Chiba-City

Stonebreaker's Ingres Papers revenge. The Berkeley IT crowd was remarkably generative of good and enduring outcomes. Their Free/Open Cathedral efforts still anchor our frothier bazaars. Great read.

There are vast real world application domains globally where Postgres one stop shopping for both infrastructure, dev targeting, training and MRO is the clear win with negative returns on BFC better faster cheaper.

Good enough and comfortably familiar haptics is really important. The worldly focus brings us worldly wins. We apply the applied math tools to human concerns to find jobs solving problems and not get jobs to solve our problems. Balancing those two sets of problem is the act.

The ease of repeating a calculation against a data set or recording such a dataset from instrument readings is not exactly the same repetition of a lab or factory recipe outcome. Science concerns data collected and copied yesterday. Tekne concerns repeatable outcomes reproduced tomorrow. Distinctions between the endless feast of science and endless labors of tekne are pretty clear.

Start with basic observations. Tool acquisition is not tool mastery. Tool mastery does not mean jobs for or at Google. Janitors are not getting IPO payouts for lives of leisure. Cold war coastal higher education, city living and corporate trading prowess have drained many interior communities of their best brains throughout decades of deindustrialization and deskilling.

Some better nerds here can hardly imagine perfectly smart people who cannot yet touch type or turn a spreadsheet into a group calendar. Our miraculous simple decision support tools are still opaque to majorities of Americans. Only Americans far outside Google will create value to create jobs. That takes planning for any possible sweat equity or financial investment. We have generations of people to train with tools. The boy genius prizes for ever new tooling are not really separate concerns. Cultivating and harvest new boy geniuses from the field is expensive. They don't exactly grow on trees.

Google like Apple or Microsoft had to discover and rediscover their own relevance. They cultivate their markets now with intensive growth. This is a good move.

Nonsense. Mass transit is a necessity of city traffic fluid dynamics. That has zero comparison to fed funded roads and mortgage deductions for nasty white flight perpetrators. Let them suffer. Let kids inherit their parent debts. Speak in big paragraphs of wordy words. Quips are not funny.

I'm 51. We PC nerds played with IPC via DDE and even Net DDE in the early 90's Netware days before TCP/IP and HTTP took over with XML or JSON in tow. A script connected "Emacs Lisp" for office automation is still a good idea for professionals. The programmable spreadsheet changed the world in the 1980's like few today could ever imagine. They gave out Office to everyone en masse after that. But Hack attacks via email are not always front and center considerations. IPC interoperability is important for folks actually customizing workstation workflows.

One of the most useful resource saving articles I've read in years.

That's consensus narrative not subject to "event horizon" nature of the scheduled TV cat pointer. The business press is very different. There they schedule quarterly financial reports, industry metric measures and product roadmaps on schedules. They interrupt overtly ongoing daily grinds of industry. Popular press is more sensationalist.

The grip of consensus measures is not suffocating. You have to surf them with feature detection. Contests are staged and sometimes usefully to draw attention. But we have good Webs of real news around newer consensus narratives more powerful than ads or fake news. We even have Snopes where we doubts remain.

Life is not much of a debate. Contests and debates are most of the bullshit that walks. Programmatic operations around design realizations talks and walks.

FWIW, the prizes closer to the top are neurotic sons and daughters of legacy post-Colonial industrial screw ups around constant crises manufactured on high. I enjoy "high culture" locally fed city living, but white flight we inherited relegates that to "society luxury" or even "tourist" status in most cities. Receptive folks who like our subsidized outdoors, cars, TV, booze and factory food seem happiest here. I can't change that.

"Servitude" for good operations in good ecosystems with good outcomes is better than fine. The "in charge" positional goods are rare by definition. But rot at our tops and even collusion in industrial felonies (Enron? Wells Fargo?...) is mostly preordained by an accidental empire in decline.

The Santa Fe Institute folks narrate our history and recent dog-eat-dog challenges pretty credibly at different comparative and resource accounting resolutions. Fixing our very specific post-WW2 population Boom and short lived apartheid empire is not possible by grand gesture. Culture, know how, will, patience and trust do not grow on trees. Even trees grow slowly. Interesting times to be a human and learn how we got here.

I am a real person. I was presuming people read the article. I am 51 and caught the tail end of old TV and newsreel culture. People read more of far less but were mostly denied any access to contextual data. When I arrived in DC tons of people "front ran" releases of government data sets only available on tape. I had to go to Library of Congress to read paywalled academic papers. Many aspects of modern Net lives are far superior and more efficient. Social ennui and deception were alive and well long before the Net. I studied philosophy of language so these considerations are my Petri dishes of endless fascination. I am not a bot. I can answer real questions just fine.

Never forget the nightmare of broadcast "Hogan's Heroes" and "I Dream Of Genie." Imperfection looks good from here. Scale information insecurity will remain a real and costly problem. But 1-way broadcast funnels were structurally only problems. Graphs of us are mostly better.

Cities are neighborhood places where people walk to work and carry groceries home 4 nights a week. It works great for retirees who ditch their cars entirely.

I live near the National Zoo in DC. We have a local Iranian grocer right off Metro with a local organic chain right next door. There is no parking there. Segregate any "venue" with parking vs. the alternatives. I also hit a nearby Whole Foods for some items but they need giant underground parking lots for their business models.

The notion that "everyone" is living on Taco Bell and delivery pizza is pure nonsense. Our DC ethiopian and hispanic communities blossoming a short walk away eat really well. They have nice markets where I sometimes buy jicama to pickle. Some C++ template fu nerds also cook up a healthy storm. Recipes and idioms apply everywhere.

I wish I had a clear answer. We have to be nice enough to people, but we have a world of needy charlatans transacting for themselves with little concerns for outcomes, responsibilities and reputations.

Here are some ideas.

IBM's head of federal sales said make hires show their past tax forms. Her point was to remove any "cleverness" over negotiating salaries and outcome responsibilities. Negotiate serious matters "naked." Watch details like commute times, time consuming rituals or debt levels.

Reading and writing are paramount requisites of organizing. I would recommend seeking at minimum faithful business press readers who are not day traders.

Seek executives who show up for smart dialog at the office. Teams have to share the world and not just their own company. Smart people are team players who seek correction or validation.

Seek executives who apply methods they can describe. Beware the latest buzzword fads.

Places like SV, NYC Or BO have deep benches of worldly smarties. That worldly wiseness is important in a startup seeking relevance to very real supply chains in constant motion. Many job seekers at all levels are very narrow specialists who have "rounded themselves" adapting to roles deep inside very incestuous companies or industries. Those folks are motivated by popular delusions of "riches" or "wonders" hiding elsewhere.

Attrition is normal. But recruiting is costly and executive attrition is super costly for the teams and companies left behind.

Industries are all different. But enduring purpose, role and focus are good character attributes to seek in startup hires. That's not highly prized in our fast-transacting careless world.

These are complex consumer taxing drip feeds of information, upgrades, service faults, repair services and so forth. It seems to mostly feed dumps.

Slightly industrial grade hardware is often field repairable. I go for new or refurbed durable low depreciation tools worth mastering. Emacs, weather sealed camera gear or even cookware are examples.

Otherwise I use low power almost disposable Chromebook, Chromecast and Moto-G away from a Linux box with cheap reasonable dumb screens and bluetooth speakers.

The haptics of consumer tools are churned far too easily for business models. Windows XP showed how too slowly depreciating good enough assets in the field upset vendors. Constant maintenance and futzing are taxes outside actually advancing any state of the art. I don't drive living in a midstory DC building together saving about +50% of typical American transport and HVAC power budgets. And I don't sport shop or even eat energy intensive packaged food mysteries.

Good and operationally efficient habits can go well enough with software and city living.

I founded a company that helped many other 90-00's founders along with some legacy industries in crisis. I am a reader so I read many business books. But I missed two specific dynamics I wish I had known earlier.

First, executives will routinely attempt to take the founders' roles. Industries vary widely, but they are roughly "showy spenders" and not savers. Many have no experience in new ventures. They have ridden high and will panic against adversity. If they cannot flee in an overall industry downturn, they will feed on the founders. Be very careful to make "executive" expectations brutally clear and consequences for any and all hubris terminal.

Second, many founders want to be 1-hit wonders. Unlike our industry ecosystem building heroes, they are neither in the ecosystem nor interested in developing the ecosystem. They want in to get out ASAP. Their short termism sadly translates into teaching bad examples to employees.

Nevertheless, the information rich life of the "small rooms" where plans are crafted and industry roads remapped on whiteboards are truly the most wonderful teachers anyone can expect to access.

All this fatalism is wrong, nonsense propaganda. The "wealthy" in plain fact are often killed with survivors exiled en masse. I know tons of bitter Maryland and DC former wealthy who were punished for collusion with our very own state and exiled to our little patch of North American pizza cheese hell to remember. I know world bankers who work with now assassinated Russian billionaires.

You obviously have no comparative data, relevant associates or historical acumen whatsoever. Dare to say something exceedingly smart, discerning and not wish fulfilling. Noise obscures any possible policy signal. All "old saw" claims of "what everyone knows" only subtract from value creation, good planning and sound accounting. That will remain true tomorrow and 10 years from now.

Stay away from needy or greedy cheerleaders spewing nonsense. Just wait and some dummy will a wave a flag next.

Thanks for the book recommendation. That looks like a winner. FWIW, primate biology in big organizations or around family formation have much bigger negative impacts on achievement than I would have realized as a younger man. The odd "zero sum games" around mate selection and status seeking can be too real.

I have "fight" in me. Fight is good. The trick is applying it. I am trying to write an article, but provisionally we find "contours of adversity." There are tons of examples like "HVAC power consumption" for servers or "inflammation" for North American eaters. Once we map out stakeholders in the current "state of adversity" we find human specific institutional obstacles in our supply chains habitually feeding off the adversities. Those become the de facto "enemies" of better new options absent much moral theorizing or imagination. A very sound and shared 1980-90's Netizen principle was "IP routes around obstacles." In the field, those obstacles fight back like crazy and often enjoy political allies. Separating those concerns between "problem space" and "solution space" makes for better shared strategies for early teams and growing companies. I am trying to lay down schematic methodological formulations for better conceptualization of value adding and enduring entrepreneurship channeling that beautiful "fight" of human progress.

There are no debates. There are dialogs. Any contest is staged. I avoid all contests. Our education system, media messaging and fictional narratives are all conflict based. Nothing in real life is like that. Anyone SHOUTING-AT someone at Harvard (or around me) gets kicked out. You just call the police.

Young folks (some older ones) here never realize the is nothing to win and there are no prizes. Go on YouTube and hear great dialogues between Buddhists, Catholics, Anglicans, Suffis and so on. There are no cage fights. That is 100% propaganda. None of us will "Win the Matrix." The Matrix is a silly fiction.

It can take modern people raised on propaganda hero/villain narratives months, years or lifetimes to readjust. Disagreement is not conflict. Positional goods (first, fastest, best) worth having are very rare. Life is pretty good 24/7/365 depending upon distributions of our mutual attentions. I am autistic and had to read the finer manuals to liberate myself. I try to help others (including some DC vets).

Just to repeat: there are no debates and all contests are staged. [Edits: typos, paras]

This looks lovely and near perfect. But what happened to Docbook? I worry about tool longevity and thus ongoing editability of source assets. I imagine groff still might grind old tbl and nroff and docs into Postscript.

I have no privileged state secret information to disclose. But a former employee of mine (and Orbital Sciences, NSA before that) was in Queen Noor Of Jordan's entourage. WhatsApp was one of the dominant messaging apps in the Arab Spring aftermath. I suspect the miraculous purchase price might reflect that. I could be wrong. Boy genius working class hero miracle narratives should be discounted however possible for better business lesson learning. WhatsApp is a rounding error in China and likely a genuine military or trade secrets security threat. Our proclamations of self-identity as guardians of democracy are as important to us as our own enforcement and good example. Focus on what and who matters where.

DC has funny issues likely shared with some other locales. The traffic is so bad people do not want to show up. People move 30 miles away for square foot dreams appropriate to where they grew up and then hate getting to work. Then many dimmer lights here enjoy well paid, easy and even secure event planning or influence peddling jobs. DC political giveaway and pecking order jobs are attractive temptations for entrepreneurs comparing notes and dating. Then add limelight fears vs. friends working well behind walls.

I tried to explain during onboarding that we were not providing public school teacher security and summers off with "tech industry" upside. It did not matter. Expectations were driven by friends and family narratives. Everyone borrowed like consumers, even dabbled in tech day trading and panicked at every industry downturn.

Entrepreneurs must have the operative networks to "front run and flip businesses" or be money savers with real wills to endure as an operational team. Sony failed first making ironing board covers. The team kept going together. I learned enough working for Bill Wynn and Mark Pincus. People not so lucky must read some business case history and biographies. Those are not long or hard reads. Otherwise people are infected with the wrong expectations.

Student debt is a giant depressing obstacle. I am considering registering a religion so "friars" can defer their student loans operating small scale operations together, rotating roles, cost accounting, scheduling, writing contracts for fulfillment and finding sound counsel advisors. Business formation must put process refinement, team building and network growing front and center. It has to be functional, information rich and mostly fun all by itself.

No waves of pens solve these problems deep within motivational structures and widely disparate comparisons between possible futures.

The Web is a failure of cheap tool distribution by attention seekers distracting possibly greater talents wasted on short lived skills or failed projects.

We mostly lack use-case qualification, support metrics, documentary weight or programmatic contract between tool makers and users. None should take commercial interest in tools without references, tutorials, cookbooks, i18n support and road maps shared between stakeholders.

The ecosystem of Unix and Windows literature was exceedingly well written and stable. Backward compatibility was important or breaking changes well flagged. Real software for profitable operations (not entertainment) requires stakeholder analyses for costs, adaption cycles, business models, risk and so forth (no screens or code yet) taking weeks or months even in "move fast startup" mode. Chasing tooling and testing against API changes in a code dump is unwise.

Sadly pop promotional blogs make breathless lottery winning with "bailing wire and chewing gum" seem desirable or probable. That's nonsense. We never need hear more "dorm room miracle" stories or "DB2 rewritten in Forth" fantasies. Anything rushed is a bad bet for talents wasted on shifting sands. The use-cases absolutely matter for tool applicability in a multi-stakeholder (contract obligations) profitable operation. Everything else is a distraction.

I suspect voices of endless tool fetish, "exploratory programming," consumer gaming and "content scripting" might disagree. They do not matter. Those people suffer special needs. The Web as a tool platform has mostly failed. The most "convenient" tools for people measuring fake productivity in keystrokes have failed the hardest. [Edit: typos]

Driving and drinking in common forms are wastes of time or dangerous. Commutes specifically are now the #6 cause of full blown clinical depression. The easiest form of "helicopter parenting" was turning off TV's. Now YouTube lets parents turn of ads. Novelty status seeking, post-war PTSD and novel TV 1-way broadcast made drinking or driving seem attractive. I know parents who forbid gaming, TV fictions and even cheap factory franchise food wholesale. Their kids have time to do everything else live and in person. Not dating is a demographic phenomenon. I was born in '66 and none of us feared incurable diseases. The divorce rates are so high and peer-available literacy and even maximum attention spans so low many kids have no interest in family formation. Demographer predict 25% of unmarried Americans will never even marry. During WW2 26% of Italian women were nuns. Global TFR's are falling and Japan has been depopulating faster than their deflation for net wins. Japan and Britain are net importers of water (via foodstuffs). The instincts for not breeding are smart. Various Amish populations have been booming. People seeking larger families should consider organic farming careers.

We forget Feds fund American roads and local congressional districts like it that way. Our people grid is a road grid accessing an energy grid. Every single story suburban home is a waste of space and HVAC. Rationalizing costs will penalize cheaply built homes along roads built with federal funding. Our TFR's have peaked and Sante Fe Institute folks do not predict happy sprawl. Look at DC or Boston Building town homes and condos more densely on shared public transport with Uber fill in. Quite successful medium enterprises spread out by Eisenhower cannot find employees. Various locales like Columbus, OH and Pittsburgh are slated for gathering that slack into ecosystem. The economic concerns of remote Americans playing fake prairie homesteader are not especially relevant to long term planning. Plan for yourself last to see the big plans in motion. There are business opportunities skating to where large pluralities of pucks are going. Levis made jeans for rushing gold rushers and lived to tell the tale.

A private company is NOT A STATE. DC is a right to work state. We fire people for any reasons. I had a pro PWC recruiter as employee #11. We were exemplary in practice. But nobody "gets jobs." That is unskillful thinking. People "make things." I need not argue. Go read "The McKinsey Way." That is a famous company where smart people like to work. They run an attrition hierarchy. They have a famous hierarchy of priorities: Customers 1st, McKinsey 2nd, Employees 3rd. Language deficits are never customer problems. Is this a support group for Matrix Neo Masters of Swift rewrite future? Too bad. Heroes write paychecks. They make the rule their customers need. Machines rust. Flesh rots. How philosophical do we have to make this?

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I was playing with words. A method is a protocol defining a group for a project duration together. We call numerical recipes methods but they are more like refined tools we apply selectively. Methods are more than a point solution preferences. I have yelled at the BSOD and typed harder at the machine. But software engineering is a pure communicative discipline. The "enforced" was rhetoric. All methods are mutually enforced like a grammar.

Back then educators and technical writers knew about pervasive passive voice writing problems. Brad Cox (Objective-C) ran our library and formalized onboarding. These were dark ages. Blog writing was yet to be. We walked people through "Dynamics of Software Development" and handfuls of shorter articles during lengthy onboarding. We shared examples of good writing. Project kickoff automaton was still instruction based and tarball then. We ran an internal early "best practices" Wiki to let people write more. We worked in groups on special projects more than task fulfilment. Group composition was important to clients. Our developers often shared our office space with clients on daily or weekly bases. We did a good job of doing a good job possible for that era. [Edits: typos]

Smart clever people loved racking up resume win after win with high profile clients. Liking it is not in your job description.

Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines was absolutely essential to drawing me into the software industry. It's entertaining and inspiring. Everyone should have fun sharing it. That book reached tons of nerds playing with terminals, phones, TV monitors, programmable calculators and modems.

We used (enforced) a writing method for software developers of three categories: So Far, More To Go, Save It For Later. It was something like a personal Kanban board for project members sharing a real schedule in weekly compiled/tested feature deliveries. This was a visibility feature for schedule and release rationalization. There were no Hail Mary pass negotiations or requests permitted. The prose mattered and project leads were forced to read them. It was not anything that could be rushed at the end. "Save it for later" kept team time boxed and synchronized and gave managers features to schedule for future version releases and sales messaging. We fired people who could not write English right alongside their Java and PL/SQL. It worked great. 100% project completion over 125 projects. I attribute it to HR weeding out ADHD gamers suffering bad grammar of inadequate educations needing paychecks. Software is 100% a product of communicative action. There are few excuses for execution failure absent bonafide academic grand challenges.