cm11

I think this is broadly true of leaders including lesser ones. It even seems true of roles like product manager.

The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc. Whether blame falls on poor execution, poor planning, or overpromsing, those are precisely the things that chosen leaders are supposed to have been chosen to avoid—and what they would in theory fail downwards for. Unpredictable things do happen, but the regularity of these outcomes for projects (and products as a whole) means we're systematically choosing the wrong ones, there aren't enough capable ones (period), and/or that we shouldn't be org'd to need them in the first place. The last one is simply saying that if the environment is unpredictable enough that you can't plan well, then let's not spend time and money on planning. That in itself axes large chunks of the things product leaders do before work starts.

It makes iterating a more likely plan, but most teams and workstreams don't iterate too much. The iterating that sometimes is done is typically downstream of the plan, strategy, architecture that leadership leadershipped. They might do better without all the planning and overpromised timelines, which gut iterating. Iteration is only sort of a strategy anyhow (depends on what layer we're talking about when we say strategy). Iteration is what hedges a lack of vision.

I'm having a hard time following the thinking in many of these threads so I'm not sure if you're questioning it genuinely (or hypothetically or sarcastically), but I think essentially yes sadly.

Wealthier areas wonder why it costs so much for house renovations or for daycare or`for farmer's market produce. Or similarly folks move to less wealthy countries as "expats" and hire help, babysitters, tutors. Sense of prosperity seems tied to those things feeling inexpensive and them feeling cheap requires income inequality. There's I think a large amount of feeling poor (or average) when those things are eating your budget. Even though you have them. For example, you pay for expensive childcare so both parents can work, it takes a big bite out of your budget, and so you don't feel wealthy (but you're paying for childcare and your family has an employee). Similarly, you're paying for expensive private school, it eats your budget, you don't feel wealthy (but your child is going to private school).

For those doing well, the surplus goes to what's left—house, education, healthcare (I recall there being a fourth, but I'm blanking). Those things are expensive because they should be, you're wealthy. You're competing with the other wealthy people. I'm stealing this from somewhere, but they're essentially luxury goods—the more money you have, the more (and better quality) you consume. They don't decrease as percent of income as food does.

In case anyone's wondering (I was). Flock was in the summer 2017 batch and more recently YC invested in their 2025 raise.

Yes. And in most of those meetings where the researcher invalidated the leaders, the leaders have left the meeting saying (and thinking? I’m not sure) they were validated. So because of the leaders we have we should skip the meetings and research in both cases.

My point is largely that the nontrivial work you've described is the norm today. What's being asked for tomorrow is not new. Most apps are already set. Not just because of work Apple does to make it easier for apps to "port" out of the box, but because the multiple sizes that apps are already prepared to handle across iPhones, iPads, and resizeable iPad apps (and to the extent that devs are having React Native handle this, then across Android too).

So it's a lot of work, yes, but it's work that's already been done and that engineering teams already assume in their processes. The future is the same because this has been the status quo for a few years. Whether the Duo has a 2:1 ratio or something slightly different, the apps are at about the same readiness for it.

I agree it will feel super nice to go from the front screen to the dual screen and have nothing "move". And similarly it will feel "mildly infuriating" if it doesn't do that.

I also think that I (personally) don't need a front screen and would love to have whatever cost savings or improvements would come if there weren't one. This last sentence is of course a me thing, but I mention it because I think that if people start on the front screen and then open the Duo, they may just want the full screen app or something else entirely. I'm not sure the use case of being in your banking app device folded, deciding midway through flow to open it, and wanting to be in the same UI is really what I want. The part I question is what's going on that step 2 came about—I think it's either you want to go into more depth on it or you're just opening the device the way you would had you not been in your banking app.

The case where I open it to find the app using half the screen and then I have to press something or drag something to make it full screen is not that great (and isn't great today with current iPad window resizing). The best case I can think of for wanting the app in the same size format when I open it is for is something like multitasking, I guess we'll see how that looks or feels and how you get the second app open (or whether it's very common use case anyway).

In general, I've long felt the folding tech is for tablet use cases not for phone use cases. I think Apple's foray (finally) into it more or less validates that. Even though there will be a meaningful number of people buying it to replace their phone, I think this is largely because their phone use is already tablet use case-y (for entertainment especially). I assume many people will also buy it as a(n expensive) tablet replacement in addition to their phone, which is perhaps related to the timing of iPhone Handoff (same SIM on two phones) too.

But apps can just rejigger into widths that fit. It would be more of an issue back when mobile sites were first becoming responsive and we pragmatically chose 2 or 3 media query widths to serve different layouts and then applied the same thinking to mobile apps. Of course the initial mobile apps, particularly on iPhone, stuck to just one and later just a few sizes themselves. As there was a wider range we did things more responsively on a continuum.

I still think the broader point of there being design reasons to hit these ratios stands and is great. I just think the idea that it needed to be precisely twice the width so apps can fit full-sized doesn't hold too much because there isn't really a "full size" notion. Or if there is, the full-size is probably the double width one. If it wasn't exactly twice the width, most apps are already built to fit into varying iPhone/mobile screen widths.

Avoiding disagreement is more ominous with people though.

Very much agree, but also (not saying you're saying otherwise) stealing, lying, entitlement (which is possibly just stealing and lying), and scamming "work." These are checked in large part by a person's aversion to it not just by its lack of working. Of course dark patterns work. If what one says increasingly inches towards 100% misrepresention (but shy of it), people will "mistake" what's being said. "Mistake" doing a lot of blame shifting.

"You're never going to convince someone to stop doing something that is making them money." Reasonable, but I would soften from "never". There was less of it at one point—and it seems logical to guess we have less today than we'll have tomorrow. The main reason is likely that we simply didn't know about these tricks yet, but somewhere below that on the list of the reasons is that some people dropped off from doing it at lesser forms of misrepresentation. Or they made the case against it at work resulting in them either winning (and their projects perhaps did less well) or them losing and being overrun by those more willing. With losing possible also leading towards leaving, not getting promoted, or getting fired. This is just a way to say that there are people who do forgo money, they just might not be around or visible for various reasons. And, as implied by the difficulty of convincing people to not make money, their (former) coworkers prefer that on some level even if they don't believe they agree with stealing or lying. But losing or earning less money is not the same as having no choice.

It might generalize to tech rather just engineering. The same pitch was made for marketing and SEO roles, designers, product managers to varying degrees.

I interviewed with a startup that I thought I was a pretty good fit for. I'd had the same role at a company that did the same thing they were doing just three years ahead of them. That led to fairly nuanced interviews with each interviewer because I was familiar with their projects and more generally had a sense of what their roadmap looked like. And that put me into a final presentation interview with a bigger group that included the CEO/founders pretty quickly.

Towards the end, after others had asked questions, the CEO asked how I was using AI and about the tools I was using. I mentioned using Claude Code to quickly build basic prototypes of my first few stabs to rule them in/out/iterate. I thought this was a pretty good answer in the situation—Claude Code was pretty new at the time, I really had been using it this way, and I thought it was good for a large meeting with a broad set of people where I probably can't get too detailed. I'm not sure she paid much attention, but followed up with "Do you know what Lovable is?" I hadn't. She said something along the lines of "I'm not sure exactly, but it seems to be what all the cool kids are using."

Anyways, afterward I looked it up, and I was kind of bummed because I felt I was using the more advanced method (for the situation), but the CEO didn't know it, and I likely came off as behind.

Agreed, but I think some logic follows that as increasingly more incentives are needed then maybe people just don't have these principles. People seem to want it both ways—both to get the thing they want, but to be seen as not having taken it. To be seen as principled without standing for the principle. So we hear that taking a "principled stand is great and all, but". That line is right, it just implies the person doesn't believe that much in the principle.

Yes, these things reduce (not necessarily how to zero) how much compliance the programmer is doing. They aren't figuring out how to get a car legally on the road, they're still figuring out how to get a car to do car things. The compliance questions the engineer sees are largely engineering questions. Sometimes hard engineering questions.

It's questionable though how much the programmer is operating under it. The programmer's work may need to comply, but there are a bunch of things that can reduce how much the programmer themself deals with it.

There are the executives, the lawyers, the product managers, sometimes the designers, who to varying degrees determine this before they land in the requirements the programmer sees. But there are also the libraries and APIs the company pays to handle compliance so that the company and the programmer doesn't. The programmer implements the library (and may not even had a say in or necessarily care which one was chosen).

Absolutely there can be a bunch of hard things wrapped around easy things. When those things can't be separated neatly than it doesn't make sense to separate them such that we can call the easy parts easy (or even parts really).

That said, it's still reasonable to think that once (and only once) the hard part is done, then the easy part is easy. It would just be wrong to think that you can do the whole thing without having to do hard parts. I think the argument here is that with AI this is more possible—that the tasks are more separable. Even if it's the same one person doing the hard stuff and then passing what they learned to the AI to do the easy stuff.

Two reasons they might not separate well (there are others):

- If in a company's product development it's hard(er) to have one person doing H and another doing E, then you're generally going to have one person doing H and E. More or less, this means a person can only do E easily if they do H beforehand. So hard things are required no matter what.

- People come in whole persons. If people skilled/educated to do H tend to be the same people skilled/educated to do E (can be because of how programming is educated, but also can be because there aren't that many programmers), then you're always going to be plugging programmers who have both H and E into roles and it'll probably be more efficient to plug them into roles requiring both rather than just H or just E. You could, within that population, determine who is comparatively advantaged (and we do do this mildly with senior vs junior or with "architects"), but plugging a person into an E-only role is going to involve that person questioning what happened during the H part beforehand. In part because they're good enough at H to question it, but more importantly because they're implementing the H such that they're aware when their E might not be as easy as it could be.

Both of these seem like they might be less true now with AI (and also perhaps because there are more programmers).

You're right, it can be read as it being difficult for society to maintain manners. I agree and I should have been clearer. But I also think you may be misunderstanding what I said to fit it into your own model. There is a difference between manners and what results from them. You can maintain (what you believe to be) good manners without it improving society to your liking. This is "irrelevant" in the sense of not changing things, but it is not irrelevant to maintaining your manners. Conforming to the bad manners is the more likely culprit to the bad outcomes anyway.

Caving on manners to avoid the "struggle", or rather, caving on manners because one benefits from doing so is just a reflection of how much one values the values. This is simply saying that more often than not we can maintain them, it just might not be worth it to us.

I don’t know. I, the individual, can maintain a lot of manners fairly simply if I really wanted to.

Yes, but also the "executives are paid in stock" by certain people. If the stock price goes up, of course the executive equity will be worth more, but also if the executives make the certain people happy, the certain people can increase and otherwise adjust the amount of stock. So the stock price can be much about maximizing those very large shareholding certain people. That the price also changes the value of the exec equity is a thing, but the package is straightforwardly modulated as needed whether the price is high or low.

Nice, that's good.

—–—, I believe.

Your last sentence is the important one, yeah? On a spectrum of intelligence or expertise, the higher end would be defined (ish) by knowing the right color or having better guesses anyway.

Like someone restoring the Sistine Chapel would ideally have some of: knows what it looked like before because they've been working on it for thirty years, because they've been researching and/or have access to photos or some other historical documents of it's priors, because they're educated on the types of materials and pigments from the time, maybe they know something about the daily use/tourism of the place and how/whether it should change some parts of the restoration. In the absence of those things, then infer that something should be purple-ish because it's blue to the left and red to the right. This is good, but perhaps below great. Maybe the gap should have a hard line between the two colors or maybe there was an object in there.

And of course plenty of people maybe just don't care, aren't getting paid enough, don't have enough discipline to get the right purple, or are playing to their supervisor's eye rather than their trained intuition. The last one having a lot to do with the notion of "plausible". This effort aspect is I guess different, but still related/adjacent to what comes out of or how that "intelligence" is deployed.

I’ve struggled following this idea too and wondered if I’m missing something? There’s a (I assumed straightforward) implication that the wise person is often letting problems grow and/or enabling them.

It is resolved personally, which is valuable, but most of these things have a larger footprint than that making it a kind of self-prioritizing mindset. There’s some kind of math to the decision involving how much effort, how much personal or short term benefit, how much communal or long term cost. But the math isn’t neutral. So basically choosing to avoid problems is going to correlate with personally better and communally worse. The clever person might be doing the solving, making sacrifices for broader good, and is sabotaged.

People trying to think of startup ideas aren't doing it accidentally. They don't want ovens or baked goods. They want to be a founder and/or money. I feel like PG is only right halfway (which maybe means he's not right). He's implying it's wrong to do it that way (to try to think of startup ideas), that it won't work, but geez louise has it worked. To get funded, to get rich, to get an exit. He's also helped enable that path quite a bit.

People have different strengths, but I consistently see teams that have people who are decent or better at their non-expert skills and their comments play a very small role in the discourse. Sometimes they speak up more and sometimes not, a lot of them manage to (learn to) just not care. I think there are many teams where the "expert" is not actually better at their role than the other team members.

I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.

Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.

Oops: "...but just *not the vantage point I see from."

This resonated with me. I'm a bit struck by a theme in the comments around whether it's worth one's time to argue their side. The logic is understandable, but just the vantage point I see from. I think if this means stating your view and then after that deciding how hard to push it, that's one thing and fine. But I think a lot of people just see a potential disagreement and then don't state their view, or not uncommonly even say the opposite and agree with the person (a la "The best way to get someone to shut up is to agree with them"). I think this is fairly bad all around, and disheartening as you've said. Not only because it's self-centering in the mindset and self-defined in value, but it's also just kind of dismissive.

Of course there can be different goals, but I think there's something omitted. It's not quite neutral to put aside some goals for other goals. Reading that your friend wants emotional support rather than truth seeking or to understand their coworkers different values is fine, but also sometimes it's not for the best. The choice of when and when not is a choice, it's fuzzy and reflective of one's values. It's not the sole choice of one person that the other has to then read and adhere to either.

Sometimes friends are wrong to the point of the truth being more important than emotional support. More important for them to hear, or for you to stay aligned to your own values, or for the parties they're mentioning to get fair treatment. It's not so interesting me saying that broadly as I have, it matters where one has chosen that point to be, not that the point exists somewhere.

It's not neutral of me to recognize that the jokey casual conversation I'm having at a bbq is a vibes convo and thus if the jokes start suggesting distorted assertions about different races I should adhere and join (or even just nod politely). Or more mildly, as my friend starts complaining about their boss, who I think might be right, there is some point when I think it might be best for them to know.

Most of these goals are not strictly opposed to each other. They only look opposed when the thing we want starts to contradict with some of the agreed upon "facts" of the situation, and then we say the facts aren't always what matters. To oversimplify, if you choose to give your friend emotional support over truth then they will get the support and be wrong (or vice versa). This is okay if that's the right tradeoff here, but it shouldn't be distorted into belief that your friend is right. And being willing to do that in circumstances A and not in circumstances B is reflective of one's values.

I never really understood the “Being right is overrated” mindset. It’s easy enough to understand the good of harmony, but that’s not really how I see it used. They’re not really oppositional, a person has to see it that way. And to the extent that cohesion is valuable, that's just built in to a better calculation of right. But saying it this way, I suspect means that the person doing the calculating needs to overstate this cohesion beyond its value. This is a convenient sorta trusim to make a case.

The premise is that there are factors beyond accuracy which are for the greater good. That seems reasonable, but what are they? There are things like peace and happiness, which sound great, but aren’t at odds with accuracy, or more precisely the pursuit of it. This isn’t really a tradeoff. When people frame accuracy as overrated, it seems they’re often obscuring and gliding over that they don’t have a counter argument. There isn’t necessarily one discoverable truth, but there are better hypotheses and more sincere attempts. To the degree, that optimizing for peace and happiness can be a better goal, the measure of those things is typically self-centered. They would be happier. It can be group self-centered too, as in our team would be happier. It’s not a neutral truism, it’s a personal weighing, of the value of the better outcome resulting from right/better/good decision and the desire for (at least surface-level) harmony.

But more important than that, even if the group would be happier, there is the false tradeoff thing. Embedded in “being right isn’t what’s most important” is agreement about what’s right. Why are we unhappy with something more right? Accuracy/truth seems conspired against at a dispositional level in this situation. Disagreement and disharmony are not the same thing. So it’s not even disagreement leading to disharmony. It seems more of a personal desire against either a particular outcome or against disagreement generally. Both questionable. Relatedly, diplomacy is not a bad trait exactly, but I don’t see it as essentially positive. It betrays a lot. It is a kind of tax, which can be worth it up to a point (there is value in the internal functioning of the group), but probably not as often as the truism has it play out. Something should be questioned when a person/team diverges so much from better/accurate/right.

The idea of picking your battles makes a form of self-centered sense, while also making a (I think large) form of nonsense outside it. There are many forms of dissent that occur before cussing or violence, it is much different to (1) disagree, (2) disagree, but go along, (3) disagree, but say you agree, (4) disagree, but convince yourself to agree for harmony (and perhaps eventually forget that you disagree). A phrase I’ve come to dislike is “I wouldn’t die on that hill”. People should defend, if not die on, more hills. It also might recruit others. We have all these hills that have been ceded because we weren’t willing to say we liked them.

Curious if you have any gripes or concerns about using the Apple keychain/passwords setup. Aside from Apple devices, do you mostly also stick with Safari? Was it hard to transition things like TOTP or passkeys?

Awesome! Sometimes a thing conveys it was built with some love or intention. It's not restricted to fun/entertaining content, it can be Saas too. I'm talking more from how it looks and feels than necessarily what's going on in the backend, but I'm not really talking about graphics.