atulatul

The quote you replied to is used to educate a reader how to understand an existing system. For example, it helps one understand why a system is in a state when as you say 'there's not necessarily anyone who wants' it that way. Rivers are polluted because there are some factors in the system which enable it.

Also, as the video I linked in the previous comment says: 'our first instinct is to blame people in the system and that is a low leverage response...actions people take are possible, feasible, and rational because of the universe in which they exist.'

I am not sure if you've read the book. But even though you've not used terms like feedback loops, etc. I think what you are saying is not much different from what the book says.

If interested, a chapter wise summary of Thinking In Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL6RiAl2WHXEU04zFYyWr...

> Thinking In Systems... gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily

I liked the observations like:

'long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why'*

'Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.'

'Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.'

* 'Structure generates behavior' as stated in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8

Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that.

edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.

https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562

May I submit these? Didn't see these after many refreshes:

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French." - Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

"When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." - Harper Lee. To Kill A Mockingbird

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."- Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind

>I assume I'll not see my favorite

Your favorite was the first I saw. Just FYI.

I also read what he writes. But some other things he writes/ tweets about actually interest me more- like art, writing-as-thinking, some interactions with his kids- than his startup related stuff. Some content seems repetitive or maybe I have moved on- for better or for worse- from such content: people in twenties, money-vs-wealth, airbnb, stripe (Collisons), Jessica, users, unrealistic sounding growth can be real, etc.

I tried this idea for the books and gave up. No rules for book purchases.

But for something like netflix, I create a list. And when I start repeating something like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, etc. rather than not-yet-watched items from the list, I cancel the subscription. And I don't renew till some time passes (6 months). Only then there are a few different movies/ series I can add to the list.

>Software design/architecture is a strange beast

Yes. At one point I thought a set of good programs can be composed into a good architecture. Then at another stage- with agile, etc.- I was thinking about evolutionary architectures.

But experience and dealing with different kind of problems and systems work best. Also, I have seen Conway's law hold when many other patterns, principles fail.

Books like Garlan Shaw are good but help if you have some experience. Some other books/ courses like Neal Ford's help, but for me those helped only to know the terms/ ideas. Practice and rewrites, tech-upgrades helped more. Also, books like Michael Nygard's Release It.

Another aspect besides not recognizing everyone from your company is like this- even if someone knows for sure that a person from a different company is helping themselves to snacks, people are may avoid pointing it out. People may prefer to avoid conflicts or make someone else look bad. They are more likely to act if they see someone stealing from their desk, home, etc. That's kind of their domain.

Also, a few other things may also be there- people won't make noise if someone steals snack packets, but they may make noise if someone steals laptops.

Also, if one person steals it may get pointed out more than if a lot of people steal- where stealing is culture, etc.

ICYMI Recently this link was posted on HN

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

This related BBC QI video is quite interesting: Which Software Drove People To Violence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7r1GnG9cQ8

At some point I shifted from eclipse to intellij idea. And with other features also loved the Darcula theme.

Was the co-worker called Newman?

I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:

From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:

"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."

> I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read

I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.

A couple of indicators I have seen:

1. For a non-manager, an indication that there is good management (project, process, etc.) in place is that the management aspect sort of seems to disappear/ moves into the background.

2. Communication becomes efficient or smooth.

How is it achieved?

1. High level goals and metric. And incremental upgrades to those. I think people/ teams need to get comfortable with one set of those before you want to improve better those metrics. Jira story points and velocity are not good metrics.

2. A manager acts as a buffer. A manager absorbs some shock and filters some data/ emotions which would otherwise flow between one (ideally more) pair of layers: one above them and one below them.

3. One kind of non-sense (from many kinds) is that people- junior or senior- are 'trying to prove their value'. This is why some people speak unnecessarily in meetings, emails go back and forth, senior management chimes in on low level issues, etc. A couple of good managers I saw were able to limit that- over a period of time.

this was insightful, thanks.

Thanks. Any intrusion of privacy, threats, bribes, etc. like they show in some movies? Does the experience test your preconceptions, morals, ethics, etc?

I did not post this earlier because what the post says and what I am going quote are not exactly same. Time on Progress-craft/ Problem Solving. But maybe at some level of abstraction, the idea is same.

Quoting from 'The Road Less Traveled' by M. Soctt Peck.[0]

Section on Problem-Solving and Time:

> At the age of thirty-seven I learned how to fix things. Prior to that time almost all my attempts to make minor plumbing repairs, mend toys or assemble boxed furniture according to the accompanying hieroglyphical instruction sheet ended in confusion, failure and frustration. Despite having managed to make it through medical school and support a family as a more or less successful executive and psychiatrist, I considered myself to be a mechanical idiot. I was convinced I was deficient in some gene, or by curse of nature lacking some mystical quality responsible for mechanical ability. Then one day at the end of my thirty-seventh year, while taking a spring Sunday walk, I happened upon a neighbor in the process of re-pairing a lawn mower. After greeting him I remarked, "Boy, I sure admire you. I've never been able to fix those kind of things or do anything like that." My neighbor, without a moment's hesitation, shot back, "That's because you don't take the time."...

> The issue is important, because many people simply do not take the time necessary to solve many of life's intellectual, social or spiritual problems, just as I did not take the time to solve mechanical problems...

> And this is precisely the way that so many of us approach other dilemmas of day-to-day living. Who among us can say that they unfailingly devote sufficient time to analyzing their children's problems or tensions within the family? Who among us is so self-disciplined that he or she never says resignedly in the face of family problems, "It's beyond me"?...

> Actually, there is a defect in the approach to problem-solving more primitive and more destructive than impatiently in-adequate attempts to find instant solutions, a defect even more ubiquitous and universal. It is the hope that problems will go away of their own accord.

>Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...

After a few pages into Midnight's Children it made me a bit uncomfortable (not bored)- not for the story or characters like in other novels- where you identify with characters or feel for them, their plights, etc. It made me uncomfortable in reading the way the story was told. I wondered why was this book so loved, it does not seem like any good book I've read so far, in fact it somewhat destroys the ideas I have about how a good novel should be. And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved. With that understanding I 'decided' I was going to be ok with the discomfort I felt till I finished the book. And then creativity became visible and the discomfort sort of went away.

I haven't read Evaristo but I will add Salman Rushdie to your list. Particularly, Midnight's Children.

Exactly. We seem to refer to these ideas somewhat casually, don't we? For example, selfish gene, natural selection, entropy, etc.

This is good.

My notes/ underlines were wiped out when synched. (new edition with quality issues- spellings, I think- corrected.)

Any workaround?

Just checked kobo sites due to original comment. The catalog may be smaller but now they (India store) have comparable book prices to kindle. The last time (many years back) I checked, books were not available in India.

I had first edition terrible keyboard kindle and have a paperwhite. It seems libra colour is still not available in India.

Not related. The Wilhelm scream is used in many movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YDpuA90KEY

"Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!"

https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

But at higher you also learn how to solve problems. Suppose you see a problem which is quite unfamiliar, you have tools and you know how to use tools- combine tools, separate those and use for separate parts, invent tools, etc.

Does flash photography harm the internet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vywf48Dhyns

Off topic maybe but Europe is so beautiful. I wish I get to travel across Europe with leisure.

Is there any word for this kind of things/ processes that have some weird logic?