The Myth of Commoditized Excellence
barryhawkins.com
barryhawkins.com
* linux - the freedom it gave me to build my own computing astounded me. I praised it in every direction only to find people that want all the benefits with no effort. I had to configure their systems to prove linux was any good. When I started telling them the benefits require personal tinkering I was attacked for "being an elitist" and linux was said to be actually full of things that don't work. Now I present it as a geek thing that is of no relevance to the general public.
* motorcycles - I now have the following presentation when people ask me about my experience riding: "It's not like on TV, when it's hot you sweat, when it's cold you freeze, when it rains you're wet and it's quite dangerous on top of it." That's after my enthusiasm convinced some people to buy motorcycles and crash because they didn't take riding seriously enough. They thought they where cool toys.
Rather than hooking people with benefits and then disappointing them with the cost, only those who remain interested after they are familiar with the downsides will stay and listen. It also serves as a good time saver for both parties.
If they go into it thinking "oh, this is like installing windows" and then their expectations violated, they will be frustrated.
If they go into it thinking "oh, this is a way to get more out of a computer, if I'm willing to do some debugging." then they can think "well, I'm the type of person that does things best when I've got a solid theoretical grounding. Let me go get a book first." or "well, this could be a puzzle, let me get a sandwich before I attempt this."
Working with Linux is indeed frustrating at times, but it can be well-worth mustering the frustration-tolerance. But to do that, you've got to know yourself and know what you're getting yourself into.
Me: Today's school lunch is serving a giant chicken nugget. Will you eat that?
Son: Yay, okay, I love chicken nuggets!
Me: There's a bun involved, you can ignore it.
Son: ::shrugs:: okay
He hates sandwiches. If I had lead with the cost, that he'd be getting the breaded chicken patty in the form of a sandwich, he would have refused. Now, he'll happily set the bun aside. Kids are weird. But, I guess adults are too.
The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting in a cafe when a waitress approached him: “Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?”
Sartre replied, “Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream”.
Nodding agreement, the waitress walked off to fill the order and Sartre returned to working. A few minutes later, however, the waitress returned and said, “I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream — how about with no milk?”
As you should. Linux shit DOESN'T work, for a defintion of work 99% of us use. It ate away so much of my time, with the various distros, until I realized how much simpler it is on Windows.
With the obvious caveat that not everything is click and play, you may have to tweak a config or variable here and there.
For this definition MacOS, Windows and Linux all work just fine. I prefer to use a combo of MacOS + Linux because for ME Windows doesn't work, always gets in the way, not just the OS but all the software seems biased towards nagging and spamming and attention grabbing and doing stuff I never explicitly requested it to do instead of just sitting there and doing only what I want them to do.
For others even Chrome OS is good enough.
So mind your use case.
A lot of professionals do real work without touching ANY of what you'd call "office" software whatsoever! I'm not even sure what that "Outlook" thing some refer to even is to be honest. ...I DO use Microsoft Excell, but that's it, the rest of that software universe does not exist to me.
Is it worth it? I'm obviously biased, so my answer is to be taken with a grain of salt.
Not all reasons for having a large family are religious; some are just desire, of course, and some are indeed economically rational. That last is part of the reason, I believe, that birth rate drops as wealth increases, and is yet another reason to try to increase wealth for everyone.
Well they are - in the sense that the practical value is very limited and there are better alternatives in every regard (even in the ideal scenario where you live in a place with excellent riding conditions and limited parking which benefits a bike - a scooter is going to give you easier riding since it's automatic, less maintenance, more storage capacity and will be plenty fast for commuting if you get 300/600cc ones).
My bike is a toy - it's just a dangerous one.
I would classify a motorcycle (I have one too) as a tool for both transport (get me from A to B) and fun (riding it is fun).
That being said, holy mother of god it is stressful when there are other cars on the road, people are freaking scary in cars.
A nuclear reactor is something that would have a very low "toyness" score, i.e. you wouldn't "play" with it.
A plastic toy car would have a very high "toyness" score, as it is literally designed to play with (by kids).
I kind of fear my analogy of two different dimensions breaks down here because I'm left wondering what things would have a low "toolness" score ...
Haute couture fashion?
"Toolness" is, at least to a large extent, a synonym for "(practical) utility".
Code, for example, can be played with but can also deliver significant impact to a large group of people.
A toy car, as another example, can be played with but delivers value to only one person at once (well, depending on how you use it).
Maybe expressing it as a complex number would help, eg. toolness + i(toyness)
In polar form a low angle would indicate a high "toolness to toyness" ratio.
I think its better to present enthusiasm alongside frustration in sortof a story arc:
- Inciting incident: see an opportunity to do something cool.
- A Conflict Arises: run into a roadblock -- be honest about the frustration.
- Satisfying climax: solve the problem and are able to do the thing. Genuine excitement.
I think that lets you get across your emotion of excitement, while also being honest about the facts on the ground-- Linux does genuinely involve a fair amount of config struggles. The hard part is that debugging can be quite a long and winding road, so it is hard to compress it into a concise enough narrative to hold people's attention through it.
> Linux does genuinely involve a fair amount of config struggles.
Am I
- insanely lucky?
- forgetful?
- or do I just have very limited scope of what I want my Linux machine to do (non competitive fps gaming, development, mail, simple spreadsheets and word processing) ?
- or have I just been very unlucky with my Windows installations for 15 years?
- or am I just born to be a Linux user?
Since Ubuntu 06.06 I've found one or another Linux easier to install and use than Windows.
I remember having to install an official package (915 something?) to get my resolution correct back in '06.
I remember a bit of struggle to get it working in dual boot once secure boot came (but only because I wanted dual boot).
The last year I remember learning that balena etcher is now the way to make bootable usbs.
Meanwhile on Windows it is a constant struggle each time I get a new machine. It keeps getting better but with two or three exceptions there's always something that makes it laggy, even on high end laptops. Solving it might hours of work and weeks of calendar time, and sometimes there's notjing I can do and I just have to wait for an updated driver.
In my eyes the advantage of using Wimdows is that the IT department will support it. On the other hand I also only need support when I work on Windows.
(Have used and supported Windows since 3.1, so I know it better than many others even if I don't line it : -)
Most recently trying to upgrade his laptop to an SSD and clone his existing drive turned into massive frustration as his drive didn't have a second drive slot and the USB->SATA adapter that came with the SanDisk SSD just caused error messages on Windows, while Ubuntu instantly recognized the drive with the same adapter.
Turned out you had to dig through forums to find some random link to a download patching something to get it to work on Windows, and most of the recommended solutions I saw was to forget Windows and clone with a Linux live CD (I was about to, just as I stumbled across the link).
That's pretty much what I've come to expect with Windows.
I remember when it used to be the reverse, and I used Linux despite assorted driver and software problems. Now that's what it feels like to try to help my son with his laptop, with the only redeeming feature being that not all the games he wants runs on Linux.
That's not to say I don't occasionally have issues with Linux too, but mostly because I run a very unconventional setup - my few small problems start once I start tearing out the parts of Ubuntu I don't want; such as replacing the desktop environment with bspwm.
And occasionally I run into driver issues - the individually led controllable backlights on my laptop keyboard doesn't have a Linux driver... But not with anything that matters to me. Don't get me started on last time I had to deal with printer drivers for Windows.
What used to be lengthy checks to see if all hardware worked has now been reduced to a quick search and "some random person on a forum says it mostly worked" means it's almost certainly going to be flawless if the post is a couple of months old, with sufficient certainty that I've bought my last 3 laptops on that basis without regretting it.
However, the average person probably isn't comfortable (dare I say should be trusted?) with block-level utilities that can wipe the wrong drive at the drop of a typo. To propose that they should be comfortable with a terminal at all is, to put it kindly, delusional, and it's a great example of the post's mythical excellence.
This is the current meta I see:
- Linux only offers "excellence" to A.) EXTREMELY SIMPLE users who never stray from compatible use cases (which is a surprisingly unsafe assumption) and B.) EXTREMELY ADVANCED users who aren't sufficiently advanced for BSD and can overcome any Linux software compatibility issues or elide them by forcing themselves to use possibly suboptimal alternatives.
- Windows only offers "excellence" to AVERAGE users technical enough to debug in vague, indirect, salt-over-the-shoulder ways (like practicing neuromedicine), but not technical enough to feel comfortable with terminals or desire stuff like more comfortable programming workflow. (Also, bonus: it covers virtually all prospective user software and hardware.)
[0]: https://www.digitalcare.org/system-image-backup-windows-10/
Yep. Something like that, except I wouldn't say extreme neither for simple nor advanced, and I never felt it was any more suboptimal than Windows for the last 10 - 15 years:
Linux is for "grandparents" and enthusiasts. It might not be for AD domain admins, accountants with Windows only software, designers who need the lates Adobe products, people who are into competitive gaming (yet, I think).
This is said as a former enthusiast and not yet a grandparent. I am in the happy position where I can leave the system alone - and be able to fix it if it finds a way to break anyway.
The only reason I didn't jump at it was that I by a fluke didn't happen to have a USB stick or CD to write to handy to install it when I needed it, or I'd have done that.
Windows System Image wouldn't have helped - before applying the patch I had to dig through forums to find, nothing on Windows recognized the device at all.
It's mentioned below but boy did Agile fall into that trap. I now cringe when I hear the word.
It sounds like Six Sigma is also in a self-destructive part of the cycle.
Some thoughts
1) Consultancies have created a business model around that carrying excellencies from client to the next
2) The most obvious concept coming into mind which was completely abused through this is of course the whole agile (and increasingly OKRs...) movement
3) I still think it does make sense to generalize (not commoditize) concepts and spread them, however there needs to be big disclaimers about context etc
4) A big part of management’s responsibility is to improve the organization continuously, which can be done by getting inspiration how others have been successful
Book Advice: write books on how to get rich; sell books.
So many examples of this in daily life. People do amazingly vicious things to validate their membership in a movement/tribe/religion/cult/etc.
This applies even if you have good intentions. Honesty often comes with an initial cost that makes people turn away.
Thinking they give us access to truth in some explicit objective universal sense is naive - because we could just be cataloguing our most persistent cognitive and perceptual habits.
The front-end landscape is filled with these once-honest charlatans.