lcuff

Again, I think this is likely seen differently depending on which side of the political spectrum one stands, and what sources of information one attunes to. I agree that both 'racism' and 'gender' have become flash-points for discord, and that one can point to the left as trying to change the definitions. But I can think of other words that the right is equally guilty of attempting to re-define. For example, 'woke' was a term originally rooted in African American communities meaning awareness of systemic injustice, but is now used by the right as pejorative for anything they disagree with. (Including the existence of systemic injustice, sigh.)

Everybody's mileage will vary on this ... I spent a lot of time in the year after I read Paul Graham's essay on "things you can't say", searching for things that I thought matched the criteria he set out, and found a few. But it's not that the words may never cross my lips, I can say these things within some small circle of people, but would definitely not be saying them in public without being prepared for an onslaught of negative attention. Some examples of 'cancel culture' are proof of this. Donald G. McNeil comes to mind.

That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.

"Core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left". Or the conservative right, depending on which side of this divide one happens to stand on. And speaking of Orwell, he was pointing out the doublespeak of the Fascists, not the socialists.

Interesting. I wonder how the expansion and contraction of the rails with changes in temperature is accommodated.

I remember reading some time ago that there is a real difficulty running passenger trains and freight trains over the same rails. With freight, you can tolerate bumps at the rail-join points, and freight tends to create such bumps because the heavy loads push the rails slightly out of place. Also, freight routes should be limited to a 2% grade, whereas 4% can be tolerated for the lighter passenger cars. Have these problems been mitigated on the Koralm Railway? Anyone know how?

I agree that "the right thing" depends on point of view and narrative at hand (the context). And when I quote Drucker and point to character, I see it as the bedrock on which a good manager will stand. But people of good character still need a whole array of other tools to turn them into good managers: Being skillful politicians to navigate the organizational polity, being people who can see the big picture. Having _lots_ of people skills. Having a good grasp of the field of endeavor. An ability to laugh at themselves ...

Failing to understand the basic requirement is not, IMHO, overthinking it.

I will admit, as I reread the question and the hint just now, that I just didn't read carefully the first time through. It's actually pretty clear. Sigh.

People's minds work quite differently ... As evidenced by people that have strong reactions to particular languages (love or hate), or, as another example, people that love or hate syntax coloring in code. (Yes, it gets in the way for some). The fact that the instructions didn't make the problem clear to me is not an overthinking problem on my part. It would be better for me if the problems were expressed in different ways.

When trying to communicate, saying the same thing two different ways is a big step towards helping deal with the variance in people's minds. I wish they'd done that with some of the questions.

Peter Drucker wrote that the most important thing a manager could have was 'character'. I've asked myself "What is character?", and the best answer I've come up with is: "The willingness to do the right thing regardless of negative consequences to oneself." When I look at myself, I don't believe I have character. I want to be liked too much, and in my emotional core, I'm frightened. I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of people in managerial roles have little or no character, and are unwilling to take on the monster of 'the system', whatever that means in their context, because in general their superiors don't want to hear the bad news a manager with character might deliver. I've worked for managers who were complicit in hiding the dilution of stock options; who failed to push back on higher-management policies that were eroding the morale of their subordinates; who failed to be straight with subordinates about things they could improve; Who accepted ridiculous schedule demands on their teams, allowing death marches. You've probably got many examples of your own.

I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243

I thought there was too much ambiguity to several of the challenges:

I gave up after the following exercise:

On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ... Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory.

It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.

"It's a cheap trick to make me trust the interlocutor".

Hmmm. Different interlocutors can have different intentions. Some are going to have the intention to understand. Echoing what you believe the person said is not a 'cheap trick' when it comes to discussing ideas. I've been on both ends of conversations about singing, engineering and sailing, and one person says "what your saying is this" and the other person says: "No, that's not what I'm saying", with a correction that follows, and the chance for two-way understanding.

Yup. Weizenbaum knew about active listening.

Nope, I don't see that. As a therapist, this is a big part of our training. Using it in a business context, there's more emphasis on ideas, whereas in therapy, you do ask people how it makes them feel. Often because people don't know how they feel, and that's important in intimate relationships.

It can land as awkward, un-natural, yeah even 'fake' when it's being used by somebody who is just learning it and is practicing, though after time it will lose those qualities. If people you know are using this on you, they might need to own that they're trying something different to get you into a comfort zone before pressing on.

No kidding here.

A philosophy professor I had when I was an undergrad, asked the question "Why did Socrates deliver the Apology in such a way that was clearly unapologetic and designed to annoy the Athenians"? His answer was that he thought Socrates was old and wanted to go out with a bang. I thought his answer had merit, and also that it was an answer I, at 19, would never have come up with. At 70, I go "oh, yeah, baby".

For some "a little friction" is enough. For others, not. I keep less-healthy food treats in a cupboard in my garage, because the friction of walking out to get them is enough to reduce my usage to an acceptable level. Even less healthy treats I don't buy, because the friction of going to the grocery store to get them when I'm craving them is enough.

It's an interesting exercise to think about how this could be engineered to increase the friction.

Fun article, but the example of Hilbert Curve usefulness with hard drives is quickly aging out. SSDs, which are increasingly prevalent, have more-or-less constant access time. There is no equivalent of the seek time or rotational latency that slows down HHD access when successive reads are on different tracks, at different rotational angles.

Okay, but my main complaint is that the medium (video) feels very under-utilized.

I confess I was disappointed in the video. As someone who decades ago read Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, it doesn't substantially add to my (lame!) understanding of the Standard Model. It names the 17 entities in the model, classifies them (fermions vs bosons), makes the distinction between matter particles and force particles, chats about each of the four forces, and drops in a number of other factoids. All well and good, and if you had no previous exposure to the standard model, you'd learn a lot. But the contrast to videos in other realms I explore (3Blue1Brown in mathematics, Guitar instructional videos by folks who include tab + video of actual fingers + sound, and woodworking videos where tricky constructions are shown from many angles) casts this Standard Model video in a poor light. The visuals just recapitulate the words that are being spoken. Sigh. Maybe there's nothing else to show, but, as I led with, I ended up disappointed....

44% shorter: is your claim that limiting line lengths to 80 or 100 characters is going to 'massively impinge' your productivity? That seems unlikely to me.

Sorry to take so long to answer. Good questions. 2 space indents, in (say) 30 line functions, get harder to discern the more indent levels. This problem is exacerbated by bad eyesight.

Bigger monitor with higher DPI does help, yep.

Horizontal scroll: I suppose it could help. The more immediate tradeoff tends to be that I use a terminal full width on a large monitor when needed, and tolerate the fact that I'd prefer to have space to have a web browser open on the same screen.

I'm a big fan of Sandy Metz, who advocates 5 line routines. In Python and Ruby, this is possible, and the indentation problems go away. In C, it's more of a challenge.

>at a comfortable 10 point font size.

How lovely for you. As someone with significantly impaired vision, even when corrected, I have my font size set to 18, thank you very much. A coding standard that assumes a 10 point font size would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act's 'reasonable accommodation' mandate. I wasn't pushy enough to act on it, but it sure pissed me off when my fellow team members blew off my complaints about how we formatted our code. (Including two space indents...grrrr.) My worse than 20/200 vision (Can't see the big E on an eye chart) lets me see code, but legally, I'm blind in one eye.

I admit, it's a classic 'no perfect solution' scenario, because I like very long variable and function names. I write tiny functions (5-10 lines) because they only need one or two levels of indent. Some programmers I've worked with really dislike such small functions.

Except when there's not ... In this case, it was superseded by "more pressing" alarms, namely "pull up"/"you're too low".

In this incident, as with Air France flight 447, pilot and co-pilot were holding the controls in opposite directions, and the software averages the input. In this case the warning that the controls were mismatched was not of sufficiently high priority to be issued (other warnings were taking precedence: You're about to crash). This user interface just continues to appall me.

With mechanically joined controls, it is impossible to have this happen. I think if I were designing a modern aircraft, I might retain physical linkage for just the reason.

I did a lot of the work in my 40 year software career as an individual, which meant it was on me to estimate the time of the task. My first estimate was almost always an "If nothing goes wrong" estimate. I would attempt to make a more accurate estimate by asking myself "is there a 50% chance I could finish early?". I considered that a 'true' estimate, and could rarely bring myself to offer that estimate 'up the chain' (I'm a wimp ...). When I hear "it's going to be tight for Q2", in the contexts I worked in, that meant "there's no hope". None of this invalidates the notion of a carefulness knob, but I do kinda laugh at the tenor of the imagined conversations that attribute a lot more accuracy to the original estimate that I ever found in reality in my career. Retired 5 years now, maybe some magic has happened while I wasn't looking.

"Hard times create strong men". At what age do the hard times start for this to be true? Do children who are victims of abuse become strong? Some perhaps, but I suspect not more than a control group. Do the hard times occur when the people are full adults? Anecdotally in my life, I've seen hard times be precursors to people cope by using drink and drugs, and seen hard times to lead other people to step up to the challenge. And what is the definition of strong, here? Seems so vague as to be pointless. This old saying seems like complete bunk to me.

Does anybody have a pointer to a good description of what Alan Kay means by messaging?

> Wildly impractical

I couldn't disagree more strongly. Part of the vision in PARC (and Alan Kay's life work) was to create learning environments for children, and this demo is set in that realm, so having kids figure it out themselves is enormously empowering. Obviously not what you want if you're trying to sell widgets, but the widget-sellers themselves could benefit from this kind of environment to develop a usable widget-buying experience.

> The UX has already been thought out ... [and] ... refine[d] over time.

In such an impoverished way, in my experience. One of the things Alan Kay has said (elsewhere) is that the environment at PARC allowed them to experiment with radically different user interfaces in the afternoon, after thinking about it at lunch. This implies an in-depth knowledge of the tools, yes, but developers need that in any environment. I'm doing volunteer work now and having to learn to use several software systems (EventBrite, MailChimp, Salesforce). The difficulty of using these systems is in range for me as a retired software engineer, (although endlessly annoying), but other volunteers need extensive training. There's is nothing 'refined' about them, in terms of ease-of-use to the end users. The current tools for developing the interfaces (HTML, CSS, SQL, Javascript, etc.) are also primitive compared to the environment shown here. Again, it's a lengthy task to become a power use of the system demo-ed here, but no more so than to become a power use of the 10 or more technologies you need to learn to make a modern web site.

As a web site developer, with these kinds of tools, you'd develop your own tools and abstractions (an intermediate layer) to build with, none of which would appear anything like the physical world manipulation tools that have been built here.

When I hear Alan Kay talk dismissively about current applications and interfaces, and the lack of attention given to what was developed at PARC 40 or 50 years ago, I often wish he was more explicit about WHAT was developed. (I have watched the mother of all demos, which is truly awesome, but partial information). This video is another significant chunk, and it puts modern interfaces to shame for their lack of power and imagination. The depth of power here is analogous to the power of Lispy languages, where, until you really understand the concepts, you are ignorant as to how (for example) C++ is in no way "Object Oriented" in the way Alan Kay meant it, how impoverished it is, and how critical late binding is.

In a more consumer friendly architecture, the bank would send the consumer a list of the current organizations that have a recurring charge 'relationship' and ask the consumer which ones should be transferred to the new card. It takes it from automatic, to semi-automatic, but much more consumer friendly. Needs lots of security around it, of course.

Evokes my favorite Warren Buffett quote

"Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you."

>>> In place of anything like a novel proper, we get a would-be bildungsroman breaking through to the surface in disparate fragments. These scraps are Winston’s yearnings, memories, sensual instincts, which have, as yet, somehow gone unmurdered by the regime. The entire state-sponsored enterprise of Pavlovian sadism in Oceania is devoted to snuffing out this remnant interiority.

The details of Orwell's life were interesting, but the above-quoted paragraph lands as highbrow prose that doesn't say much. I had to look up bildungsroman "A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character". Oh my. It was/is a proper novel. I disagree that it should be characterized as bildungsroman, with all the caveats and flourishes. In fact, it's more about the protagonist's discovery of the truly moral depravity of the culture he lives in. The creative element of the ugliness of the culture is made even more compelling for me by the fact that the storyline avoids the conventional "Shape of Stories" patterns described by Kurt Vonnegut. It ends with the protagonist having all creative life and individuality crushed out of him. Not an easy end to encompass. No happy ending here.