@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

raganwald

@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us

I am an author of bespoke works of prose. Every word—every single one—is literally written by hand, letter by letter.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

A rallying cry for the "Make Something Wonderful" crowd.

🪖 @aral

https://social.bau-ha.us/@aral@mastodon.ar.al/112427628706932284

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Communities support each other with questions, answers and discussions. Communities are fundamentally about building bonds between people via cooperation.

Community was baked into the web via newsgroups, comments on old-school blogs, social mediums where people can help each other with everything from how to fly a glider to what's wrong with my JavaScript.

Capitalism is trying to burn that all down.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Today's attack on Community is using AI to answer questions, suggest code, and do everything in its power to get in between people so that the world stops relying on community and cooperation, and becomes fully dependent upon capitalism.

When blogs, search engines, and everything else can no longer be discovered, but their content is remixed and hallucinatified, how will community survive?

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@baldur

The founding principle of StackOverflow was to kill the loathsome corporate SEO chum known colloquially as the "Expert Sex Change" web site.

The irony of them now being expertise-hostile in favour of 💰💰💰💰💰 is so extreme that it feels almost lazy to bother pointing it out.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

“Dorsey is obsessed with the idea of a social media platform that nobody can be kicked from.”

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2024/05/10/jack-dorsey-bluesky-decentralised-social-networks-and-the-very-common-crowd/

That is certainly what Dorsey says he’s obsessed with, but he’s no fool: He knows very well that if you can’t or won’t kick Nazis out of your bar, you become a Nazi bar, and the Nazis will kick everyone else into leaving.

This is 💯 about plausible denial. “Who me run a social media site facilitating genocide? Perish the thought! We embrace all civil discussion.”

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@ParadeGrotesque

A while back I asked how this story goes if the bar is sold and the new owner renames it “X” and places a literal iron cross on the roof, which he illuminates day and night in lieu of burning a wooden cross.

I now realize the “new” owner is just finishing the job the previous owner botched.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Holy shit I ❤️ gliding club culture.

We have a series of lectures going to kick off the season, and our Slack instance is humming along nicely with discussion about one recent topic: Toxic masculinity and how it gets people killed in aviation.

I think I'm going to steal the deck and replace all the aviation references with software development references.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

One of the precipitating changes in aviation culture from "Pilots can do no wrong" to "Toxic masculinity gets people killed" was a terrible B-52 crash that killed the entire crew in front of spectators.

This incident marks the moment when the specifics of the pilot's mistake were considered less important than the systemic complicity in the pilot's increasingly dangerous behaviour throughout their career.

Yes, this applies to tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_B-52_crash

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@janl A terrible accident, and the pilot did make a bad decision, but the salient difference is that the B-52 pilot had a career-long history of making bad decisions without any correction or punishment. The fault lied with the culture around them, and needed major cultural changes to fix.

Whereas the fault with KLM 4805 was poor procedures that have subsequently been improved.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

IMO, the lesson from this crash is not "Toxic men are dangerous." It's "Toxic masculinity is a system that tolerates and even encourages men to be dangerous."

If you want to get rid of it, like the strangling vines of Rapunzel's Tower, you must hack away the roots, not the vines themselves.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

"Sunken Cost Fallacy:" Not a logical fallacy, but the tendency to continue to invest in something that is not working out, because you have already invested so much in it.

"Escalation of Commitment:" A human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

What's the difference? One is a business and investment term of art that typically refers to tangible sunken costs like money and labour.

The other is a sociological term of art that typically refers to extreme efforts to avoid using new information to make a new decision or embrace a new point of view.

The first is created by fear of writing down an investment. The second is created by fear of admitting one was wrong. And yes, it's a false dichotomy to suggest they can't both apply.

18+ NataliaArmyOf1, to random Portuguese
@NataliaArmyOf1@mstdn.social avatar

this post is very true and not many people are taking it under consideration because "pornstar"

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@NataliaArmyOf1 Predators choose victims on the basis of whether the victims are likely to be trusted/believed/considered worthy of justice.

It's not a coincidence he chose to abuse a sex worker. He is counting on the public to believe in their hearts that she's not worthy of justice.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Myth:

Agile cannot scale.

Fact check:

Agile scales well with the number of teams. Agile scales poorly with the length and mass of the chain of command.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Some people are discussing software engineering in the library. The more experienced of the two is explaining that "The goal of Agile is to develop something very, very fast, and thus Agile produces more bugs than Waterfall."

If it was just this person, I'd say nothing. But I know that the belief they just espoused is not an outlier.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Good morning! A question for React + TypeScript users:

I want to reboot my experience from scratch. What books, videos, or courses would you recommend that speak to React and TypeScript “as they are spoken today?”

TypeScript logo

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

I am an author of bespoke works of prose. Every word—every single one—is literally written by hand, letter by letter.

Is this laborious? Yes.

Is there an industrialized substitute that’s “good enough” for most people? Maybe also yes.

Will I stop writing bespoke works of prose? Perhaps one day. But today is not that day. And tomorrow doesn’t look particularly promising.

🍓

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

In a world where corporations, politicians, influencers, social media, games, grifters, and everything else is fighting a battle to the death to hijack your attention for their purposes…

Sitting still and letting go of everything is punk as fuck.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Inspired by Caroline Caldwell

https://upmag.com/caroline-caldwell/

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Balderdash is a parlour game where a player presents an obscure word and a definition that may be correct, or a bluff that sounds plausible.

The challenge for the player is to understand what “correct” sounds like, so that they can bluff with verisimilitude. The challenge for everyone else is determining when something that sounds like it ought to be correct, is actually false.

———

Oh hey, I’m sorry, I meant to talk about using Generative AI to answer questions.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

There’s a culture pendulum that swings in tech management.

At one end, there is optimizing for individual productivity and morale. This is Kanban systems and agile and managers who view themselves as shit umbrellas.

The other end optimizes for plausible predictability achieved via command and control. This is big design up front and metrics and enterprise-grade ticket processes.

Question: Does this pendulum swing in harmony with the periodic tightening and loosening of the tech job market?

A series of pendant lights hanging adjacent to each other such that causing the light at the end to strike its neighbour transmits the force through the intermediary lights causing the one at the other end to swing away, then then back, repeating the process in reverse only to cause the first bulb to swing out again, and the cycle continues.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Social media in 2024

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

In a post-truth market, all stocks are meme stocks. Stocks are not bets on fundamentals growing, stocks are bets on which companies capture attention in an influencer and misinformation-saturated media landscape.

Behind the scenes, a toothless SEC watches as AI bot farms and human fellow travellers orchestrate disinformation campaigns. Everything is faster: Pump and dump schemes happen in minutes and hours, not days, weeks, or months.

Conservative populism has eaten the world.

matt, to random
@matt@isfeeling.social avatar

The average iPhone user has a Windows computer, not a Mac. I feel like this is something we in the Apple enthusiast space forget like…all the time.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@matt

Apple embracing Windows users began with iTunes for Windows supporting iPod. Given Apple's history, that was a major sea-change, and something most companies are completely unable pull off.

The typical company would kill such a move because it devalued Macintosh to support iPod. That kind of self-disruption is as rare as unicorns, hen's teeth, and Apple.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Hank Kniberg wrote a great essay about the rightfully viral illustration he created to explain the difference between:

  1. Pre-planning a series of increments leading up to shipping a product that satisfies a customer, and;
  2. Shipping a minimally testable product and iterating on that until it satisfies a customer.

https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp

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