trentnix

If you could quantify the benefits of literacy, I think you'd find a similar decline. The incentives for literacy, especially among kids, are less compelling than they used to be.

I’ve found, as a fairly recent phenomenon, it’s often higher than the insurance price. The pessimist in me thinks that insurance companies have worked to close that loophole. They need to maintain the illusion of their utility, after all.

I used to work for a consulting firm and one of my fellow consultants, a guy who went on to some measure of nerd fame as a DevOps evangelist, used to set up his consultations by saying "I don't know everything but I work for a company that does. If won't have an answer for every question, but I'll get an answer for you if you give me time."

That doesn't match your context perfectly, but I think it does communicate the importance of managing expectations.

I'm pretty good at thinking on my feet, but I'm also not above changing my thoughts once I've examined a situation in detail. So when asked a question on the fly, I'll respond "my gut tells me X, Y, and Z but I'd like to think about it a bit and get back to you". If you do that, it's important that you follow up with some real thought and structure that provide real value. The confidence comes not in how you ask for time to think, but in your audience knowing your followup will be worth their while.

That's only the case if you're unaware you're in bad company! I've known a few people that were excellent weathervanes as long as you were aware there were going to always be wrong by 180 degrees.

It doesn't even have to be medical emergencies that go unnoticed. There are other declining health metrics that an independent observer might notice that a person is not aware of or is unwilling to confront. If there's no one to say "you might want to get that checked out", you probably won't get that checked out!

No mistake, almost all of us can refer to an anecdote of an elderly relative dying soon after their spouse. It can be both tragic and, in hindsight, romantic. But really, the consequences of loneliness are often and unfortunately quite practical.

I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.

I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.

I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.

My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.

Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.

I had the same response. History has shown that the high-priests of government are the least reliable, least consistent of all we’ve allowed to be the arbiters of truth.

Texas banned phones in schools as well. A local school administrator told me “in the high school, the lunch room is now loud with talking and laughter!”

There are still parents that complain. Turns out they are as addicted to texting with their kids all day as their kids are addicted to the same.

Regardless, it’s great to see that the ban has seemingly nudged things in a healthier direction. Its a failure of leadership that schools needed a statewide ban to make such an obviously positive change.

Despite being 31st in educational funding, New Mexico has ranked 50th in juvenile education for 8 years in a row per the Annie E. Casey foundation:

https://www.aecf.org/interactive/databook?l=35

You can research for yourself and see other evidence that the educational outcomes for children in New Mexico is generally very, very poor.

Expect similar results with New Mexico's "universal" child care.

While I'm savvy enough to keep my madness to myself (most of the time), that's pretty much what's happening in my brain!

As a compulsive, I have the problem of liking too many things. I don’t drink coffee because in a month I’ll be neck deep in forums about the proper way to grind beans. I don’t own an aquarium because I’ll be obsessively learning about perfect water pH for the most exotic fish. I don’t drink hot tea because I’ll be studying growth patterns and how seasonality affects leaves and their flavor. I don’t drink beer because I’d be sucked into learning how to craft my own.

I appreciate that it’s useful to have an open mind about your tastes and preferences, but each rabbit hole I stumble into is far deeper than the time I have available to explore. So for me, i have to find reasons to dislike things to protect my time and my existing obsessions.

Cognitive load and the benefits of simplification aren't just for systems and code. Reducing cognitive load is critically important in delivering good requirements. It enables engineers to focus on the technical and organization aspects of the solution, not interpreting the problem.

The fact is, despite all the process and pipelines and rituals we've invented to guide how software is made, the best thing leadership can do is to communicate incremental, unambiguous requirements and provide time and space for your engineers to solve the problem. If you don't do that, none of the other meetings and systems and processes and tools will matter.

The article talks a lot about appropriate management behaviors that come from humility, but I don't think humility is a skill. The skill is having an accurate and effective self-awareness. If you are (accurately) self-aware then humility (and confidence, where appropriate) is an inevitable side-effect. And that means stuff like...

Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, and reconnecting.

...is a reflex, not a tactic.

"Success rate" is a tricky metric.

I had to use an Amazon chatbot a few weeks ago. It introduced itself as "Deepshikha". After that facepalm, I started down the path with its various preferred responses to get a refund on an item I bought that never arrived, had no tracking information, and was almost certainly a scam by a third-party seller. I eventually, after a few tries, selected the right combination of things to get the refund processed. But the chatbot wasn't helpful, it didn't make any decisions, and it simply served as a filter for scam refund requests.

I guarantee you that some middle-management PM and some VP at Amazon counted that interaction as a success. I'm sure that's how it ended up on their quarterly graphs and charts. After all, the customer (me) got what they wanted and the right decision was made. And, !bonus!, it used "AI", reduces cost, and had low latency. Raises and promotions are almost certainly incoming!

But the experience was abysmal and insulting, contibuting to the ongoing ensh*ttification of the Amazon experience.

He should face consequences for his cargo-cult thinking in the first place. The C-Suite isn't "getting" anything. They are simply bending like reeds in today's winds.

I'm a Notion fan but the lack of a native Linux app has me shopping for a replacement. Obsidian seems, from what I've seen, focused on the ability to graph notes, which I don't really care about. I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.

What are my options?

And when they can't suppress visionaries within the organization, the ruling class finds other ways to preserve their power. Today the entrenched companies, organizations, and government bureaucracies collaborate to write the laws and regulations and pursue predatory competitive strategies that suppress new competitors and preserve their power.

There are always good reasons for why X law or Y regulation exists or why Z company is given preferences and even subsidies. But the visionaries are undermined all the same.

Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

There were some odds and ends around partition management that made me hesitate. ChatGPT helped me distill what I wanted to do into a plan that made sense to me.

In terms of issues, getting certain mounts to persist took some time. I had jump back into Windows and change some settings to get Windows to give up control.

I tried to install a few packages, like Emulation Station, that presented some headaches but I worked through it.

I tried installing SpaceDrive and it was a slog that eventually went nowhere. It took a lot of effort to get it compiled and running and then it didn't really work, so I gave up. It's alpha software, but given the press (and investment) it's received I expected a smoother experience.

Installing MakeMKV took a small bit of gymnastics to install, but once it was installed it worked great. Setting up backups on Mint didn’t behave as I expected at first, but I figured it out.

I didn’t really have any issues, per se, with Mint. It was a breeze. I’m sure the forums are great, but GPT hit enough that it wasn't too terrible when it missed. And it has a lot less latency than searching a forum or posting and waiting for responses.

I'm pretty sure your comment was sarcastic, but I'll add the anecdote that this is the year I moved to Linux. I've running Linux Mint as my main driver for a few months. For decades I've used Linux on servers or on an extra laptop or as a second OS to boot into as a curiosity.

I was capable enough to be professionally effective with Linux but I stayed on Windows because it was the path of least resistance. I had decades of conditioning and habits built around how Windows worked. Everything was installed and configured and setup and familiar. So I just accepted the nuisance of the injected ads and data harvesting and bloatware because it was the path of least resistance. But despite all that, I finally had enough of Microsoft's shenanigans and resolved I was done.

I used ChatGPT to successfully navigate some of the more esoteric errors, installation headaches, and software setup stumbles I've encountered getting Linux set up. No Wine or VMs either, RhythmBox and LibreOffice and MakeMKV and Steam all work great on Linux. If I need Office I've got the Office web apps. PC game support has gradually improved on Linux. The availability of emulators and Emulation Station means I don't miss my extensive LaunchBox setup that sits on my Windows partition. The end result is a setup that has kept me out of my Windows partition for months at a time.

I don't really care who wins, whatever that means, but Linux is polished and fantastic and performant. I wish I'd made the jump a decade ago.

Also partially subsidized by the government, who charged their mom-and-pop brick and mortar competitors sales tax while Amazon avoided subjecting their customers to sales tax for many years. That, plus Amazon's ability to operate at a seemingly perpetual loss, was absolutely predatory.

And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.

AI schlock

Isn't Perplexity the AI company that has been accused of ignoring robots.txt and requests not to data harvest?

> Here’s how you know you’re in denial: You use terms like “AI washing”, you think ChatGPT is just a toy and everything built on top of it is “just a wrapper”.

The author provides lots of words explaining how everyone has the wrong answers but doesn't do much to provide any right answers.

> You can’t bolt AI onto SaaS. You have to rebuild around outcomes.

To borrow a quote from Blazing Saddles:

Not only was it authentic <consulting> gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.

I'll eventually make my repo public on Github, but I'm hesitant because it's still pretty half-baked. In the meantime, I'll do my best to capture the essentials. It's been a minute since I implemented it, so I apologize if I miss some details.

I use the same ViewModel structure for all renders, a struct called Content. It has a members to help with rendering and whatnot, and the data being rendered in my HTML template is stored in a Data type for the content that will be displayed:

  Data any

So whether I'm rendering complex data, a form, or just a snippet of text, that's where it lives. That allows for all sorts of patterns for rendering data and re-using templates if that's what you want to do. Or you can just keep things simple.

Hat-tip to the Pagoda framework, which was used sometimes as an inspiration and other times as a guideline for this (and other) patterns that I used. You can find it here: https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda

I also have, as part of my ViewModel, a `Notifications` slice that specifies messages to send to the user and their type:

  Notifications []messages.Notification

I have a HTML layout for my full page that includes a section that CSS uses to pick up notifications and display them via a toaster message:

  <div id="user-notifications" class="toaster-container">
    {{ range .Notifications }}
      <div class="toaster{{ if .IsSuccess }} success{{ else if .IsError }} error{{ end }}">
        {{ .Message }}
      </div>
    {{ end }}
  </div>

I managed to get it working without any need for JavaScript (other than what HTMX needs to work).

My partial renders use a layout that includes a section for the partially rendered code and my oob Notifications:

  {{ block "Content" . }}
      Loading content.
  {{ end }}

  <div id="user-notifications" class="toaster-container" hx-swap-oob="true">
      {{ range .Notifications }}
      <div class="toaster{{ if .IsSuccess }} success{{ else if .IsError }} error{{ end }}">
        {{ .Message }}
      </div>
    {{ end }}
  </div>

So the hx-swap-oob results in my user-notifications <div> being replaced with new notifications content, if there is any. I have a base renderer that handles injecting the layouts and injecting data into `Notifications`. As a result, my handlers can be generally oblivious that this is all happening underneath.

This model can work for updating links, updating breadcrumbs, writing messages to the console, or whatever.

I'm still scratching the surface with HTMX, but I'm convinced HTMX is perfectly appropriate and a much simpler alternative for 95% of the web dev being done today.

I’ve been building a Golang web platform for my own web apps and I wired up toaster notifications using hx-swap-oob. I just populate a ‘notifications’ slice in my view model and hx-swap-oob makes sure my toaster messages get loaded irrespective of what content is actually being swapped.

It sounds like a similar use case to yours.

Isn’t that what hx-swap-oob is for?

It’s not just the same things - they do the same things to similar degrees. They are reading from the same playbook (and have, mostly, the same investors).

They're just following the herd.

Creativity and competence have become a commodity in the eyes of the modern management. Employees are headcount and customers are blood bags to bleed until there’s nothing left. Each and every one is an economic unit to mobilize and squeeze.

And when creativity and competence are commodities, companies expect they can replace creativity and competence with another SaaS platform or another vendor who'll do the dirty work. Companies don’t dare hire new graduates and train them. They don't try to educate them on how to build and maintain things while preserving the fresh thinking that comes with youth and inexperience. Those days are gone because the MBA wizards have decided long term investment, investment into an industry or one's community, is bad business.

The pied pipers of modern business thinking openly encourage “minimum viable” as the secret to success. “Minimum viable” is only a a fly’s eyelash from “not viable”. That results in “nearly not viable” schlock filling the shelves anywhere things are sold.

Modern business philosophy is literally that, for years, we’ve made things too good. That thinking infects every level of business, from development to manufacturing to service and support. Companies instruct their teams and vendors to fly as close to the sun as possible. They use words like “agile” and “lean” and “efficient”, when in most cases they are just using those words to wallpaper over shoddy work.

And because the way we used to do things is always wrong, companies hire one “consultant” after another poisoning the well with this garbage. The need for “consultant” help never ends, as the real money in consulting is in prolonging problems.

When all of that outsourcing, outsourcing of thinking and outsourcing of actual production, doesn’t adequately insulate the decision makers from accountability, companies embrace “big data” and decision committees and auditors and anything else that shields the org chart from real scrutiny. Companies refuse to trust anyone who actually has their ear to the ground in favor of some artificial signal discerned from the mountain of white noise collected from inconsistent and uneven sources. Nobody trusts the prophet in their own hometown, but the prophet from the next town is an oracle.

All of that, coupled with a consumer market that is neither educated nor savvy enough to discern quality and unwilling to pay for what quality actually costs, results in the sorry state we are experiencing. This can't sustain.