fogzen

The thing that I got wrong about estimates was thinking it was about estimating. Actually, someone already has a time constraint. There’s already a deadline. Always. Your manager, VP, customer, whoever already has a time budget. Find out what it is and work backwards.

When someone comes at you for an estimate, you need to be asking for the time budget or expected schedule — not estimating.

I failed to understand this for most of my career. Someone would ask me for an estimate, and I would provide one. But without knowing the expected schedule, the estimate is always either too high or too low.

Scope is always flexible. The feature or commitment is just a name and a date in people’s heads. Nobody but engineers actually care about requirements. Adjust scope to fit the date, everyone is happy. Adjust the date to fit the scope and people will think you’re either late or fooling them.

We have AGI. Latest generation LLMs are far better than the average human at basically everything you can throw at them. Are they smarter than the most intelligent, skilled, knowledgeable humans? Maybe not. But AGI != super intelligence.

I wish I could use this – unfortunately UI frameworks are a political problem at every company I've worked at. The designers feel undermined or threatened by it, and product owners want to dictate design. Despite the massive productivity benefits of a UI framework, I've never been able to convince stakeholders to actually adopt one.

Linear is the latest trendy issue tracker. A to-do list, basically.

I agree. The lack of discussion about replacing middle-management with AI betrays the real politics of business.

Middle-managers output exactly what LLMs do: chats, documents, summaries. Particularly working remotely. They don't even generate tickets/requirements – that's pushed to engineers and product people.

If you don’t have quorum the meeting is rescheduled.

“Jeff you didn’t show up to the meeting. What happened?”

Jeff is eventually put on a PIP or fired for not showing up to meetings without notice.

This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.

Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.

The catch is ethical. I personally don't feel good profiting from financial distress. Cash-back benefits are primarily funded through interest on carried balances (not interchange fees). In other words, credit card cash back is funded via high interest on other people's debt. The strongest predictors of revolving debt are income volatility, lack of regular savings, irregular work hours, and unexpected expenses. Basically credit cards act as an extractive safety net for people with no other options. It's a business model that depends on financial distress.

To be clear, the research appendix claims their review of RCTs does not support SFA intake correlated with coronary events or mortality, and thus does not recommend reducing saturated fat below 10% of energy.

These discussions pit ChatGPT against doctors — but we can combine them! Doctors can use it to improve their diagnostics and treatment options.

The "Reducing Saturated Fat Below 10% of Energy and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease" research appendix says they purposely excluded any study before 2010. Why? Also they only included randomized-controlled trials that lowered SFA below 10%. Why 10%?

My 5 year old has his own iPad. We choose which games he can install, and he uses YouTube kids to watch videos (which we curate).

He plays all sorts of games: Monument Valley, Hello Kitty Adventure Island, What the Car, and more.

He also uses a few “learn to read” apps like Teach Your Monster and Khan Academy Kids.

We generally don’t restrict his hours on it, but also ensure he goes outside daily for walks, playground trips, or to ride his bike. He seems to regulate his usage on his own, he’ll get bored after a while and do something else. When he gets into a game he’ll spend a lot of hours on it, then beat it or lose interest. Some of the games require reading so he will ask me to play with him so I can read things or tell him what to do.

There seems to be a lot of moral or health concern from other parents regarding devices, and many at his preschool did not allow any device usage. But I haven’t found those concerns to be based on anything tangible.

We could fund roads (and everything else) using a progressive income tax, so that everyone pays and the wealthiest would pay the largest share.

I tend to agree — but is there any data on this?

That only works if you don’t receive any real communication where people expect a response, right? I think that is the case for most people.

If you don’t actually communicate with email then Inbox Infinite seems the way to go. You only go in to search for a confirmation code or receipt for something. This is how I observe most people using email.

Same. Both my personal and work inbox are currently empty. I think it’s easier than ever now that spam filters are so good.

I don’t have notifications enabled. I triage the inbox 1-3 times a day, outside of checking for an expected email. Triage means responding then archiving, deleting, or snoozing. It’s pretty easy so I’m always baffled by people who have thousands of emails in their inbox. I get the feeling they just don’t take action or don’t receive any real communication.

Randomized controlled trials show LDL consistently drops with lower saturated fat intake, and randomized controlled trials show LDL strongly correlated with coronary risk. It’s one of the best-established causal relationships in nutrition science.

The American Heart Association’s narrative is based in observed clinical relationship between saturated fat intake, LDL, and coronary events.

Yeah, even alert/warn/info would be an improvement.

I hate the concept of “errors” in general. They’re an excuse to avoid responsibility, and ship broken software with known undefined behavior.

The very notion of an error basically means “there was behavior I chose to not handle and do anything about but which I knew would happen” which is essentially just negligence.

I love everything about this – the little touches like the logo, the content warning, etc. Thank you for bringing some joy to my day.

Same. But it took learning to ignore everything every manager was telling me: Go faster, ship before I'm ready to ship, proceed without agreed-on and documented requirements, listen to product instead of customers, follow code conventions set by others...

What’s wrong with POST’ing a report?

POST to /reports with the query parameters in the body. Respond with bookmarkable, cacheable /reports/id and GET /reports/id

And that’s only necessary for huge, complex queries. If filtering some resources doesn’t fit into the URL you might want to rethink what you’re doing.

The October CPI report was canceled and delayed because they couldn't retroactively collect data during the period of the government shutdown.

You may be interested to know of MIT's Billion Prices project, which scraped the Internet to calculate a CPI. It mostly aligned with BLS numbers, so I'm not sure if it's really worth the effort to repeat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project

Is it really so crazy to extend democracy to the enterprise?

What is the ideological lens that characterizes our society? Greed.

The individual owes nothing to society: no limit to what I can own. Society owes nothing to me: my share of the wealth is my own fault. Might makes right. A deal is fair regardless of the terms: a deal is a deal. Workers don’t deserve a vote: they agreed to their servitude.

A game’s rules are fixed. Customers, societal laws, norms, etc. are not.

Wake me up when there's an IDE that cares about performance. My coworkers are amazed my laptop can run for days because I don't use Electron crap.

Having been a CEO and around many CEOs... they of course do work. But they don't do x250 times more work of another worker. It's just a different type of work. Yet all work from every employee is critical for the enterprise to function. And in my experience, they often do less work than many employees in terms of hours. If you're an on-call engineer for example, your CEO doesn't get paged and have to wake up in the middle of the night. If you look at any enterprise the CEO is likely not the one doing the most work. That's kind of the whole point and the reason they want to become a CEO/founder (to capture a larger share of the wealth for the work they put in).

Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.

The problem is not immigration policy — it’s using terror, illegal detainment, and negligent and excessive force to detain people. Breaking into a daycare with no warrant, no identification (they wear masks and refuse to identify themselves to avoid justice for their crimes), with guns, and dragging a woman out kicking and screaming is both completely illegal in every way and extremely traumatic for everyone - regardless of the wanton cruelty of deporting working class undocumented immigrants who have become a contributing and otherwise law-abiding part of a community.

I recently saw a video of armed, masked ICE terrorists entering a daycare and forcibly dragging a teacher out in front of babies and toddlers.

America is sick. Republicans are sick. They condone this and have made no attempt to do anything about it.

Helix has its limitations — but I use it for speed. No other editor I’ve tried is as nimble.