B) useful for developers who streamline their workflow
=> What are the streamlinable workflows? (1) API testing; (2) data model layers; (3) API language bridges; (4) ...
Find complementary or competitive products for 1-4.
Find (where) people (who) complain about the product limitations
Prove to them your product does not have such limitations.
Along the way: learn about the problem and product space, decide if you care enough to make people happy (productize), ...
... or find something that's more interesting. You might e.g., find yourself more interested in showing people how to adopt AI than in how to generate Java.
Then you're showing the java-generation as proof point for a broader and arguably more valuable technology, and showing yourself as someone who can create value, for others who already have a market+product in mind.
It's an anthropocentric miss to worry about AI as another being. It's not really the issue in today's marketplace or drone battlefield. It's the scalability.
It's a hit to see augmentation as amputation, but a miss to not consider the range of systemic knock-on effects.
It's a miss to talk about nuclear weapons without talking about how they structured the UN and the world today, where nuclear-armed countries invade others without consequence.
And none of the prior examples - nuclear weapons, (writing?) etc. - had the potential to form a monopoly over a critical technology, if indeed someone gains enduring superiority as all their investors hope.
I think I'm less scared by the prospect of secret malevolent elites (hobnobbing by Chatham house rules) than by the chilling prospect of oblivious ones.
But most of all I'm grateful for the residue of openness that prompts him to share and us to discuss, notwithstanding slings and arrows like mine. The many worlds where that's not possible today are already more de-humanized than our future with AI.
The point of Chatham House rules is to encourage free-ranging and unfiltered discussion, without restriction on its dissemination. If people know they are going to be held to their words, they become much less willing to say anything at all.
The "residue" of openness is in fact the entire point of that convention. If you want to be invited to the next such bunfight, just email the organisers and persuade them you have insight.
Scott Adams' revolution was to get users to give him plot lines.
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
> a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
This is a common trend now on TikTok for any "creator" with a moderate follower count. The template goes something like "I'm bored, tell me the thing you bought that you can't do without". The creator doesn't have to do anything, the followers create the content for them in the comments.
Here's a theory why Scott went from funny to a bit weird alt right. For much of the time he was getting users sending office stories by email, but in more recent times was on twitter and getting info from the alt right bunch on there who push a lot of weird stuff. The reason he got banned from most papers was getting sucked into this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
A lot of people seem to have constructed a history of Adams where he suddenly got sucked into the Twitter alt-right sometime around the rise of MAGA, forgetting that his whole cartoonist origin story is white male resentment stemming from his belief that his progress in management was being hampered by women and minorities and that his decline from that low starting point was being remarked on long before the MAGA era, to the point that it was treated as a long-established fact around the time the term “alt-right” was coined.
It's been a while since I read dilbert in the papers, but.. really?
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
> Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime.
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
>Scott Adams has claimed that during his early corporate career, he was explicitly told by his managers that he would not be promoted because companies were prioritizing minorities. According to Adams, while working at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, his boss told him that "Whites could not be promoted." He then moved to Pacific Bell, where he says his boss told him directly, "you can’t be promoted because you’re White and you’re male"
I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
> I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
That's nice, and it might even be relevant in a discussion where someone said that his claim to have been discriminated against made all his office humor suspect, rather than that it was a key turning point in his own narrative of how he came to make it.
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
I'm not sure how to respond to a post like this. It feels superficially earnest, and yet absolutely dedicated, at its core, to talking about black people without having ever talked with us.
sigh
Point-by-point:
Whiteness is a manufactured identity. It's the Kwanzaa of ethnicities. It was constructed as part of a centuries-long colonial campaign that, yes, sought to subjugate non-European peoples and places. It only exists in opposition to blackness, and delineates that which exists for and in opposition to this colonial campaign.
If you live in a segregated area, it is likely that white residents have pressed historical socioeconomic advantages and influence to secure their own livelihoods in a way that tends to prevent the accumulation and leveraging of resources on the part of black residents.
Black people are generally not promoting (incredibly flawed) violent crime statistics.
It is not a conspiracy that Black Americans focus on the way that American institutions have not made their families and communities whole from various injustices - some within living memory, often explicitly predicated on race - which continue to have direct or easily-traced ramifications for their contemporary lives.
I cannot remember or find the quote - I think it was by James Baldwin o MLK - tha essentially said that racial strife has never been a thing for black people to "overcome", but a thing for white people to stop instigating or propagating. Truly, the division between white and black people ends when white Americans decide that's what they want. Whether or not black people want it (and I, frankly, don't trust the Dilbert guy as an authority on the matter, or even as someone who can dispassionately assess sources), black people don't have the institutional power to force it.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
i suspect this happened with j.k. rowling as well, but maybe i'm giving her too much credit. pretty stunning the difference in results for each based on their similar mental/social curdling. i guess it's easier to stay at the top when you're already there.
Memetic viruses. Just like in biology, sometimes some people can fight em off, but others cant. The universe is not an emergent phenomena from random interactions of tiny billiard balls, ideas and memes actually exist in some plane of reality (IMHO of course)
Dilbert was such a revolutionary comic strip in a lot of ways. Here are a few things related to Scott Adams and Dilbert that have stood out to me over the years. Apologize in advance if any of this sounds like it came from an LLM. Me and most of my family just like to info dump on subjects of interest.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
> I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish.
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
Even if implementation was painful, did it work well? It sounds good, in making managers accountable and encouraging servant leadership, but I lack the understanding of psychology and unfortunate management to know /how/ it could go wrong, yet have the experience to say as gut instinct, this could go wrong.
Or was it positive but just tone-deaf that they introduced random drug testing at the same time?
>Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
I'm trying to imagine the entirety of my thoughts, dreams and feelings being reduced to binary choices on questions predefined by some corporate wanker - and it being called a dignity initiative.
> good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
You see it sometimes on Reddit in /r/comics, where someone will post a comic and then the idea for the next comic comes from a comment on the first one etc.
Most HN posts are how to program, mainly focusing on new tools and ideas.
But now the tooling is so good and the competition so fierce that the real question now is not how but what to program.
For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.
This post imagines how Nadar saw his subjects, and how his subjects saw things. Not only is it a different time, but in most cases the subjects had a hand in history, we know now.
To me that's the essence of product design: imagining a different world through the eyes of another, and understanding how to make a real difference.
Products mostly focus on the present-market scale, but investments incorporate the full life cycle. The real power of the historical perspective is understanding how it's the latent value in the context that gives a new product its power, and how significant that can be over time, particularly when a technology becomes pervasive.
Here the photograph far outdoes the samurai's sword in its influence, not just for images and history but as a demonstration of the power of recording light for science, medicine, etc.
May this post inspire someone to make the next photograph.
>For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.
The main issue is that the skills needed to make a product can be different from the skills needed to land a job in an organization. That makes it further muddy what to program.
Ok, we all understand the ancient problem and its current manifestation.
But what can be done? Science is not supposed to be the realm of disinformation, but it seems to have no real defenses. People are being paid to lie, no one is being paid to say they are liars, and from the outside scientific dispute looks a lot like politics, so scientists lose credibility by association.
First, I wouldn't give up on the work relationships. Even if you damaged them, it's good practice and good karma to try to make amends; people really appreciate others reforming, and they will take you seriously as a person if you do. And even if they balk, you tried, and you can leave with clean hands and new life lessons. But most of all, the regularity of work and home is a good basis for making other life changes. Unemployment changes economic and social and perhaps home context, making it mostly a time to hold things constant to balance the equation; any change is more forced than elected. Better to hold employment but start changing what you want.
Ok, not to duck the hypothetical, assuming you do leave (and to add to the other good advice here)...
We tend to focus on the things we can control, and things we understand; we stay in a context. A job change is a chance not to be stuck in that mode.
The biggest difference in work latitude is the overall need and value flow. It's just easier to be on a big river than a tiny stream, modulo competition. So consider the world in terms on value-flow and competition. E.g., tech value flows can be large but volatile, and competition includes outsourcing and automation on top of new grads. In-person health care services require long credentialing but then are protected by those credentials and the difficulty of automation; but because it's in-person, the value is hard to scale unless you're a rainmaker (i.e., a doctor). And so on.
A job change is also a chance to reset your life. Yes, try exercise and address some other self- and social-debt, but don't load yourself with obligations. The key thing is values, how you feel, and your liveliness relative to life. It'd be a good sign when there's a nice view, and you really feel it, without distraction from your psycho-social-economic context. When you discover your values, you pretty naturally start working on them and work isn't hard.
Java is a great success story. Though, to be fair, James Gosling was the spark but has not been the steward.
Even as early as Java 1.1 and 1.2 he was not particularly involved in making runtime, library, or even language decisions, and later he wasn't the key to generics, etc.
Mark Reinhold has been the hand's-on lead since 1.1, first integrating early JIT's, HotSpot, the 1.2 10X class explosion, and has been running the team all the way through Oracle's purchase, making the JVM suitable for dynamic language like Kotlin and Clojure, open-sourcing, moving to a faster release cadence, pushing JVM method and field handles that form the basis for modern language features, migrating between GC's, and on and on.
As far as I can tell, everything that makes Java great has come down to Mark Reinhold pushing and guiding.
The whole core team is amazing. Gosling wanted a language that was practical from a development POV. Over the years, it's been refined into a language with a fair amount of mechanical sympathy on top of the development experience. Thanks to folks like Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.
I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.
The article doesn’t give enough attention to the glacial but steady changes in the ownership model that will have great benefit in avoiding copies in value types, Swift’s strength and Achilles heel.
I have to say Paul Hudson has almost single-handedly taken over communicating the essentials of Swift to the world; he’s fantastically reliable, brief but enthusiastic, guiding people around the many pitfalls.
Agree on Paul Hudson being great, but not so much on the guiding around the pitfalls. One big issue with the Swift community in general in my opinion is that a lot of the community content is incredibly shallow. Most of them are fine with "there's this feature and you can do X with it, cool right?" style-content, meaning very few people actually take the time to explain what the trade-offs are / performance considerations / how things work under the hood, and IMO this took a huge negative hit in the average skill level of Swift developers.
I think one of the problems is that the people who are actually using the language features generally don't have time to do it, Apple doesn't do it themselves, and Paul Hudson has 300 new features a year to view. Plus, iOS developers cargo cult harder than any other programming community I've come across, and this generally doesn't work really well if your explanation is difficult to quickly convey.
Agreed about Paul Hudson. He also just seems like a genuinely nice guy. I was kind of shocked to receive an email from him out of the blue last weekend (well, from GitHub, but with his name in the "From" field). Turns out it was about a PR [0] to one of my packages where he fixed typos in the README.
May I ask why did you decide against starting with (Eclipse) Theia instead of VSCode?
It's compatible but has better integration and modularity, and doing so might insulate you a bit from your rather large competitor controlling your destiny.
Or is the exit to be bought by Microsoft? By OpenAI? And thus to more closely integrate?
If you're open-source but derivative, can they not simply steal your ideas? Or will your value depend on having a lasting hold on your customers?
I'm really happy there are full-fledged IDE alternatives, but I find the hub-and-spoke model where VSCode/MS is the only decider of integration patterns is a real problem. LSP has been a race to the bottom, feature-wise, though it really simplified IDE support for small languages.
My California rates are .50/63 off/on peak
"Jealous" is not the term I'd use...
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