danilo, 4 months ago to random

Part of why tech workers at huge orgs like this need a union:

Being compelled to relocate to a forced birthing state is violent as hell

So much more to collective power than just getting paid

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/14/24037904/apple-san-diego-siri-ai-team-relocating

nedbat, 4 months ago to random

Tired of this: "learn C so you can understand how a computer really works."

So much of modern computers is not visible from C (pipelining, virtual memory, branch prediction, cache misses, etc).

I guess what they mean is, "you learn about pointers and consecutive memory locations"? How is that helpful for programming in other languages without pointers?

C teaches you an abstraction of computers based on the PDP-11. It's interesting, but it's not essential.

mlevison, 3 months ago to random

As Google becomes useless and LLMs regurgitate drivel, I'm looking for Independant minded #Agile Blogs. I'm trying to curate a set of trusted sources that I can recommend to students.

Examples of what I want: https://dannorth.net/blog/, https://simplybegin.co.uk/blog/, https://medium.com/the-liberators

Please boost for reach - my current list follows.

Exclusions #SAFe

gvwilson, 4 months ago to random

Best practical guide to organizational change in higher ed and/or research orgs? Web searches are returning books on "the science of organizational change", which mostly look like pop neuroscience selectively reinterpreted to support whatever the author wants. thx

mlevison, 1 year ago to random

#MyersBriggs #PersonalityTests is popular and that is about the only thing it has going for it. In reality it is no better than rolling die and assigning people a personality profile based on the die roll.

• Carl Jung's ideas are at the base of the test. Unfortunately Jung's work has never been empirically tested. Hint when your base level construct is unsound you might have a train wreck on your hands.

1/6

#Myths

mlevison, 5 months ago to random

Spam calls can charge your phone? How is this even possible.

16474274007 - attempted to call my wife's phone and we were charged $4.99.

WTF - this cost 20 minutes with Videotron to fix and the only solution is to block the phone number.

How is this even legal?

mlevison, 1 year ago to random

@woollyapp Feature request.

When I search for someone I wish to mention in a message, I’ve not found an easy way to copy their @username to paste into the message.

1. Search for a person
2. Visit their profile page
3. Missing Copy Userid

Please make this easy.

mlevison, 4 months ago to random

Original from @danilo

> Part of why tech workers at huge orgs like this need a union:

Being compelled to relocate to a forced birthing state is violent as hell
…
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/14/24037904/apple-san-diego-siri-ai-team-relocating

—
Don’t know what the solution is. I do think the Apple press need to hear about this and amplify. So forgive the intrusion

@atpfm
@caseylisscom
@marcoarment
@johnvoorhees
@viticci

mlevison, 6 months ago to random

I have just spent 4hrs helping my daughter work a Gr12 JavaFX Coding assignment. The teacher gave them a base set of code, with some many strange things (constructing JavaFX objects on two different threads, …). Like outright awful code, that she said by the end: “Papa, it would have been faster to write this code from scratch and write unit tests. The code would be cleaner and we would spend less time making mistakes”

She is my daughter.

mlevison, 7 months ago to macos

#MacOS Screensavers the new OS has brought a mittful of very nice moving pictures. However the system settings dialog makes it so hard to see that I can’t guess which ones I have seen.

Has anyone seen an article or site that documents all of them?

Cc: @ismh and @atpfm I’m hoping the most Mac connected people I know will boost this to a wider audience

mlevison, 1 year ago to random

From time to time the hosts of some of my favourite podcasts mention Will Power/Ego Depletion, citing the work of Roy Baumeister. It may not be common knowledge but the original work fails replication. As I document in this note sharing the theory has negative consequences since people believe they have limited will power. I'm pasting my notes on the subject from my Obsidian vault. These are rough and ready, they've not even been polished by Grammarly.

1/4

#Myths #Neuromyths #Willpower

mlevison, 7 months ago to Ottawa

Uncharted by Margaret Heffernan, gives hope. It reminds me that we solve problems not by repeating things from people we already agree with but by participating with people whose backgrounds are different from our own.

Doing this well might start with something small like a participatory budgeting process, or anything else where a diverse group tackle something meaningful to them. I wonder how we could start something like this in #Ottawa

mlevison, 4 months ago to random

Two Pizza Teams and Bezos. I'm trying to track where and what he said. Many sources cite the Investor newsletters: https://quartr.com/insights/business-philosophy/collection-jeff-bezos-shareholder-letters

I read them, no pizza and no mention of team size.

Does anyone have an actual source for this?

mlevison, 10 months ago to random

"Any fool with an LLM can generate a generic summary article of Product Backlog refinement" - B.A. Baracus. "We don't need more about the basics of backlog refinement."

"Instead please write about what you tried, what was hard and what you learned" - Levison

#EffectiveMeetings I reviewed 168 sources on #ProductBacklogRefinement so you wouldn't need to. Needless to say most of them had no useful tips.

In collaboration with @bernie and @anil jiasing

mlevison, 10 months ago to random

“Watch the work product, not the worker” – I attribute this quote, to Don Reinertsen am correct?

mlevison, 9 months ago to random

@jchyip I'm trying to help a client sort through the pros/cons of a Manager/Developer and their affects on Psychological safety, Self org especially in light of their having control of performance reviews.

Manager/Developer - feels very Spotify and so I was wondering if you (or someone else good) have written about this.

mlevison, 2 months ago to random

I need your help, compiling a top ten list. What are your Top Good Reasons a Manager in #Agile Organization needs influence:

1. …

2. To remove impediments;

3. To bring about larger scale change i.e. cross group or department

Good Answers only today. Evil reasons will come tomorrow

mlevison, 1 year ago to random

Buffer has published it's annual state of remote work. Takeaways: People value the flexibility and for many it is reversing the negative effects of past burnout https://buffer.com/resources/insights-2023-state-of-remote-work/

mlevison, 11 months ago to random

Back briefly.

Working with my daughter end of year JavaScript high school project. We saw XMLHttpRequest().open() can take a boolean parameter. The teacher even passed in "true".

Today's learning, I promised even if I'm fifty years dead, I will return from the grave to #haunt her if she ever writes a method that accepts a boolean parameter.

mlevison, 3 months ago to random

#Hivemind some help. In my personal #Agile friend group, I know 10-15 people who're looking for work right now. I plan to make infrequent postings to promote my friends. Help them network, etc.

Two things:

• What would you want to know about someone that would get you to connect and talk to them?
• How would I need to frame the whole thing so that you repost/reshare so these people get to know more people than I do?

(The post will be on LinkedIn since that's were ppl have profiles)

mlevison, 1 year ago to random

Fantastic article from @nicoespeon -- Technical Debt Isn't Technical: What Companies Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt https://www.infoq.com/articles/reduce-technical-debt/ -- hint there are humans involved

Patricia, 18 hours ago to random

People literally proving my point over and over by concluding that the book is about whatever they want it to be about, while simultaneously not having read it and also all deciding it’s about something different. It’s made for it. Every single viewpoint is in there, whatever you want to support you’ll find something. You can also find the opposite viewpoint too, but hey, don’t let that get in the way of a good time.
https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112491738354434313

mlevison, 9 days ago to random

10,000 Hrs of Practice will make you...

I call this the Malcolm Gladwell myth, since it his book the popularized and distorted already questionable research.

As usual, I'm not a psychologist. I don't have a PhD in any science. I do coach Agile and Scrum. I also explode the balloons I call NeuroMyths. As a general rule, if Gladwell writes about it, tread carefully.

In "Outliers", Gladwell suggests that completing 10,000 hrs in their chosen discipline will excel.

#NeuroMyths 1/5