@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

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, 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

⤵️

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

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

@baldur I know you're mostly joking, but when I postpone a passionate post and I still want to make it the next day, that validates that it's not a knee-jerk reaction motivated by thirst for likes and boosts or in-the-moment anger.

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

Executive drives hard, steps on toes to get results. Admits they are flawed: “Sometimes I hold people to the same standards I hold myself, and I need to be less abrasive about that.” They’re lauded as a tough, non-nonsense hyper-achiever.

👇🏽

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

Individual contributor works hard, is strongly opinionated about code and product quality. Admits they are flawed: “Management want to hear about whether we’re shipping what product promised in time for the earnings call, but we’re ignoring critical bugs and functionality gaps and somebody has to make it explicit that we’re choosing to ignore our product and tech debt.” They’re the first to go when the belt is tightened.

“Not a culture fit.”

👇🏽

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

“Culture fit” is a phrase designed to sound egalitarian: “They just don’t fit in with everyone else.” But it is almost never about fitting in with a contributor’s colleagues. It is actually about aligning with leadership’s motivating values.*

—

  • Stated values are often buzzwords strung together for effect. Motivating values are the ones that drive actual decisions.
raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

“To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn't. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform locked in? The more any stakeholder to a platform stands to lose by leaving, the worse the platform can treat them without risking their departure.”

— @pluralistic, “Paying for it doesn’t make it a market”

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/

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

One of the consequences of programming being a pop culture is a kind of dunning-kruger effect where programmers would often prefer to rewrite code than understand it in all its subtleties.

This is obviously the Chesterton’s Fence anti-pattern at work, but let’s just go with “reading and properly understanding code you didn’t write is a hard problem.”

Ok, so now let’s talk about AI generating non-trivial code that a programmer has to understand in all of its subtleties.

Hmmm….

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

How many companies adopted MongoDB because “it’s the future!” and are now stuck with it until insolvency or the heat-death of the universe, whichever comes first?

Be careful about making technical decisions based on bubble logic

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

@baldur Not my observation, but in an industry where gigs, entire products, and even companies are short-lived, the incentive will always be to use the latest shiny:

  1. The latest shiny gets your blog, mastodon, and conference talks attention. Boring is harder to sell.
  2. The latest shiny plus the above gets you your next gig. Boring is harder to sell.
  3. The odds of winding up that one old person in the corner who knows what used to be the latest shiny are extremely low, even if you try.
raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@baldur We repeat Dr. Alan Kay’s observation that “programming is a pop culture,” but all-too-often we focus on the culture and forget that just like pop music and pop art and pop literature, there is an industry wrapped around the pop culture that amplifies the “pop” nature of tech.

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

In the late 80s/early 90s, I worked for a founder in the database-backed desktop publishing niche. He told me a story about how when he was a boy, his grandmother offered to take him to a movie for his birthday.

Trying to be edgy, he requested "Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke." After the show, he asked what she thought of the flick. She thought for a moment, then spoke: "There wasn't much of a story, was there?"

Grandmothers never lose the ability to cut you down to size.

📣 @JeffGrigg

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

Another story, this one about our adventures together.

He sold a classified ad system to a penny-saver in Dayton, Ohio. We flew down to do the install.

this system ran on a "closely coupled network," i.e. The system had an S100 bus, plus cards for I/O and storage.

But instead of a single integrated CPU/memory card, there was one for each user! A text terminal was connected to each CPU card, and the S100 bus was the network.

Output was to two Apple LaserWriters in parallel.

➡️

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

When we got there, they loved the system, but demanded a new feature. The founder was no idiot, he told them we'd convene and get back to them.

He thought he needed to talk me into doing some free work. I countered with a proposal:

Leave it to me, and if I could talk them into paying for the new features, how about we split the money 50-50?

He said yes, they said yes, and I went home USD 5,000 happier after working around the clock to implement the features on location.

➡️

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

But that's not the story. The story is about the LaserWriters. We didn't try to buy them in Toronto, import them into the US, and then sell them to our customer. In those days Apple Canada charged 20% more for everything than the US, and there would be no warranty.

So we brought the physical minicomputer, but bought the LaserWriters locally. Or at least, we tried. Here's what went down.

➡️

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

We went to a local resellers, told them our story's and ordered two LaserWriters. We agreed to come back in a few days to collect and pay for them.

When we returned, the manager led us into his office and told us we had like 30 seconds o come clean or he was calling the cops.

It seems we had—hold onto your hats—backed into our parking spot, which is something only bank robbers do to prepare for a quick getaway.

➡️

LindaCollins11, to random
@LindaCollins11@mastodon.social avatar

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218905101

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

@LindaCollins11

  1. The Venn diagram of language vigilantes and “free speech absolutists” is a circle.

  2. Odd these stories never involve a man telling another man he must speak English.

  3. This woman happened to be speaking Navajo. Another viral case involved a Muslim woman speaking Welsh. But weird I cannot ever recall someone being told to stop speaking Scots, German, Gaelic, Swedish… Wonder why.

  4. Come to my town. Speak Afrikaans, a language that gives me the creeps. What’s the problem?

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

The best applications for AI generate high-value with high fault-tolerance.

Replacing highly-paid employees with AI is high-value. Replacing highly-paid employees whose communication can be ambiguous or even contradictory, as long as they sound like an expert is highly fault-tolerant.

Who is paid more than the CEO? And judging by Musk winging announcements in Tesla’s earnings calls, nobody cares if the CEO is hallucinating.

Everybody know this is feasible, but nobody thinks it will sell.

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

“At first you may say to yourself, ‘Hey this thing looks kinda like a Playdate’ and you wouldn't be far off.

“But the difference is the Playdate is a fun, charming, intentionally simple little console that you play for five minutes whenever you remember you own it, and the rabbit is a cretinous imposition that I don’t ever want to hear about again after this blog.”

https://aftermath.site/why-would-i-buy-this-useless-evil-thing

🎩 @dandean

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

@dandean

Counterpoint:

“If there’s one overarching takeaway from last night’s Rabbit R1 launch event, it’s this: Hardware can be fun again. After a decade of unquestioned smartphone dominance, there is, once again, excitement to be found in consumer electronics. The wisdom and longevity of any individual product or form factor — while important — can be set aside for a moment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.”

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/24/rabbits-r1-is-a-little-ai-gadget-that-grows-on-you/

🔗 @daringfireball

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

@dandean @daringfireball

An outstanding wrap-up:

“Having only played around with the R1 for a few hours, I can definitively tell you that it’s a more accessible device than the Humane Pin, courtesy of the touchscreen and price. It doesn’t solve the cultural screen obsession Humane is interested in — nor does it seem to be shooting for such grandiose ambitions in the first place. Rather, it’s a beautifully designed product that offers a compelling insight into where things may be headed.”

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

@marick @dandean @daringfireball

I think we’ve grown old and forgotten Narnia. I can definitely remember a time when “a small device that answers questions—even unreliably—about things you’re looking at” would have been fun.

But for now… It’s likely to be exactly what the quote suggests: A hint of where things are going without much chance of evolving directly into the useful thing to come.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • ngwrru68w68
  • ethstaker
  • tacticalgear
  • osvaldo12
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • Youngstown
  • everett
  • InstantRegret
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • provamag3
  • kavyap
  • GTA5RPClips
  • Leos
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • khanakhh
  • cubers
  • normalnudes
  • anitta
  • tester
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •