ZDL

ZDL, 2 days ago

Ghostbusters. Amadeus.

ZDL, 8 days ago

I saw the recent documentary Civil War just this weekend. It confused me a bit though.¹

1. When did Kirsten Dunst stop being an actress and become a photojournalist?
2. When did Texas and California become allies?
3. If the president was shot dead, how come I still see Joe Biden talking?

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¹ This post may be a bit of a joke. Maybe.

ZDL, 10 days ago

This is the response I was going to make.

If you accept outside money, you will enshittify. There is no exception to this rule. Externally-funded companies are in one of two states: in the process of enshittifying or enshittified.

Make your business with an eye toward self-sustenance. If you accept outside ownership your business is gone.

ZDL, 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

As stated by other people here, the first rule is simple:

1. Do not accept outside investment. Ever. Plan your business through organic growth, not through investors.

But aside from that, there are other things to consider.

2. Inspect your incentives. Enshittification is the inevitable outcome of perverse incentives. This means don’t pay anybody based on share performance in any form, for example: there’s too many ways to briefly boost share values in ways that can be gamed. (This is true whether the company is private or public.) Pay by performance, yes, but make sure that you’re measuring real performance, not short-term hits that cause long-term pain.
3. Foster a culture of equality. Don’t be an arrogant asshole that says “I’m the boss, so I’m smarter than you”. The people who do the actual work for you often know far more than you do about the fine details of the company’s operations; listen to them with an open mind and set aside your ego. They may save your company. As an example of this, I told my boss back in 2021 that we needed to stop taking American clients. He listened to my (counter-intuitive) advice and did a modified thing of what I’d recommended. We kept the ones we had, but we simply stopped taking new American business and instead branched out into other countries. I think that has made us more competitive in our little niche now that the USA has become a toxic shithole that other companies are joining us in avoiding: we already have relationships in the countries they’d avoided.)
4. Develop a fine touch for management. Some people need close management (usually junior people): make sure you provide it to them. Some people need a light touch in management: back off and let them work independently, just monitor their progress and offer minor course correction here and there. Some people need micromanagement: let them go (humanely) because this is not a fit for their talents. In the end management is a people skill, not a technical one. If you lack people skills, hire a manager who has them; don’t try it yourself.
5. In any conflict between your employees and a customer, consider carefully: one customer who is unhappy will badmouth you to a few friends. One employee who is unhappy will generate a dozen or more unhappy customers. If you throw your employee under the bus in such a conflict, you will have an unhappy employee (or more than one!). If the employee is in the right, support them. If the employee is in the wrong, guide them. Don’t throw them under the bus.
6. Related: remember that you can (and should!) fire some customers. There are customers who will generate nothing but horrible drama for your company; drop them. Send them to your competition if they’re really bad and you hate your competition enough. Personal anecdote time again: we had a customer who felt that by paying us he was entitled to micromanage every step of our process. He was constantly calling in and demanding people drop work to cater to him. Finally our department manager compiled a document that listed each time he’d done that in the past 30 days, estimated the direct cost in time and the indirect cost in lost productivity attributable to his behaviour. It outweighed (by far!) the amount of money he was bringing in. My then-boss called him up on the phone and told him that we would not be continuing in the contract; that he could take his business elsewhere. (Weirdly enough the people who’d been hounded by this asshole were extremely loyal to said boss later when business took a downturn.)
7. Never, ever, drop the “we’re a family” line. No business is your family and attempts to make it a family are just plain-old abuse. Your business is a place of employment. The people you hire have their own lives outside that business with their own family, their own friends, and their own time. Do not try to encroach on that space for cynical purposes like getting unpaid labour out of them. It may work in the short term, but it leads to burnout, embitterment, and backlash. As soon as I see “we’re a family” in business, these days, I start looking for another job.
8. Related: don’t ever demand free labour. Either hire enough people to do the work, or pay the overtime. I did marketing for a software company in Ottawa and watched as they sucked the life out of their developers by not only forcing overtime, but having that overtime be caused by the developers having to do mindless, bureaucratic make-work like scheduling their own meeting spaces and times, making their own copies, etc. (They had developers being paid in high five figures standing in front of seriously intimidating copying machines and trying to figure them out instead of having someone paid in low five figures doing the work for them expertly.) For the cost of a single person paid in low five figures they could have freed the developers to do the work they’re actually there to perform all within the span of an ordinary workday. Instead they did the “penny wise, pound foolish” thing of grinding their developers into hamburger, burning them out, and losing them. Pay for your excess labour or, even better, run your business intelligently so that you don’t have to!

ZDL, 11 days ago

Durian. It’s like eating a cream custard in fruit form. Longans and Lychees. (Related and similar in flavour, but not in form.) Sweet but with a little lilt of “something else” that makes them interesting.

ZDL, 10 days ago

Apparently a whole lot of people like pears.

In today’s lesson we’ve apparently learned that tastes differ.

ZDL, 10 days ago

I’m not a fan of fresh mangoes, but the dried ones are great.

ZDL, 8 days ago

Does anybody actually think he’s going to see the inside of a cell?

ZDL, 11 days ago

Did it also desensitize your eyes?

ZDL, 16 days ago

Yes. “Creations.” That’s what I would call AI (=Always Incorrect) music. A “creation”. Not “a bunch of talentless twits feigning being artists”.

ZDL, 17 days ago

…

I don’t even know how to respond to this.

Kirk’s complaint is at the top. Not only is English read from left to right, but it’s also read TOP TO BOTTOM. This fact has been used all over the place in writing, including in comics:

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/d7578fee-dbf0-41a1-8d31-38b76f7bfa51.png

(So ubiquitous is this format that I literally just popped a comic I was in the process of reading up onto my screen and there it was in one of the frames! I didn’t have to go searching.)

You’ll also see it in advertising, in some books with fancier formatting, and a whole bunch of other places.

So remember not only “left to right” but “top to bottom” and you’ll do fine.

ZDL, 17 days ago

“Dissenting” is to the left of “the” in the comic example I gave. Did that confuse you too? If one confuses you and the other doesn’t, I really don’t know what to say. They’re using the SAME FORMATTING. (It’s called “centred text”.) If both confuse you then at least you’re consistent (but very bizarre given how common this formatting is).

ZDL, 17 days ago

Yes. Life is a constant struggle for … the person … who can read without difficulty and not for the one who gets confused by trivial and common formatting. That’s definitely how it works.

ZDL, 17 days ago

Where did you find a picture of my termite!? 😮

ZDL, 17 days ago

I thought it was Motörheads?

ZDL, 22 days ago

Thankfully I’ve never lived anywhere where prom night is a thing. I can’t imagine the stress of “keeping up”. It was bad enough having the high school “cool kids” cults; amplifying it would be a nightmare.

ZDL, 21 days ago

The “work” part of it is the stressing over clothing, your date, etc. beforehand. The poor kid trying to figure out how not to look poor at the prom. The fringe kid who’s pretty much guaranteed to be going dateless if at all and laughed at for it. I suspect if you’ve never been in an outside group (and I always have been because I’ve always been racially an outsider and literally an outsider because of frequent moving) you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about.

I’m just very thankful that in all my moving, I never moved anywhere where “prom” was a thing.

ZDL, 28 days ago

I think I’m just meant to be single.

No. No you’re not. Don’t let that brain worm in.

Here are some other brain worms not to let in: not your brain worm’s, your “guy’s”.

Here’s a list of red flags that should have you blocking and permanently removing this guy from your life:

• “the type of women he likes, woman that loves god, wants kids and marriage, goes to the gym all that good stuff” vs. “[I am] an atheist, don’t want neither and I’m 117lbs”.
• it was mostly girls that are not of my color
• he proposed we be friends with benefits, I shut that down and told him that sounds very degrading to ask me after he just told me he wouldn’t want his own woman doing such work
• He got into a whole rant, I stood on what I said then got blocked lol.
• “I think i just liked u and i didn’t wanna get hurt. So I kinda said fuck it, imma just save myself the trouble.”
• he was venting about how lonely he is and how hard it is to find the girl that he wants

And so on.

Dudebro, as described, is an incel of the worst kind. You will not be happy with this kind of turd circling the toilet bowl of life. Don’t “settle” and don’t ever let that brainworm in your head. NOBODY is meant to be single. (Not even the aforementioned turd; he could easily be not-single by just not being a dismissive prick.)

ZDL, 28 days ago

I wouldn’t bet on an eBook being usable 30 years down the line.

I wouldn’t seriously bet on an eBook reader being usable 5 years down the line. Could it? Possibly. Is it guaranteed? Not even close.

As for the content, my SO points out that we have knowledge that was stored on computers in formats nobody alive knows how to read anymore. We’ve lost information—some of it probably very important!—that’s younger than I am.

In the mean time I’m reading stuff that’s been gleaned from writing that was recovered literally thousands of years after it disappeared.

ZDL, 1 month ago

Equilibrium was underrated. I liked it much better than The Matrix (which felt like some pretty shallow people trying to be deep while rehashing SF themes dating back to about the time I was born). I mean Equilibrium wasn’t especially original either (part Brave New World, part 1984, and part Fahrenheit 451) but it didn’t try to pretend to be deeper than it really was.

Drag Me To Hell was good fun.

Love Never Dies … I … it never grabbed me. Musically it was weak, IMO, which is fatal for, you know, a musical. (Same for that Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel Shock Therapy.)

Dog Soldiers was very good indeed; I should probably watch it again.

The rest are either things I’ve never heard of, or things I’ve heard of but am not interested in.

ZDL, 1 month ago

French people in general freak me out.

. . .

… Wait for it! …

. . .

I mean they eat pain for breakfast!