asoneth

Not quite the same thing but I've heard of people putting "A Duck" in their designs, which is a superfluous design element that is included solely for the purpose of letting a micromanaging superior remove it so that they can feel like they contributed to the design. https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

But whether it's a duck, anchor, strawman, whatever you call it -- the risk with proposing an obviously bad solution to make the good solutions look better is that every once in a while they'll pick the bad solution. I think it was a talk by Mike Monteiro where he explicitly cautioned against using this approach because it tends to backfire hilariously at the worst possible moment.

Seconded the Tufte books, especially to learn about the principles of visual communication. Though as a fan who has all his books and attended multiple lectures, I have to admit that his forays into interaction design were... underwhelming.

Most products don't need a whole book:

1) Use a mature, well-designed GUI framework. Especially if you don't have a designer it's unlikely that novel interactions or an unusual visual design will be a key selling point for your product.

2) Find a half-dozen folks from your target user audience or proxies who are as similar as possible. Give them a task to do with your product/prototype while you watch. Let them talk aloud without interrupting. Do this early and often.

If you can do those two things you will be ahead of most consumer products and vastly ahead of most enterprise products.

I think you deal with bad designers the same way you deal with bad developers.

Try not to hire them in the first place, fire them if you can, and if you're stuck with them try to make sure they are occupied with tasks that will not cause too much overall damage.

Is that really a downside?

In some cases you convince your organization to shift focus onto more useful products, and that can be a really great feeling. In other cases (company is too large, management too committed) it helps you confront exactly who you're working for. Because if you're going to sell your soul, you should at least make sure you're getting a good price.

> Why optimize for the one-time thing at the expense of the everyday use?

I'm not necessarily endorsing this perspective, and it depends on the specifics, but there are cases where this makes business sense. If you take a task that requires an expensive expert and make it something that an unskilled worker can do then you you can lower overall labor costs even if each user is less efficient in the new system.

Agreed. Alternately renaming it to something like "Overview" or "Home" might better match new user expectations about what will happen when it is clicked.

> How would we know that the same people complained about code cleanups and not having a file picker?

I also saw some complaints of this form. If I recall correctly they were non-contributors complaining that Gnome devs were dedicating too much time to refactoring and deprecating APIs and not spending enough time implementing features that they wanted.

I'll give you that Gnome developer communication often comes off as defensive, but as an outsider I'm also shocked at the volume and tone of complaints they get -- I doubt I would be able to put up with such toxic users for very long.

> There's value in a laptop that can be easily repaired/upgraded for non tech people

How does the price of a Framework today plus upgrade modules in three years compare to a cheap laptop now and a new cheap laptop in three years? Obviously the former is better for the environment, but if you don't break even on your investment in a Framework laptop by the first upgrade then it's going to be a very, very hard sell for most consumers.

> It's probably inevitable though that it would have become more of a social media product over time.

Personally I would have welcomed that.

Google Reader did essentially become a social media product over time. By the end it was the primary social network for many of the people in my research area. I was mystified when they shut it down to redirect resources to yet another Facebook clone rather on building on a successful foundation that was already present.

By now most people realize that this is just how Google operates, by shuffling resources around in a blind panic. But many people can point to the first product shutdown that crystalized the realization for them. Google Reader was mine, and judging by the comments in this thread it served the same purpose for others as well.

There are many fine RSS readers, but what I miss most was the social and community features.

The communities that spring up around things like GReader are like lightning in a bottle. Perhaps the companies that can afford to build things like that have concluded that other forms of social media are more profitable.

There still are niches of the internet that operate like a book club for excitable nerds, but they can be short-lived. Most eventually succumb to politics, lecturers, eternal September, and/or a zero-sum debate-team mentality.

I ended up going with blank but I did consider getting "Linear A" keycaps https://shop.keyboard.io/products/linear-a-keycaps-m100 for my Keyboardio Model 100.

My understanding is that low-fee accounts with low balances have never been profitable for banks. Perhaps they were used as a way to bolster the bank's image and/or as a long-term loss leader to attract customers who might eventually become profitable. As long as a bank has few competitors and those competitors are also subsidizing unprofitable accounts then everyone can afford to do so.

But this is an unstable equilibrium.

If competitors focus on attracting more profitable customers then I'd imagine that this subsidy becomes unsustainable as unprofitable customers migrate to banks with lower fees and minimums and profitable customers migrate to banks with higher rates. (Which those banks can afford to pay because they are no longer subsidizing as many unprofitable customers.)

You said: "The restaurateurs might be raking it if they own the real estate. If you pay rent for your location you are probably scraping by..."

He may refer to himself as a "restaurateur" or a "restaurateur who is his own landlord" for social status or tax reasons but I am suggesting that this framing is misleading: if his income is primarily as a result of the real estate he owns then his actual occupation is "landlord".

Non-remunerative avocations like, I don't know, building wooden sailboats, painting, community theater, photography, gardening, raising cattle, or managing a restaurant may be intense and rewarding, but if the expectation is that they will have no marginal impact on income one way or the other then they are more like hobbies.

A restaurateur who only makes money because they own real estate seems like a landlord with a side hobby.

> There is no reason Emacs couldn't be the number one editor right now

I suspect you're right that under different stewardship Emacs could have taken over the wold. And who knows, if they cared to run usability studies on the initial user experience it might still be possible.

> This is just admitting defeat

If you assume that everyone values popularity or ease-of-use then this is a reasonable conclusion.

But if you'd forgive some unsolicited advice: assuming everyone shares your values will make it hard to understand or predict other people's actions which will hinder your attempts to communicate, negotiate, or manage anyone not like you. It may be simpler to imagine they're crazy, foolish, or deluded but personally I've found it useful to operate under the assumption that their values are real and just as valid as mine.

I agree that Emacs commits a number of unforced errors with regard to its user experience, especially for novice users. My guess is that with some usability studies they could flatten the learning curve substantially and significantly increase their market share with only minimal burden on existing users.

Having said that, "market share" doesn't seem like a relevant metric since the community seems perfectly content being niche.

I agree that team cohesion, manager skill, and domain experience are significantly more important factors to the success of a project than physical proximity. A bunch of random people dumped into the same room will not outperform an experienced remote team. But that is not sufficient evidence that proximity is not a contributing factor.

To be more explicit: all else being equal (i.e. similar cohesion, skill, experience), teams that work together in a dedicated room seem to outperform expectations compared to similar teams that are spread across an open office or working remotely.

(Personally I did not notice anything close to the "doubling of productivity" claimed in the paper above, but it was sufficient to be noticeable even with a small sample size.)

> What he did wasn't immoral ... Since morality is subjective

I agree that morality is subjective -- what he did was immoral to some and moral to others. Similarly there are people who considered it immoral when CEOs were publicly voicing support for pro-choice policies.

For a leader it probably hinges on the perspectives of the people they lead. You won't have a healthy organization if a significantly large number of people believe you are behaving immorally, especially at a nonprofit paying below-market rates.

> Productivity would have to be massively increased to justify all of these additional costs and constraints so you’d think by now this would shake out in the data

I agree with you about the immense costs of an in-person office. But the fact that neither remote nor in-person businesses have demonstrated clear superiority in the market yet indicates to me that the benefits of being in-person are likely in the same ballpark as the costs.

(My guess is that it'll end up depending on the type of business. For businesses with higher than average profit per employee it might make sense to pay the fixed per-person costs of being in-person to unlock the productivity multiplier -- for everyone else, not so much.)

Perhaps. It's also possible that this reverses causality and that they use the product name "LibreOffice" because of the existing term "libre software", rather than using "libre software" primarily because that's what the product is called.

After all, "libre software" has been used in English since the 1990s, the EU was writing legislation about libre software in the 2000s, the Free Software Foundation has hosted an annual LibrePlanet conference since 2006, and even gnu.org recommends using terms like "free (libre) software".

I recall a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work paper (possibly this one? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005) that identified different levels of collaboration including working together in the same room ("radically colocated" in CSCW jargon), working near others on the same floor, working on different floors or parts of the building, and working remotely or from different offices. They claimed that radical colocation was significantly more productive compared to the others, and collaborating across different floors was no better than being in different parts of the world.

Based on my experience since then I am less skeptical about those claims than when I first read the paper. I've been on skunkworks projects where a half-dozen people worked out of the same conference room for a couple months, offices where my teammates' desks were clustered together around a meeting space, open-plan offices with my team spread across the building, and working remote during Covid.

For well-established projects any of them were fine. But for new projects I felt like we gained a tremendous advantage by being in the same room. Maybe that won't always be true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still holds today.

> Calling this “libre software” instead of “free software” seems very self-serving

How so?

When talking to a non-technical audience my experience has been that the term "free software" is misinterpreted more often than not. If a name always requires an ancillary explanation ("...as in freedom, not beer") and collides with a common and wildly different meaning then it is not a good name.

"Open Source" advocates realized early on that the name was a fatal liability and switched to a significantly better one.

Trying to rebrand free (as in freedom) software movement as "libre" is probably too little, too late but I don't think it hurts to try.

True, though I wonder to what degree a per-person dividend (some sort of universal income) could offset the regressivity of consumption taxes.

That is, we go ahead and tax consumption of land, road space, emissions, extraction, etc and everyone receives the same monthly sum that is enough to cancel out the taxes paid by a person who uses a minimal share of resources.

(Though I'm not sure I'd consider police interactions as a source of consumption taxes as per the original poster.)

As someone who knows nothing about this field your post was particularly enlightening. I am especially grateful that you have defined most of the terms and acronyms you used.

> There is no such saying.

I mean, there clearly is now because people have been saying it. I was curious about the origin and the first instance I see online is a line from Ed Harris in the 2017 movie Geostorm:

"I'm turning the clock back to 1945, when America was a shining city on a hill, not just a bank disguised as a country."

Though it's certainly possible there were earlier formulations.

Agreed, though I'm not sure the W3C has much choice. When WHATWG wrested control of HTML from W3C it drove home that browser implementers determine the standard. Given chromium's ~75% market share[1] and Apple's ~18% market share it increasingly seems like the purpose of the W3C is performative, to lend more credibility to what has become a proprietary standard driven by Google and Apple.

[1] tallying across chromium-based browsers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2022...

I also did not like living in a city, but it is clear from prices that people are willing to pay a premium to live in major metro areas like Sydney, London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, etc even in the post-pandemic work-from-anywhere world. Even in smaller cities the downtown areas seem to be doing just fine based on rent and occupancy.

I suspect the deeper problem is with San Francisco and similar cities that became more of a desirable place to work than a desirable place to live. When business is good the city does well, but when the businesses leave or go under people have no other reason to stick around given all the other negatives.

To give an example, my NYC friends moved there to be in NYC and only look for jobs that let them stay in NYC. Whereas my Bay Area friends primarily moved there because that's where they got the highest offers after college, and most of them would move (or already have moved) elsewhere if a better offer comes around.

I agree with the trend you mention, but the fact that it is bi-directional preference may even things out a bit.

States can focus on attracting employers by having business-friendly taxes, minimal labor laws, minimal environmental protection, and other corporate-friendly regulations. If they can attract and retain companies then people who need work will follow.

Other states focus on attracting employees by having stronger worker-protection laws, strict environmental regulations, and amenities like education/arts/healthcare/transit. If they can attract and retain people then companies who need access to that labor pool will follow.

Depending on their constraints, industries seem to gravitate towards states on one end of that continuum or the other. For example, there seems to be more manufacturing and agriculture than the US average in employer-friendly states and more technology and finance than the US average in employee-friendly states.

That is true. Many kinds of reporting requirements are only triggered for companies larger than a certain size, so perhaps that would be beneficial here as well to maintain anonymity.