why positioning matters When I started Go Make Things, I hired Jonathan as a business coach.

Until this morning, I always styled the current link in my navigation menu by doing this.

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.nav .active a { border-bottom: 0.125em solid #fa7176; color: #272727; } It gives users a clear visual indication that “you are here.”
Well… sighted users, that is. If you’re visually impaired or use a screen reader to navigate the web, it tells you nothing.

Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years.

We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view. And now, when those of us who are sheltering in place venture out and see everyone in masks, sharing looks with strangers is a different thing. It’s eye to eye, this knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once. It’s the reality of the social; it’s seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another to survive. It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.

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As for government: it’s government that listens to science and responds by taking action to save us. Stop to ponder what is now obstructing the performance of that government. Who opposes it? Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far? Even if it’s the common wisdom? Or was.

It was long overdue, but I’ve added an accessibility statement to my website. Here are a few reasons why.

“The problem with the MK1 stuff was that I didn’t have my eye fully on the ball, because I was still taking care of a lot of Tesla stuff,” Musk said. “Now Tesla, I think, is in a good situation here, so that’s why I’m pretty much camped out in Boca. The MK1 was a failure not because the rocket failed at low pressure, but because we failed to build a production line.”

Now he has built the production system. It’s not finished. It’s not perfect. But it’s starting to pay dividends. The factory is beginning to flow linearly, from one station to another. And after last week’s flurry of hiring, the company has the workers it needs to produce rockets one after another.

“If you’re just trying to make one of something, it can all basically just be made by the engineering team,” he said. “But if you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself. The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated by a lot. Things need to be translated into instructions that the average person can understand. You can’t have somebody with an engineering master’s degree from MIT hand-making every single part. It’s not possible. There just aren’t enough. MIT’s not graduating enough people.”

list of tools for measuring performance like web page test and pagespeed

The challenge for the left is to provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment, without replicating the logic of a death-cult; to create a feeling of belonging without chauvinism, and authenticity without essentializing identities. Our politics must learn to speak, simultaneously, the language of reason and the language of values. Without abandoning the Enlightenment, our movements must be ready, nevertheless, to address our deepest psychological, cultural, and even spiritual needs. Unless we can do so, we may find our demands for material security, social equality, and personal freedom continually outbid by those who promise only a life of sacrifice and a glorious death.

mistake theory and government policy

This week I searched old emails and made a page containing all the nice things strangers have sent me about it, mainly because this makes me feel good.

The lessons here are:

Making simple little online tools is totally worth it, especially if the alternatives are usually covered in ads and tracking
Providing an obvious way for people to get in touch with you is important
There’s no shame in collecting it together like this because it’s nice for you and probably nice for users to see that they’re not the only ones who’ve been there
It’s really nice if you email someone to tell them you like something they’ve done.

pro monolith

In Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s novel Memory in the Flesh, the narrator recalls a saying: “A man spends his first years learning how to speak, and the Arab regimes teach him silence for the rest of his life.”

If games are art, we must treat them that way. An essential part of that is breaking cyclical discourse, discarding the debates of yesterday and contextualizing games within the new reality the media exists in. The broadening of an audience means accounting for shifting tastes and sensibilities. This means acknowledging the growing concerns of queer players, disabled persons, people of color and other voices that were not traditionally heard within the culture’s earlier days. Did you really beat a game? Should we even care about “casuals”? Do we have our Citizen Kane? Stop, please. We don’t need to keep asking “are games art” until we all die in the upcoming Resource Wars.

Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Framework

managing the emotional and time of hiring

t-shirt interview

realtime sync of text

Of course one of the biggest proponents of the public-markets-don’t-care-about-the-long-term thesis is Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., who went so far as to pretend he was going to take Tesla private to get away from the short-termist public shareholders who gave his money-losing future-focused company the highest valuation of any American car maker ever. The problem with public markets is not that they can’t stomach short-term losses in pursuit of higher long-term value. The problem with public markets is that they have a diversity of opinion. Some people will think that the short-term losses are acceptable in the pursuit of long-term vision, and they’ll buy the stock. Other people will think that the short-term losses demonstrate a long-term problem, and they’ll short the stock. In private markets, the only investors you deal with are the believers. Some people won’t believe in your long-term vision, but you’ll never hear from them. In public markets you will, and you might not like it.

In a way, thinking and feeling through Ferrante make me wonder if the whole project of literary criticism, for some of us, might be one of un-pleasure reading. To me, the joy of writing about a text is the twisting, rupturing, pleasurable unpleasure of unforming and being unformed as I work to shape an argument. To read a book to its core, to get under its skin and let it get under yours, is to engage with it in a mutual process of transformation and sometimes-ecstatic contortion. This is, some might say, highly un-professional (whatever this profession is), definitely un-objective, possibly even un-ethical. But for me, to write a piece of living interpretation, to share in gutsy, real conversation with a piece of art, is always to invoke form as a verb, not just to submit to the noun of its existence—a forming that is process-oriented but not simply procedural—and to somehow animate that constant movement in words. In my life as a critic, as in Ferrante, this is an impossible yet irresistible desire: the little stories I’ve told you along the way here, my shape-making narrative impulses, are the legible coverings that skim over the roiling blurriness of ongoing forming-unforming beneath, the frantumaglia—that dialect word that Ferrante uses to mean “bits and pieces,” magma, a jumbled tangle that refuses reduction—of reading and being read (shades of Calvino here, too). This is the last thing I’d call pleasure—and yet…

Lots of nice Rails SQL queries.

Worker-in-the-loop

exhasting reading about html5

a summary of font/text sizing techniques

business planning

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

14kb is rhe magic payload size

The problem isn’t the algorithms.

The problem is that everyone is stuck on social media.

The problem is that social media networks are centralised platforms that aim to monopolise their users’ attention and time.

When you have PZF, the product resonates with users not because it’s better, but because it feels extremely culturally relevant at that particular moment in time for a particular group of people.

postmortems that are blameful but shameless

Foremost among these has been the return of an old “integration debate”—about whether people from non-European countries can successfully become part of German society—even though no one can agree on what exactly German society is. “The question is not who we are, but who we can become,” the late British social theorist Stuart Hall argued, but Germany is poised uneasily in that polarity.

“You get used to it,” Haru answers. For her, after all, it is not a little bit. It is her life, and a life she has to – she wants to – inhabit and live well. Being angry all the time, fighting against all those tiny oppression that don’t even have a culprit behind them: it is all exhausting and tiring. To be upset and to be angry is eminently human, but to have a hope that voicing your anger will change something is, also, a privilege.

Two examples stuck in my mind: the story of the senior leader who did nothing but watch the production line for four hours so he could see for himself what was going on, and the minivan chief designer who insisted on personally driving in all 50 US states and Canada. The minivan designer then went back to the drawing board and made significant changes to the design that made sense in North America, but not in Japan (such as having multiple cup-holders for thelong journeys typical of that region)

Travis’s website

“twenty-forty rule.”: spend twenty minutes working a problem before asking a question. dont spend more than 40 minutes.

As Eliyahu Goldratt says, you have to subordinate the whole process to the constraint. That means incentivising people to sell something a lot like what you have now, over selling a bigger number of things you don’t have now and won’t have soon.

TI coaches strive to teach a proven method that works to countless other people for whom simply swimming with ease and enjoyment would be a great gift. TI is also about swimming every stroke with clear purpose . . . whether for health, enjoyment, or competition.

15 minutes to write. 5 min to read

on safety, just and no blame.

the state of agile. with a nice point:

But, importantly, they do the things they do because it helps them release software, not because it helps them hit project milestones. The revolution really did land there.

You can’t separate out diversity and inclusion from ethics, so it became apparent that ethics should be addressed by the ad hoc committee.

Many people saw Instagram museums as the ultimate non-mission driven, too far on the visitor-engagement. I might argue that their mission is to give people experiences, and they do well by their missions as their bank accounts show. And, understanding these orgs help museums, as Koven Smith brought up. It’s important to interrogate what lines they’ve crossed and why.

Real life comes at you fast, though. When you’re working on version 1, you want to do as little work, as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you can validate that there are enough customers who derive enough value to make the product worthwhile. But by the time you come to work on version 1.0.1, you wish you’d taken the time to make version 1 maintainable and easy to change. Most subsequent versions are a little from column A and a little from column B, as you try new things and iterate on the things that worked.

As fast as possible, but no faster, I guess.

When public figures so unabashedly follow a PR checklist, regular people can be seduced into judging mainly the quality of the checklist, and viewing these things purely as PR successes or failures. Let’s dispense with that, quickly: Luhnow’s PR advisors should be fired. They’re real bad at their jobs.

But as a series of human actions, this is all hideous. The Astros have a culture where a person could even develop the specific anger behind Taubman’s taunts, to say nothing of shouting those taunts at someone in public; where the kind of person who would both feel that specific shit-hearted triumph and then weaponize it is otherwise considered a good guy with high character; where the organization’s inclination is to take the word of internal “witnesses” who would have obvious professional incentives for obscuring the truth over a first-person report from a journalist; where the action that flows from that misguided trust involves publicly accusing the journalist of fabrication; where a group of adults would need whole days in order to determine that even a general apology is appropriate; where orchestrating a happy ending to this disastrous sequence in a press conference is more urgent than personally apologizing to the only person who was actually wronged; and where you’d even need a PR playbook to sort this out in the first place.

Browse – I want to explore to see what’s available
Find – I want to locate something specific
Query – I want to see items which meet my criteria
Structured – I want to be led through a series of choices to help me narrow my focus
Guided – I want to be led through the information

amazing summary of high output management that is clearer than the entire book.

on pregnancy, community, and what goes unacknowledged

It wasn’t long before I was dreaming up hundreds of dollars every day. It seemed to get easier and easier. Around the time I was imagining a thousand dollars a day, I knew I’d hit on something big. Heck, if I could imagine a thousand dollars a day, couldn’t anyone? I mean, I’m not so special.

RCP stuff

For Thomas, dishonesty was not only about race; it was also about class. However well intentioned white liberals were about remedying racial inequality, their élitism was steadfast. At Yale, some of Thomas’s classmates would query the absence of class rankings and grades. “You do not separate cream from cream,” a professor responded. “It is your fate as a Yale Law School student to become one of the leaders in the legal profession. It will happen, not because of you personally, but because you are here. That is what happens to Yale Law School students.” But Yale’s black students were separated from the cream; indeed, the absence of rankings was used to effect that separation. As he approached graduation, Thomas tried to secure a position at an élite law firm in Atlanta, which had no black associates. One of the marks against him was that he had no grades. Even if he came from Yale, how could his prospective employers know how good he was?

about active learning. interesting comments

what his argument does imply is that large profits that cannot go into productive capital investment or to workers will instead go into government bonds, pushing interest rates for ‘safe assets’ down quite low, or even into negative territor

What is it you do? Whatever it is, you write for a living. Memos, proposals, emails, commit messages, performance reviews, user stories, code – you write for a living. The better you write anything – the better you write everything. You write an email and then you decide that it is better not to send it. So you delete it. You find the code that is never called and you eliminate it. It is just noise. What about that code that is called all the time? I hope it is good. I hope it has been tested and profiled. This is where working your magic can really pay off.

Suppose we find that counting small stories is part of giving management the information they need Remember that as we split small stories, we often come up with slices that can be deferred.

This is the sweet spot of Agile Software Development!

It seems that there’s always too much to do, and too little time to do it.

• Reusing good software is easy; it is what allows you to build good things quickly;
• Software is limited not by the amount of resources put into building it, but by how complex it can get before it breaks down; and
• The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.

decision making from a quaker perspective

good process

I think many companies get so busy they don’t “have time” to ensure alignment through the layers, which leads quite directly to unaligned execution. Likewise, my experience is that few companies can distinguish between misalignment due to poor individual performance (by the person being delegated to) and misalignment due to poor direction (from the person delegating).