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Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

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Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#181

Post by busterarm »

hinkley wrote: post #173
busterarm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them. I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone. They are still using ES…

When you first introduce the idea you'll find a bunch of people think decisions are Reversible which are not, as you say. And the flip side of Reversible decisions is the Last Responsible Moment, which runs afoul of Hofstadter's Law, and people wait until halfway past the last responsible moment. The key to reversing a decision is getting over Sunk Cost, to start thinking of some code as scaffolding. Scaffolding allo…

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the idea. I pretty much follow a lot of what you're saying without giving it names. I'm just used to people giving lip service to certain ideas as an excuse to move with less friction in their org and end up doing long-term organizational damage.

Thank you for the added detail.

> The product roadmap is now and has ever been complete bullshit. Refactoring teaches that you amortize rework across all new stories. That's just how it goes.

Also agree, but teams use sprints and "the roadmap" as a way to say no to fixing bottlenecks they've created for other teams and don't want to take the time and effort to resolve.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#182

Post by xg15 »

busterarm wrote: post #169
hinkley wrote: post #146

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them. I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone. They are still using ES…

There seems to be some general pattern here that you can find pretty often in "dev war stories" contexts:

(1) We're a small startup/new product team/etc, let's just build the MVP and keep everything simple!

(2) Now we're not small anymore and suddenly have all kinds of nonfunctional requirements we never imagined before! But our simple architecture from before is making everything a pain now!

The natural instinct is then to compromise on the "simpleness" of the first prototype and already try to anticipate all the scaling and nonfunctional requirements that might come later - but that rarely seems to work, as you can't really how (and if) the project will grow.

Seems to me, the real question here is why those teams are still using the "MVP" code even after being well inside the "scale up" phase. Shouldn't this be the point where you gradually migrate to a codebase that is more manageable at scale?

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#183

Post by mimd »

I have met women in tech who have been privacy conscious and paranoid about state control. Or even a healthy stream of non-tech women worried that it will be used to attack their sex and to discriminate. I don't think the author is correct in his belief that there are not a considerable amount of women worried about privacy. And to make such a board claim, and in light of my experience, would indicate either hubris or sexism.

If anything, he frames that he is concerned about his daughter as a father. The viewpoint of patriarchy.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#185

Post by intended »

mimd wrote: post #183

I have met women in tech who have been privacy conscious and paranoid about state control. Or even a healthy stream of non-tech women worried that it will be used to attack their sex and to discriminate. I don't think the author is correct in his belief that there are not a considerable amount of women worried about privacy. And to make such a board claim, and in light of my experience, would indicate either hubris o…

As a counter point, the larger point that the author was making resonated with what I have seen.

As in - women in tech who value privacy and rule of law, and are also advocates for child safety and (better versions of) age verification.

In addition, for obvious reasons, you see more (more being the key word) women showing up for issues like NCII.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#186

Post by intended »

logifail wrote: post #36
andix wrote: post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

> A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents (Speaking as a parent of three) why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents? In our experience in the offline world it seems this applies! I speak as someone who's taken each of my three children - for two of them, multiple times - to the emergency room to be treated for broken bones incurred in the course of Real Life[tm]. Yes, they…

Why do you use yourself as an example of parenting?

The issue isn’t the parents who can’t imagine bad parenting.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#187

Post by intended »

zug_zug wrote: post #86
andix wrote: post #23

I don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term. Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require r…

> A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful). If that's all we want then that's trivial -- just make certain phones that don't have access to social media, or have whatever limitations enforced. And kids only get those phones. I don't think anybody's addicted to desktop social media. This gets us the privacy and the protection at once.

It likely would! It is also probably the better solution all in all.

However society doesn’t have the stomach for that (yet).

Also, as the article correctly identified, society is gearing up to deal with other types of crime online.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#189

Post by ETH_start »

busterarm wrote: post #8
Scaled wrote: post #6

Didn't know ACM was anti-privacy. Glad I haven't paid dues in who knows how long if they're spending them to platform these noxious opinions.

It's not anti-privacy to point out the obvious that privacy-advocacy is sometimes at odds with governments and the will of voters at large. Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals. Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can…

He's very clearly arguing against absolute privacy on the Internet and is saying that the people who advocated for it, which he besmirches as "tech bros", are responsible for the governments going too far now, instead of a happy compromise having been set out at the beginning, which by the way totally mischaracterizes the history of the Internet, where the governments were trying to impose total surveillance from the very beginning.

Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

#190

Post by ETH_start »

SoftTalker wrote: post #21
Scaled wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age verification is not the will of the voters. It is the will of large political donors (specifically tech companies and religious censorship groups). It is certainly not the will of adult citizens who use adult websites, who have overwhelming shown in their usage patterns they will abandon any website that tries to do age verification. Parental controls remains the right way to do age gating. It works today and has…

Parental control does not work today, it's too fragmented and too difficult.

So instead of instituting restrictions that will probably cost society hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in lost economic efficiency, publicly fund development of better parental control software, and publicly fund its adoption to make it the market standard.
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