I’m just in the middle of re-reading Simon Wardley’s collected blog posts on Wardley Mapping (via the soft cover book).
My recency bias aside, its uncanny how much his concepts infuse this Economist article.
Almost every paragraph echoes a concept from Wardley’s writings; diffusion versus evolution, inertia, co-evolution of practices and capabilities, capital flows, initial innovation versus refinement of an idea, and with hindsight, eventual ubiquity.
I greatly enjoyed the serendipity of this article appearing alongside my holiday reading.
One point missing from the article is the increased speed of diffusion via communication, and the relatively evolved states of compute, and other required underlying infrastructure for AI.
One could map the user needs of farms and farmers and todays knowledge enterprises, alongside the underlying infrastructure required to deploy tractors and AI, and draw some conclusions.
That's an avenue I'm pursuing - have joined the waiting list and am waiting for someone to get back to me after a brief email interaction over the weekend.
Secured by work was a reference to one possible suggestion of using Alpine or similar, which requires app-specific passwords. And yes, it seems it is possible to block that!
Hijacking this comment, but it seems likely to attract the right sort of crowd..
Can anyone recommend a Mac/web Gmail UI with exceptionally fast hotkey interactions? The Gmail web interface has slowed to the point of un-usability for me now.
Command line (Alpine, etc) would be fine, but my Gmail account is secured by work and has the required access control settings disabled.
I'm a developer working in London - I've been here for the last five years. Immigrants seem disproportionately represented in the software dev industry (but not IT in general).
Quite a few from the EU, but a lot from Commonwealth countries (NZ, Aus, SA).
This may have been pointed out elsewhere, but it seems to have something in common with the if-by-whisky style of argument.
All that's missing is the "if by 'cult' what I mean is a slavish adherence to laws and dictates laid down without recourse to reasoned argument.., then I disagree."
I just returned from Berlin a couple of nights ago, and met an English guy (I'm a New Zealander living in London) who'd worked there for a few years. He is an aerospace engineer working for a very famous English engineering firm in their German office.
He was of the opinion that German productivity, at least when compared with other European countries, was a myth. He told exactly the same anecdotes about German individuality as this article mentions, but gave it quite a negative spin.
When handing out bits of work to fellow engineers, the Germans would tend to put their heads down and start work immediately, instead of consulting with colleagues about previous solutions to the same problem, etc. Basically he said they did quite a lot of very efficient, very correct, very over-engineered re-inventing of the wheel.
Particularly he pointed out that to a German engineer, every part of the solution was equally important, where as to an English engineer, it was obvious some parts where more important than others. Focusing on those gave a better quality end-result when faced with a limited budget, but a German with a unlimited budget would give you an absolutely fantastic end-result.
So, that's a pretty cool story. The feedback loop on these sorts of things is insane. Does anyone have any anecdotes of this sort of thing that don't result in #1 on reddit (or something similar!).
Also - does anyone know of a program that does this for Windows?
I was trying to think of a good reason why FIFA continues to refuse to introduce any form of video replay/video referee, and the reason Ed outlines are just what I concluded.
The game is supposed to be exactly the same when played at World Cup level as it is when played at Saturday morning club level, and even below that - the streets of Brazil, etc.
Fifa has got its eye on the global market for playing football, which is what (possibly) makes it the world's most popular sport. It doesn't have its eye on the global market for watching football.
Your auto-complete is suggesting based on words inside the team name (nice!) but the experience is jarring, because it autocompletes the remainder of the matched phrase when I type in a word half-way through the name (type in: blu).
Hah - I didn't intend to end 3/4 of my post with question marks. Or did I? ..ahem.
My comment was really a rhetorical question about the moral (not necessarily commercial - I'm not arguing that) appropriateness of taking (as you described) an alienating path.
I've read quite a few descriptions of marketing as being successful by causing unknown wants and needs. None of those descriptions really talk about 'us and them' as a concept.
I'd just like to echo others comments about C being a really good idea. I live in London, and have recently moved into an apartment with large windows that are just screaming out for planter boxers.
My partner and I are trying to figure out what to plant, etc, but all we really want to do is have someone deliver two planter boxes, the right amount of dirt and fertilizer, and some flowers and herbs that we can plant now, as well as in a few months time.
We would pay quite a bit for this privilege - even more so if the planter boxes showed up with the dirt already in them. Doing any sort of work like this in an apartment is an exercise in frustration - there's just not enough room, and dirt goes everywhere.
My recency bias aside, its uncanny how much his concepts infuse this Economist article.
Almost every paragraph echoes a concept from Wardley’s writings; diffusion versus evolution, inertia, co-evolution of practices and capabilities, capital flows, initial innovation versus refinement of an idea, and with hindsight, eventual ubiquity.
I greatly enjoyed the serendipity of this article appearing alongside my holiday reading.
One point missing from the article is the increased speed of diffusion via communication, and the relatively evolved states of compute, and other required underlying infrastructure for AI.
One could map the user needs of farms and farmers and todays knowledge enterprises, alongside the underlying infrastructure required to deploy tractors and AI, and draw some conclusions.