jdbernard

No one has. ;)

> [You] are confusing them for high output.

Not really. I agree that high performance is more than just high output. When I said this:

> My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best.

I was thinking specifically about empowering them to be effective across the management hierarchy. That's the point of creating clarity around goals: so that team members can make autonomous decisions that don't rely on me to be the arbiter of quality/truth/whatever. I'm going to describe the target, not prescribe the path. And yes, even that description of the target is open to reevaluation. Facilitating healthy communication and bringing clarity is one of the fundamental purposes of the management role, in my opinion. As an organization grows the sheer number of conversations happening becomes too much for everyone to keep track of. Managers should function as clearing houses for important communication (not bottlenecks) so that other don't have to spend all of their time doing it. But the purpose of this is to make sure that people that have the skills/context/responsibility/ability have everything at the ready.

It's also why I said

> [I expect they] eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job

High-trust management is in many ways a different and orthogonal role. But you likely have never seen a truly high-trust manager.

If the high-performer is "so good [..] that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation," great! Let's promote them to Staff/Principal/Distinguished and have them report directly to the VP/C-suite, whatever.

"Do X because it's best practice" is very different than "do X because you were commanded by your rightful authority to do so."

Of course, CloudFlare is making it their business to be and convince others that they are that trusted third-party.

Provide command logs and session recordings to allow administrators to audit and replay their developers’ interactions with the organization’s infrastructure.

The only way they can do this is if they record and store the session text, effectively a keylogger between you and the machine you are SSH'ing into.

Sounds like he understood it just fine. He owns the means of production.

Navigation - I'm doing the same thing, but without "seeing" it. I know Georgetown is N-NE of Austin, Liberty Hill is due W from Georgetown, IH-35 runs N-S but actually slightly NE-SW through Austin for example. I can draw pretty good maps on command (if not to scale), but I don't "see" that until I put it on paper. I think I actually have a much better recall of spatial relations than my wife, who has a vivid mind's eye.

Regarding math: again a similar process, but I don't "see"the equations. Coding is interesting because when I'm really in the zone I feel like I can sit, think, and come up with a holistic design for some problem. Then as I start to write the code I can "feel" the congruence or discongruence between the code I've written and the design I conceptualized. But it's not, for example, a visualized graph in my head. It's more of a physical graph, like holding a carved statue and feeling the curves, edges, and features. Except it's not the same physical sensation as touch, but a mental analog.

Edit: another commentator called it "imaginary proprioception" which I find very apt.

Dreaming: Hard to describe without using words that imply too much here. It's the same as my imagination when reading. Meaning, I am aware of the plot, I can "feel" the place setting, recognize the actors involved, and sometimes even feel/understand the internal motivations of other actors in my dreams. It's hard to describe what I mean by "feeling," but maybe it is similar to how you "feel" your emotions. None of this is visual, even in my dreams. I rarely remember my dreams.

Recalling memories: As the article mentions, I have very weak autobiographical and episodic memories, to the point where my wife and friends are often surprised at how much more clearly they remember the events of my own life. I really do not recall, with any clarity, any events more than 10 years old. At the same time, my memory of "causal facts" is very strong. Meaning I have the ability to remember why things happened basically forever. For example, when taking calculus, I had a very hard time memorizing trigonometric identities, but if I was taught the origin, the "why" I would remember how recreate the identity on the fly for test. Plotlines are similar. I remember the motivation of the characters, the motivating details of the plotline itself, and then subsequent detail is attached to those logical threads of memory. Recall seems very tied to useful purpose. Meaning, I can't just remember something in detail at request. But if I take 15-30 minutes to start working on something, I am flooded with memories regarding that subject. And of course, none of these memories have a visual component. It's all more of an abstract collection of "stuff" that has a real mental substance and mass, for lack of better words, but not imagery.

Recalling visual media: Similar to above. The media is decomposed into chains of cause/effect. Again, hard to describe. I cannot "replay" a movie in any meaningful sense, but if we sit down to watch a movie I've already seen, I will immediately remember basically the entire plotline within a few minutes. I don't really enjoy rewatching movies, or even replaying video games unless there is something novel (watching with someone new/extra content). Reading books is different. I regularly reread books I enjoyed, maybe because there is a much higher amount of content from a logical plotline/story point of view.

Imagination: I "feel" things? Again, mostly centered around arranging lines of causal detail. When I was younger I used to put myself to sleep by making up stories in my head. This is very easy for me, but it's like an audio book (without visualization). This happens, then this happens. Alice says this, and that made Bob believe that, implying feelings. Miscommunication! Etc. Outside of imaginary storytelling I spent most of my time as a kid imagining what I could do/build, and this is the main activity of my adult imagination: imagining things I could make, things I could do with my family, etc.

Maybe another example, I'm not face-blind. I recognize faces, even in my imagination, but I don't "see" them in any literal fashion. For example I can imagine, now, what Viggo M. cast as Aragorn looks like, through the different emotional exclusions of the character, but I "feel" it. I don't see his face visually. I've had the experience of reading a book, watching a movie adaptation, and disliking the casting choice because it didn't match the "picture" in my head. Only there is no literal picture. The actors face "feels" wrong for the character. After seeing the actor I could tell you why their face was wrong for the role, but I could not tell you ahead-of-time what the character "looks like" in my imagination. I tend not to remember details of an author's physical description of their characters. I can't tell you, even now, if Aragorn has blue or brown eyes in the books. I think Viggo M. haa blue eyes, but that's a fact I'm remembering, not a mental image I'm consulting.

Reading: not much to add I haven't touched on already.

I'm also intentionally not making a value judgement on what a corporation should do, rather pointing out that there exist many possibilities beyond a pure profit motive.

Joking aside I know, personally, business owners who have consistently acted with integrity and managed to maintain a successful, profitable business over the course of 30+ years, adjacent to the real estate market, surviving 2008, etc. so it's not like they've never faced had time or tough competitors. In that time they have never had layoffs. They've had to cut pay and reduce benefits in lean times, but providing gainful employment is a core value (above profit!!) and it has worked.

There are several examples of local, for profit, ISPs that are about to provide a better service, at a lower cost, and with better customer service. The major ISPs have not responded to this by truly outcompeting these challengers, but by weaponizing the legal system to shut these competitors down.

So, while I agree that "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income", I disagree with your premise that you cannot provide decent customer service within the profit margins of these businesses.

Maybe the core concept of a corporation could be, for example:

- to make an excellent product in a sustainable manner,

- to provide gainful employment,

- to steward a natural resource,

- to push the boundaries of human knowledge,

- to organize a portion of society,

- etc.

I'm sure I could go on, this is literally 3 minutes of thought so far.

All of these could be pursued as the primary purpose of the corporation, with a goal of doing so profitably as a secondary concern. None of these are fundamentally incompatible with seeking profits. And in fact, in the past, as part of incorporation, you had to create a charter: what was the purpose of your corporation? That's actually still part of the prices if you go to register a business, though I don't know how meaningful it is anymore. Even the doctrine that corporations be managed "for the benefit of the shareholders," does not necessarily imply a focus on earning capital above all else.

But when the idea that profits are the sole and highest aim of a business, then yes, a lot of very good things get lost along the way.

This is already s long comment, so I'll stop here. I'm not convinced that the way we've chosen in 2024 to conceptualize corporations, even capitalism, is the only way. I think this statement:

> [Earning capital is] literally what a corporation is for

is a value judgement, not a natural definition.

> What does that have to do with abstractions or the lack of physical constraints?

Someone like Steve Jobs becomes a forcing function to maintain a high bar of quality. He's the exception that proves the rule. In the general case you can't rely on someone like Steve Jobs, but in other domains you still have a higher minimal quality bar driven by physical constraints.

I concede that in every domain it is true that "cheap stuff made quickly breaks." My argument is that even then there is a minimal bar that is set by physical constraints. If the bridge doesn't stand it doesn't get built. If you cut too many corners or rush too much it just doesn't get built, or has to be rebuilt. This leads to overages and delay, but at the end of the process the bridge meets the physical specs or it falls over. I think the lack of any such physical constraints means that there is no such minimal bar for software and the floor of quality is therefore much lower, even in software by large, successful, and well-funded, "marquee" companies.

I failed to communicate clearly. Yes, I agree, the scope of human achievement is amazing, software included. However, the issues with software go far deeper than just the trivial example I gave of the phone. It's pervasive and pernicious. I assume most software developers understand this as lived experience, but I'll elaborate more.

Almost every single person I know who is not an IT professional of some sort regularly comes to me, my son, and others who are IT professionals for help with things that are broken and non-functional to the point that they cannot use it without assistance. And that's just the show-stoppers. There is tons of crappy software that they've just found workarounds for, and they've gotten so used to having to find workarounds that they've just stopped complaining. Not because it's working correctly, but they would rather be happy and accept it than get constantly worked up about something over which they have no control. This is not entirely unique to software, but there isn't really any other mass technology that is as bad as software.

Software is simultaneously miraculous and horrible. Because of computing we have capabilities that would be seen as science fiction or magic not too long ago. But because of the things called out in this article, these magical tools and technologies are plagued by endless amounts of things that just don't work right, break randomly, and fail in unexpected ways.

With physical systems and hard sciences we identify the physical constraints, model the system, and then engineer solutions around those models, refining our solutions as we refine our models. With software we make up the models, rarely fully document them, and slap things together as we go. Some companies do better than others, and some domains take quality and reliability seriously, but in my experience even that correlates to distance from physical constraints. In general the portions of our industry that are closer to real-world constraints (chip manufacturing, control interfaces, etc.) have historically been better about delivering quality software.

If I come across as frustrated it's because I am. I love building software, and I used to love using software, but I am incredibly frustrated by the gap between what we've built and what is possible.

I could keep going, but I'll end this comment with one other observation. I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but Apple used to be the exception to this general rules of "software just kind of generally sucks." Apple used to be "it just works." And that was because Steve Jobs was the forcing function on quality. It's possible.

Again, this isn't unique to software. Excellence in any domain requires someone to be the standard bearer. At a restaurant it may be the head chef, refusing to let anything out of the kitchen that doesn't meet their high bar, for example. In every domain there exist various pressures that push quality down (time, cost, etc.) but software lacks the natural floor established by physical constraints, and is unique riddled with problems, IMHO.

No such limits exist on software beyond maybe performance and memory constraints. But both of those are in abundance, so we can and do patch over crap endlessly. Every one of us has had that moment where we think or say, "how does this even work?" But until the user hits the wrong edge case they have no idea how rickety the underlying code is.

> This happens billions of times a day, all across the world, and mostly flawlessly.

No, I'd argue it's much more common for there to be flaws. They're just not obvious. They're random crap like my phone continuing to vibrate after I've answered the call until I get another call or text. Or options disappearing from a web app because something didn't load 100% correctly. Or the joys of flaky Bluetooth pairing. The list is endless.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again" is evidence of this. It's normal for software systems to get into such inscrutably subtle bad states that the only fix is to wipe everything and reload from scratch.

Looking at it more, Hedy looks like it solves the latter problem reducing the barrier to entry. I wonder if something like this could be used to also keep the benefit of a common language. It looks like it allows you to choose at the beginning what language to use for authoring code, but could you use it's mapping of keywords across languages to allow a reader to choose the language they view the code in? Would that be sufficient? Maybe not because you still have variable names, function names, etc. that wouldn't have such a mapping. But I wonder how far that kind of auto-translation would get you. And how effective AI-based translation of the remainder would be, especially if paired with some sort of AST-based tooling that helps the AI to use consistent naming for the same symbols, etc. Interesting!

I imagine the reason this has blown up so much is that the maintainer never reached out to the upstream about this, and was rude and condescending when upstream reached out to them.

There is a some confusion because the flags that control these features at compile-time do default to OFF if not provided, but the installation instructions in the same documentation also tell you to compile with XC_ALL set to ON. The maintainers themselves talk about all features being enabled at compile-time in the discussion thread and even consider removing these compile-time flags altogether to prevent compiling keepassxc without these features. So "disabled by default" is not really an accurate understanding. It is clear that the intended configuration from the authors is for all features to be compiled in and available.

See: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10725#iss... https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10725#iss...

There are multiple KeePass implementations. The people using this one are doing so because they want its features.

That is my argument though. Dominance hierarchies are one foundational lens through which to view the world, yes I agree. However, it is not the only one, and if you were to use that lens to try to understand, for example, my motivations and my life choices, you would come to incorrect conclusions. It is possible to interpret my life choices through the lens of ego-driven pursuit of dominance, but that interpretation will not lead to an accurate understanding. You can overfit that model to my life, but it will not have predictive power because it is fundamentally an incorrect model through which to understand my motivations.

Child has ego → wants to be important → demonstrates a certain talent → identifies a dominance hierarchy predicated on that talent → consumes the mythology of the intrinsic importance of that dominance hierarchy, storied by generations of those who climbed it → spend your life climbing to the top of that dominance hierarchy.

For me it is: child has fun, wants to continue to have fun → realizes he has the most fun making things with people he loves → realizes society won't let him do what he wants to do unless he checks arbitrary boxes → spends time having fun making things instead of checking boxes → spend life trying to find a comfortable place to have fun making things and enjoying family.

The author may deny my internal motivations and assume I'm self-deluded all they want, but I am quite convinced that I know myself far better than them. I'm interested in having done things I find meaningful, not being someone of importance, and the actions of my life back up that assertion.

This article is an overly simplistic view of the world and human motivations. You get to choose if this is how you live your life, and you really can choose purpose and values other than ego. Ego and greed may be the norm for modern culture, and may be the typical way that the corporate world operates, but it is certainly not the only way. It's almost narcissistic how much it assumes that everyone else's motivations are exactly like the author's.