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KnobbleMcKnees

809 karma · joined January 20, 2020

KnobbleMcKnees
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KnobbleMcKnees··on There is no hard takeoff
I was a huge fan of him in the 2010s when he was fighting the good fight for right to repair / sideload / do whatever. He was a bit of an idol while I spent my own time hacking Xbox hard drives and building tooling to write xfat headers and such.

It just seems he hasn't grown a jot since then. I've been guilty of writing stuff like this even in recent years, but I've grown enough to check myself and hold a higher bar for the quality of my writing. Assuming he did read this back to himself, the fact that he saw it as publishable is a bit sad.

KnobbleMcKnees··on My Overkill Home Network
I have ubiquity APs and a USG but the camera are so expensive. I'll have to stick with my Chinese crapware and a DNS blocker for the meantime.
KnobbleMcKnees··on There is no hard takeoff
My problem with this isn't even that it's a bunch of strung together ideas without a clear narrative or conclusion; enough practice at this combined with actual deep field knowledge results in works like Godel, Escher, Bach.

My problem is that GHotz is a shitty writer, has puddle deep knowledge of anything that isn't iPhone firmware, and watching him play at being a freelance tech journo and produce this kind of hollow pseudo-philosophy that is meant to sound epiphanal but comes across as deeply naïve to anyone with any actual experience in these topics.

KnobbleMcKnees··on My Overkill Home Network
What cameras do you use?
KnobbleMcKnees··on Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns
Presumably consent is an obligatory contact amendment and easily introduced to new contracts too.

And British people will accept it like they accept every kick to the balls by government or big business.

KnobbleMcKnees··on WeWork goes from $47B valuation to ‘substantial doubts’ about its future
This is a story of investors in denial. WeWork died several years ago.
KnobbleMcKnees··on Slack: A redesigned Slack, built for focus
Vertical tab bar and more submenus. Gotcha.
KnobbleMcKnees··on The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games
I think there's no better use of the phrase "hit's different" than when talking about Rare games (or Rareware as we called it when I was a wee bairn).

Retro Gamer magazine have done some great articles on them over the years if you're keen for more nostalgia or just further curious about the origins of the company and influence they've had on modern gaming.

KnobbleMcKnees··on Another Joke Fine Shows US Authorities Do Not Take Illegal Telemarketing Serious
How much did you settle for on average?
KnobbleMcKnees··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
They've hidden it well
KnobbleMcKnees··on Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
You're comparing huts to skyscrapers
KnobbleMcKnees··on Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase
I would honestly just ignore that feedback. It's needlessly reductive and oxymoronic (coding is fun! But give juniors boring grunt work)
KnobbleMcKnees··on Goto in Bash (2012)
Does that mean using jumpto to jump to a label above that invocation results in redeclaration of the same code?

Seems janky even by the low standards of the author.

KnobbleMcKnees··on Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
They are hard not to love.

They also hate each and every one of you.

KnobbleMcKnees··on Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
Further, selling GCP to AWS is not how we "break down monopolies".
KnobbleMcKnees··on Stopping at 90%
A version of what you're describing is the sunk cost fallacy
KnobbleMcKnees··on Internet Explorer is EVIL! (2002)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/we...
KnobbleMcKnees··on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
I'm sure someone will turn up with evidence to support this any moment now
KnobbleMcKnees··on Reasons Not to Be a Manager (2019)
I'm an experienced engineer that's been a manager for three years. I'm now returning to an engineering role.

Having been a manager and having learned what it means to scale your ability to have impact and to land impact purely through leveraging others, I feel far more equipped to be the kind of engineer that I would like to manage.

More than that, one of the best experiences I've had as a manager is to be able to dissuade myself of many of the misconceptions and stereotypes that are rife in this thread.

I'd strongly advise non-managers in the thread to read Charity's other blog posts such as the Engineer/Manager Pendulum too.

KnobbleMcKnees··on New Word Order
If you read the second paragraph of the Wikipedia page for "slashdot effect" you'll see that the term was, in fact, "flash crowd".
KnobbleMcKnees··on Chicago95 – Windows 95 Theme for Linux
I kind of agree with this in that WIMP is a good philosophy for desktop UI design, and I feel that mobile has never really had the equivalent (hamburger menus falling out of fashion being the apotheosis of chasing rainbows IMHO)

But I feel we need only point to Microsoft Word as an example of how the statement.

>Everything was so clear, neat, and discoverable back then

just isn't true. The only difference now is that we have dozens of pieces of software in our lives now instead of the half dozen we used in the 90s, and we don't have one company monopolistically decreeing what the status quo of UI design is.

Meaningful competition is also why I think there is no WIMP in mobile. And that's a double-edged sword.

KnobbleMcKnees··on One-on-one guidelines for manager/tech leader
Please, please, please don't ask your reports questions like this:

>"On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your approval rating for our management and CEO?"

Use an anonymous survey if you really must force a staged set of answers.

The most important questions are ones like these:

>"How are your family/children doing?"

Regardless, most of these examples will make you sound like an emotionless robot. Build real rapport with your reports and then you can ask them much more interesting and insightful questions than these without sounding like you're reading from a script.

KnobbleMcKnees··on The design thinking movement is absurd (2018)
I call that industry "holistic agile" because it is to agile what holistic medicine is to medicine.
KnobbleMcKnees··on List of APIs that require declared reasons
Ahh interesting. I could see from the other listed features that this was about guarding against telemetry being used for user tracking. This was not a use case that sprang to mind.
KnobbleMcKnees··on Bad Words for Describing Software Products (2019)
>The fix for bad words isn’t to swap them with “good” words, but to answer “what?” and “so what?” in your product description.

This seems to be the central thesis, but the first problem is that we don't always write marketing copy to be pointed, we most often write it to be engaging.

The second problem is knowing your audience. If your product is creating an actually-simpler way to do something complex without trading off the power to do those things, guess what? You should say that it's simple while still powerful.

There are certainly marketing taglines that just string together these words in less meaningful ways. Here's an example:

> A simple and powerful way to build a checkout experience.

This is meaningless guff and fits the article's definition. But then:

>A simple but powerful way to build complex checkout experiences.

Now the intent is to tell the reader that the simplicity doesn't compromise the depth of customisation. It's also fair to assume the reader has enough domain information to understand what such a compromise might mean.

Therefore these words aren't "bad", it's using them to gloss over poor copy writing that is "bad".

KnobbleMcKnees··on List of APIs that require declared reasons
Requiring this for UserDefaults is pretty wild as it will be so far reaching.

UserDefaults is also app-scoped so I'm not sure I understand the reason for this as a privacy concern.

KnobbleMcKnees··on BlazingMQ: High-performance open source message queuing system
It's cool to be cynical
KnobbleMcKnees··on Understanding battery performance of IoT devices
I have so many devices that have been running 2+ years on a single CR battery. ZigBee is magical.
KnobbleMcKnees··on Google Web Environment Integrity Is the New Microsoft Trusted Computing
There's a difference between active boycott and explicitly stating you don't really care.

You can be against something and not have the resource to fight it. The person in question said they don't see the problem which is the former.

KnobbleMcKnees··on Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his SPARC4 was running slow
Thanks. This was what I was going for but my brain had other ideas.
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