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You Have to Feel It

mitchellh.com

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Re: You Have to Feel It

#61

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Really, I think we’re all talking around some notion of beauty here. Not in the sense of personal vanity, but more of a sense of internal cohesiveness.

Also, the feeling he’s referring to is what sold me on Ghostty. It was clear that he’d thought quite a bit about good defaults. Performance is great without having to tweak anything. In a way, I love that this sort of thing cannot be qualified, because it means that it cannot be commoditized or democratized. It either connects with someone, or it doesn’t.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#62

Post by tbrownaw »

cpursley wrote: post #34
johnfn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people work at large corporations and enjoy their work.

“Enjoy their paycheck”, there - fixed it for you

Nope. Sure scale comes with lots of communication and coordination overhead that many people don't enjoy, but middle management exists to provide a place to dump all that annoying stuff.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#63

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kookamamie wrote: post #5

> You have to feel it. The corporate machine does not feel it. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.

Whatever you think about Apple, I find it hard to believe that the team that developed the original iPhone could have done so without feeling it.

Perhaps that was just the magic of Jobs, who definitely felt things. But he didn't make the iPhone single handedly.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#64

Post by sublinear »

> When you feel it, you know. The feature makes you smile when you use it. It fits right in, like it was always meant to be there. You want to use it again. You want to tell people about it. This is the difference. This is what metrics, specifications, and demos miss.

Totally absurd! The metrics and specifications are what make all of that possible.

This feels like it was written for execs and managers who bury their heads in the sand when they're overwhelmed.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#65

Post by financetechbro »

mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

My theory of life is that Everything is Vibes. I work in the financial industry with individuals who think very highly of their fact driven decision making when it always boils down to vibes. Facts be dammed

Re: You Have to Feel It

#66

Post by reval »

kingkawn wrote: post #55
mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.

There is something to this. I believe that if you cannot feel, you also cannot reason. It’s almost as if intellectual ability is an application of emotionality rather than something separate. For example, when something makes sense to you, what does that really mean? In my experience, when something “clicks”, that is not intellect. The intellect kicks in to retroactively explain the feeling. The “clicking” itself- that’s the feeling.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#67

Post by card_zero »

kingkawn wrote: post #55
mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

This distinction is an absurdity first written to provide a rational for why everything being done in the name of Reason felt so bad.

Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?)

Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.

What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#68

Post by txrx0000 »

mcdeltat wrote: post #51

I've learnt that just about everything in life boils down to feelings, which is interesting. No matter how rational a person or people claim to be, usually it comes down to feelings... Life choices? Business decisions? Who gets promoted? It's all vibes and feelings. People will deliberate and argue over facts but ultimately there will be some "weighting" factor which is feelings and will make or break the outcome. Yo…

People want different things. Even if two perfectly rational people agree on a shared model of reality, they still might not agree on what actions to take as a matter of aesthetic preference.

That said, it's true that few are rational and honest. Everyone wants their ideals to be reality, but most people confuse their ideals with reality itself. Even those who can tell the difference may choose to trick others into delusion, so that they may use them for their own benefit.

I used to do that, but not so much now. Being honest with myself and the world is a more interesting way to live.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#69

Post by jbmsf »

mosselman wrote: post #27
sigotirandolas wrote: post #12

For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that. I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing .

Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive. This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece. I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense…

We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.

Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.

Re: You Have to Feel It

#70

Post by benreesman »

kookamamie wrote: post #5

> You have to feel it. The corporate machine does not feel it. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead.

It comes and goes in seasons. There is always a tension between the needs of the many and the pathological acquisitiveness of the few, but this is the worst in the West in living memory.

The last remotely compatible situation was the late USSR, and a dysfunctional Soviet corpse plundering by middling oligarchs to even more pathic notional leadership is precisely what it is.

Be of good cheer, it collapses under its own weight in this neighborhood of dysfunction. Its almost over.

There will be a mess to clean up, then it'll be summer again until we get lax again.

Always been this way, always will be. Empires grow in power, then corruption, then only corruption, and then they're done.

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