2,180 karma · joined May 11, 2015
In their zeal to defend Stallman from both fabricated and legitimate complaints the FSF seems to be cultivating a smaller but more fanatical audience. This may make it harder for them to achieve their mission.
Reminds me a little of radial menus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu). They don't handle dynamic context menu contents well but they're amazingly efficient.
> Interacting is even faster since Kera Desktop features “press and hold, move and release” gestured menus. Saved you a click!
Note that you can also use right-click menus this way on macOS and GNOME. That is, you mouse down, drag your cursor to the item, and mouse up to select it. The only downside is that if you regularly use Windows it's annoying to unlearn this behavior.
But it hasn't happened yet. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen, maybe it's just a matter of time. And personally I hope it does happen, as remote work is better for the planet and regional inequality.
But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person. Maybe they're all behaving irrationally or trying to prop up commercial real-estate or something. But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers, and the latter being slightly easier in person is enough to offset the costs.
True, the presence of people who spend time coordinating is not sufficient for success, nor is their presence in any way evidence of success.
But the absence of people who devote time to coordination has definitely sunk projects I've been on, including ones stacked with brilliant rockstars. It may simply be correlation, but I have never worked on a large, successful project that lacked people who were willing to invest significant effort in coordination.
> I've always modeled my team's process on open source development which has successfully produced very high quality "big" software
That's an interesting example and reminds me of an anecdote. At my last company I worked on a very (very) expensive fintech product. We had several competitors including an open source alternative that we were quite nervous about. I wouldn't be surprised if their code quality was higher than ours. But while many customers donated to them, spent a lot of effort integrating them, and talked about them a lot (especially when negotiating contracts) in the end we never lost a customer to the open source alternative.
Don't get me wrong, I love free and open source software and personally use and support several projects. But with a handful of exceptions open source developers seem to be more successful at creating tools for other developers than products for non-technical end-users.
Folks who consider themselves "high-velocity" seem to look down on process and prioritize their own productivity over the productivity of the team and the organization. They seem to believe that they'll be evaluated on number of features shipped, or tickets closed, or lines written. They seem to consider coordination with others to be overhead that distracts from "real work".
That mindset may work for small shops or independent features but in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.
I'd wager better remote processes and culture could have shrunk the gap, and I'm happy so many companies are doing that well, it just didn't work for our company.
With mentorship I think you're spot on with regard to adhoc interactions. Senior folks know who, how, and when to ask when they're blocked, or when they need to plant an idea in someone's head. Even though we have daily stand-ups, weekly 1-1 check-ins, and responsive mentors a number of junior folks seemed less comfortable admitting and asking for help when remote until it was too late. My company is overall the best place I've worked but has poor processes in this regard -- it's one of those places entirely run by engineers where everyone is proud of how "flat" the org is which is code for a hidden and ad-hoc org chart. I'll bet manager training and process could have minimized that, but it would be a tougher sell than RTO -- so you go to war with the army you've got.
With regard to socialization, the junior folks seem to hang out with each other after work quite a bit more. We also have lots of social events, presentations, movies, etc during work hours. We had similar sessions set up for remote folks that are well attended but don't seem to scratch the same itch.
I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.
This does not match my experience at all. If my coworkers and managers are bad at collaborating with remote workers then I will not be as effective working remotely no matter how good I personally am at it.
Supporting remote work allows a company to attract employees from a larger pool of labor which allows them to to get higher caliber employees while paying the same or lower salaries. It also saves on office costs. I'm not surprised to see more companies doing this.
But doing so also requires adopting culture, processes, and tools across the entire organization. It's not something an individual worker can do on their own.
Senior folks seem to experience more upside and less downside being remote whereas junior folks seem to experience more downside and less upside.
Depending on the makeup of the team, one or the other may be net more productive even if you yourself feel less productive. (It may also depend on whether your company sufficiently acknowledges and rewards the work senior folks do unblocking and mentoring others.)
A "newspaper" that stops doing journalism and just reprints AP/Reuters articles and blog posts has already died. Whether they actually go out of business or continue on as a zombie is irrelevant since they have stopped producing journalism in either case.
To reiterate my earlier comment, I am not arguing in favor of this strange California law. And I agree with you that reader-supported journalism (and other media) is the best approach, and I subscribe and donate to several organizations I feel do good work in this area.
I'm solely responding to the earlier comment that the "media are dying. This is normal free market that is working well" to point out that we should not be so sanguine about the death of media like journalism. I am skeptical that democracy and free markets can survive without it.
But this is not mutually exclusive. For one thing, we can do two things at once. For another, automobile fatalities typically have multiple contributing causes. If we had stronger safety regulations around vehicle height, stopping distance, windshield visibility, etc then some number of the crashes involving alcohol or drug use might have been injuries or close calls instead of fatalities.
Yes. This is precisely why this sort of decision cannot be left to individual consumers -- the end result is an arms race of ever-larger vehicles and dramatic increases in fatalities for the rest of us.
The problem with this mindset is that there is a negative correlation between investigative journalism and corruption. (e.g. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/25/when-the-local-ne... and https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/72689)
When local newspapers close (or stop doing real investigative journalism) political and corporate corruption increases which causes a financial drag on the region. Given that we tend to bail out failing cities with state funds and failing states with federal funds the rest of us have a vested interest in ensuring that the other regions we're bound to maintain basic levels of functional governance.
Setting aside the specifics of the strange law in the article, I would not be opposed in principle to spending $X a year propping up journalism to avoid spending $100X a year propping up corrupt cities and states.
However, the article describes consumers gravitating to companies that match their political beliefs. This implies that they aren't annoyed by companies who push political topics, just by companies that push politics they disagree with.
Personally I would have made the process more gradual but who knows, maybe they're running out of runway, or their research gives them confidence that a sufficient number of (profitable) users will stick around.
This is all just armchair conjecture but I suspect that either they'll be fine or that they're screwed regardless -- either way I doubt this decision will sink them.
If you are in the Boston area and meet their criteria you can sign up at: https://rally.massgeneralbrigham.org/study/nasabrainstim
I am not affiliated with the researchers except as a study participant, but I can answer questions about what it was like to participate.
> small, cheap, runabout electric vehicles could become very popular
Agreed that's a promising area. It's possible that the increasing regulatory burden on cars may drive an increase in low-speed vehicles such as neighborhood electric vehicles (NEV) for use cases that do not require more than 25mph/40kph.[2] Since they are exempt from the vast majority of new automobile regulations that makes them comparatively much simpler and more affordable.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7126a1.htm
[2] I am not claiming this works for every suburban commute, just that there exists a nontrivial number of car trips in cities and towns that would be feasible in a NEV.
(By bulking and cutting I mean eating a calorie surplus to gain muscle and fat followed by a calorie deficit to reduce fat while hanging on to as much muscle as possible.)
Reddit, Netflix, YouTube... they bulked their user base by subsidizing products. Now they're in the cutting phase and raising prices, restricting features, and/or increasing ads. They know they're going to end up with a significantly smaller user base, but if the cutting manages to maintain a large enough number of profitable users (muscle) while shedding unprofitable users (fat) then the business will end up in better shape.
Alternately one can keep calories stable and slowly increase muscle without gaining fat, but that's much slower and harder than a bulk/cut cycle, and most people and public companies don't have that kind of patience.
That may be university-by-university thing. I briefly managed an academic department at an old, highly-ranked university. Professors regularly caught cheaters and there was never any question that they would fail the course. The only question was whether the incident was mild enough that they would be permitted to try again next semester or severe enough to leave the university.
The administration supported us 100% as this was seen as essential to defending the value of the degree conferred on the other students. Without some kind of standards we'd eventually become just another degree mill.
What surprised me most was how many students who never finished the degree (not just cheating -- some just got job offers and decided not to stick around) still listed the degree on their resume/CV. The problem is that many companies now call the school to check as part of their hiring process, and the school would inform them that they had enrolled but had not been granted the degree. In retrospect I wish I had instituted a policy of letting the ex-student know in those cases, because I'm not sure if hiring companies tell them and I wonder how many people think they're just unlucky or something.
"There would also be a text input. If the user couldn't do something with the UI, they would enter what they are attempting to do. Using a natural language processor, like ChatGPT. The software would return a list of features that could help. Each has a button to add them to the UI. Going back to our painting app. Imagine you wanted to add color to a shape. With the current UI, you can't. Enter "Color a shape" into the text input, the paint bucket tool will become available to add to the UI."
But having half the team in one office and the other half remote seemed to be the worst of both. When I was remote I felt relief when everyone else in the discussion turned out to be remote as well, and when I was in-person it was similarly nice when we realized that everyone in the meeting was physically present.
So it's not surprising to me that companies would gravitate one way or the other.
You many not feel like this is a substantial imposition, but many people feel that it is easier to have discussions in a physical room with things like physical whiteboards and eye contact. Using digital analogues can be nearly as effective, but it requires everyone adopt new processes.
I'm not sure if they always achieved that, but it was at least a goal for readers to be able to skim feeds to understand what was going as quickly as possible. Such a policy was feasible because the readers were paying customers as opposed to web news which are often funded by advertisers or worse.
If anyone is actually curious: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) started a Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI.org). Later, the Association for Information Systems (AIS) started a Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGHCI.org) which has remained about an order of magnitude smaller in impact and comes from a different originating field (Information Systems). My impression is that nearly all the papers in one journal would also make sense in the other, but CHI sometimes has a little more design-y or consumer product stuff while IS-HCI has some stuff that's more from the perspective of an IT department.
The CHI folks can't unilaterally rename to SIGHCI without stomping over the smaller org, which means merging two different organizations, journals, and conferences run by different professional associations. Such a thing is occasionally proposed (e.g. http://www.bridginghci.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chi-20...) which would be nice but in reality I think that's unlikely to happen because the cost exceeds the benefits.
Well CHI is being held in Europe this year, so apparently you don't!
But more seriously, the field is "HCI" everywhere, including in America, and has been for at least thirty years. I have vague memories of hearing the story about why the initial ACM SIGCHI folks didn't go with HCI at the time but I can't recall. Anyway, it wasn't long after CHI was founded that basically everyone was using "HCI" on both sides of the Atlantic.
Setting aside impacts on customers, I wonder how common seizures would need to be to support a purely financial case that businesses that are known to not store identifying information are therefore less likely to incur the cost and effort of scrambling to replace seized hardware.