Whatever modest success I've had in this world, whatever success I might someday have, I will go to my grave with the unshakeable conviction that if I so much as touch the contents of the hotel minibar I will be immediately bankrupted.
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Whatever modest success I've had in this world, whatever success I might someday have, I will go to my grave with the unshakeable conviction that if I so much as touch the contents of the hotel minibar I will be immediately bankrupted. -
I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.We can easily spot these accountability sink practices at the individual level - that one engineer who insists on building their project in ocaml or pushes to rewrite it from scratch in React, so they can train up for their next job knowing they won’t be bearing the maintenance cost of their learning experience - but they’re not something I’ve seen rigorously discussed at the process or organizational level.
Have so many people job-hopped their way into leadership roles that it’s invisible now?
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I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.I mean, the seduction of novel ceremony is that - like new frameworks, like React, like Kubernetes - it provides structure without accountability. If the process fails it is the process’s fault, not its drivers, not its leaders.
Dan Davies created the term “accountability sink” - a kind of heat sink for diffusing human consequences, a useful term. We should recognize these things for what they are, I think, and more importantly when people are trying to create them, for whatever reason.
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I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.I sometimes fear that there is some deep set cultural drive in this industry to run from its problems instead of solving them, to genuflect to novelty rather than engage with the failures of the present. To rewrite code instead of fixing it, to adopt weird new ceremonies instead of understanding the details of the present. To throw it all out and start over, believing you’ve learned from the last iteration without really interrogating it. It smells of a sort of hyperactive nihilism.
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I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.
I see this where I work: what you want from AI, you can have with proper engineering metrics.
What you want from Scrum, you can have by teaching people to run meetings, with an agenda and notes.
These are skills and tools that can be learned, that do not require strange new hierarchies and ceremonies.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/tossed-salads-and-scrumbled-eggs/
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It’s reassuring and sort of heartwarming that almost anywhere I’ve found myself in this world, there is almost always someone nearby who will sell me a pretty good kebab.It’s reassuring and sort of heartwarming that almost anywhere I’ve found myself in this world, there is almost always someone nearby who will sell me a pretty good kebab.
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Fediverse feature request: to be able to flag a particular account as a thread cutoff marker in the interface.Fediverse feature request: to be able to flag a particular account as a thread cutoff marker in the interface.
Below a post, see something like "[Tagged person] replied; there are X further replies from [person a, person b, person c] in the thread."
If A B and C are people I care to hear from and X is small, I might open that thread! If it's A, B, .. Z And Several Others and the number is 273, then maybe not today.
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Hey #Linux friends (and enemies) I have a weird #SSH question.@Edent The "verbose" options in ssh stack, so -v is useful but -vvvv is All The Things. Whenever I've had an SSH problem the answer was in -vvv or -vvvv somewhere.
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I do not wish violence on anyone, but if grade-school students need to live with active shooter drills and the occasional mass murder as the price of a weekday, then I don't know why the people who could change all of that with the stroke of a pen and ...I do not wish violence on anyone, but if grade-school students need to live with active shooter drills and the occasional mass murder as the price of a weekday, then I don't know why the people who could change all of that with the stroke of a pen and choose not to deserve any different.
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"Our plan is to play weird shell games with money until we stop losing money.""Our plan is to play weird shell games with money until we stop losing money."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/16/24246599/intel-foundry-independent-spinoff
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For all it's infinite faults numerology can be good fun, and I always find it interesting to compare new media or storage formats to their legacy counterparts in terms of size and performance, particularly when they cross some maximal threshold of the ...For all it's infinite faults numerology can be good fun, and I always find it interesting to compare new media or storage formats to their legacy counterparts in terms of size and performance, particularly when they cross some maximal threshold of the earlier format.
Today's example are the now-shipping MicroSD Express cards, that can handle about 650MB per second of sequential write.
Which is, as us oldheads will realize, one fully CD burned, per second.
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Very cool to see somebody you know showing up in the tech press doing, y'know, those little things like "holding fast to what is obviously correct" and "being clearly on the side of the angels".Very cool to see somebody you know showing up in the tech press doing, y'know, those little things like "holding fast to what is obviously correct" and "being clearly on the side of the angels".
The OSI is on the cusp of doing what a distressing number of venerable open-source tech organizations are doing in the face of AI, and panicking their way to paralysis and existential ethical compromise rather than holding onto their principles and navigating this novel space.
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Unreasonably fond of the realization that the “Mediterranean diet” is a random second- or third-order byproduct of pension fraud."The root cause of the huge market for fake Italian olive oil is fake Italian pensioners" is so incredible, the world needs some sort of Evil James Burke to get on top of this, Connections but for organized crime.
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Linux nerds, a sound question. Everyone's favorite topic, I know:Linux nerds, a sound question. Everyone's favorite topic, I know:
There's a cute but now venerable utility called "beep" that let you play around with tone and duration of the beeps your PC speaker made, back when those tinny little piezo buzzers were a thing, fun and harmless.
In our modern pipewirey world, is there a simple, scriptable utility that's equivalent, hopefully of approximately "[name] -f frequency -d duration" complexity?
I'm sure I could make ffmpeg do this but... y'know.
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Unreasonably fond of the realization that the “Mediterranean diet” is a random second- or third-order byproduct of pension fraud.(There are other, much less funny downstream consequences of this nonsense, of course, like the wild misallocation of public funds towards elder care and telling living people trying to improve their real health problems that they should be imitating the diets of people who’ve been dead for 30 years but don’t fill out the right forms beforehand.)
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Unreasonably fond of the realization that the “Mediterranean diet” is a random second- or third-order byproduct of pension fraud.Unreasonably fond of the realization that the “Mediterranean diet” is a random second- or third-order byproduct of pension fraud.
I feel like there’s some sort of higher-level behavioural insight here, about how quickly people will latch on to things that give them any sense of agency over themselves, whatever the basis.
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This hotel room has a _baffling_ artefact in it embedded in a wall panel.You have to know that if it’s labelled with these ancient stressed-plastic stickers, this is like seeing a url with a tilde in it. This is where the old magic lives, this is the good shit.
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This hotel room has a _baffling_ artefact in it embedded in a wall panel.Ok now I definitely need to get a network cable, just to see if something's still living on the far side of these wires.
I mean, there's no chance. None, there is just no way.
But now I have to know.
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This hotel room has a _baffling_ artefact in it embedded in a wall panel.Oh my god, these are terminal connections.
In the late eighties, - before the PS/2 port existed because also before the PS/2 existed -- IBM Model M keyboards had metal-shrouded RJ-45 connectors that connected to terminals-as-in-dumb-terminals, like the IBM 3101. For a while you could buy adapters that would let you plug the RJ-45 models into PS/2 connectors, but all that's long gone.
These are 40-year-old keyboard and data ports.
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This hotel room has a _baffling_ artefact in it embedded in a wall panel.Further: there are three (what appears to be) rj45 jacks under the table, one labelled “data port” and two unlabelled. I didn’t bring a network cable but… I’m curious? I could get one?
Maybe there’s a secret Irish internet?