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jordwest

995 karmajoined 13 anni fa
https://west.io

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jordwest
·5 giorni fa·discuss
Ah wow of course, I think you just made something click for me.

It's strange how we take interest on cash as a law of nature, when the original intention might have been nothing more than compensation for the risk the lender was taking on.

Now the risk (on bank deposits, govt bonds etc at least) has effectively been removed so the interest rate is the baseline expectation.

So compound interest is underpinning the infinite growth forever delusion...
jordwest
·5 giorni fa·discuss
> While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected.

That this is seen as a problem tells you everything about business today.

It has to be explosive growth or it’s pointless, according to execs and shareholders.
jordwest
·16 giorni fa·discuss
It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
jordwest
·26 giorni fa·discuss
Paraphrasing Nate Hagens, at the end of the day the modern economy just turns megalitres of oil into microlitres of dopamine
jordwest
·27 giorni fa·discuss
Haha this is excellent, I believe you’ve just invented a new genre - Garbage Collector fanfiction.

I have no idea how reading this people would jump to the conclusion that you have problems, but I will jump to the conclusion that those people probably like to live in a gray box with blank walls
jordwest
·27 giorni fa·discuss
Would you be willing to share it again here?

I love reading these personal things - especially the things that people publish in spite of being told they're crazy. In my experience they're usually the more real, honest and raw things in a crazy world where everyone is keeping up appearances and pretending to be normal and sane
jordwest
·27 giorni fa·discuss
> the alternative is too grim

The problem is, reality doesn't care whether you think it's grim or not.

I think the environmentalism movement faces this - it's easier to believe that everything is fine and we're not harming the planet and all is good, because the alternative is grim. But if the alternative is real then the fear of facing it is only going to make the reality even more grim.
jordwest
·mese scorso·discuss
From the title I thought this was gonna be about software (like MacOS updater) giving users an “Update now” and “Maybe later” option but no “don’t show this again”.

I’m still holding out from upgrading to macOS 26 and it’s doing its absolute best to make me accidentally misclick to update
jordwest
·mese scorso·discuss
[dead]
jordwest
·2 mesi fa·discuss
I can totally relate, funny enough I find myself drifting back to really appreciating old school interfaces and pixel fonts lately. I've been enjoying using the old IBM DOS font [1] [2] in my editor, terminal etc.

Hard to tell if it's just nostalgia, but all the smoothing, drop shadows, antialiasing (and now blurring with MacOS 26) feel so unnecessary and hardly even pretty anymore.

There's something nice about computer interfaces that just look like computer interfaces instead of pretending they're something else.

IMO part of it is that the older interfaces trusted the intelligence of the user to understand the abstractions below the interface, while newer software assumes the user is dumb in order to capture the largest possible market share. In the 90s it was "RTFM", now it's "your software sucks if it's not obvious". But what we lost in that is that interfaces now abstract away what's actually going on underneath.

Maybe this preference for the old way is part of the reason for the resurgence of TUIs.

    [1] https://viznut.fi/unscii/
    [2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
jordwest
·2 mesi fa·discuss
She just didn't see the point in them, she enjoyed a simple life, grew up with little but had a full life and didn't see the need for more. She would ask me as a kid "you've been playing the television again have you?". I don't think she ever really understood that to me it was a creative tool.

I did manage to convince her to try a VR headset at one point and despite her protests she clearly enjoyed it. Afterwards she said "what a silly gadget" haha. I'm realising now that I have similar feelings about generative AI.
jordwest
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Unfortunately there are plenty of highly legible metrics that make the world a worse place ("engagement" might be among the worst)
jordwest
·2 mesi fa·discuss
> The scary part now is people denying its happening right in front of them.

I wonder if age is a factor. Those of us who have been around for a while have seen all the promises and hope and excitement about the future, that maybe 20% of that comes true and the rest ends up being the usual exploitation and greed.

The younger people haven't been through that cycle of disillusionment yet so they still believe that only the positive, hopeful dreams will come true. It's natural, but naive, to believe that humans will always collectively choose the best path forward [1].

My grandma always refused to touch computers despite my excitement about them in my youth and I couldn't understand why. Now I think I get it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Same here, picked it up a week ago and haven’t touched git again.

Probably my favourite thing that has really changed my workflow is being able to write empty commits in advance then just switch between them. It helps me remember what I’m doing and whats next whenever I get distracted or take a break.
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
The second environment I was describing fits what you’re describing more than “yak shaving idealists”.

We were working on control systems for large industry that had to work reliably and with minimum intervention. A lot of these systems were being renewed but the plant was often 30+ years old. We were also dealing with quite limited hardware.
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
> they’re often put to work making the boxes more blue or sitting in meetings with PMs for hours

Haha, this is exactly my experience.

I'll never forget the best candidate I ever interviewed - my feedback was to absolutely hire him and put him on the most interesting and challenging problems. They put him in a marketing team tweaking upsell popups. He left after 2 months.
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I've worked in two different types of environments - one where what you said is absolutely true (most of my jobs), and another where it's not true and the quote holds up.

The difference, I think is:

- Code factories where everything is moving fast - there's no time to think about how to simplify a problem, just gotta get it done. These companies tended to hire their way out of slowness, which led to more code, more complexity, and more code needed to deal with and resolve edge cases introduced by the complexity. I can count many times I was handed directives to implement something that I knew was far more complex than it had to be, but because of the pressure to move forward it was virtually impossible to push back. Maybe it's the only way they can make the business case work, but IMO it undoubtedly led to far, far more code than would've been necessary if it were possible to consider problems more carefully and if engineers had more autonomy. In these companies also a lot of time was consumed by meetings trying to "sync up" with the 100 other people moving in one direction.

- Smaller shops, open source projects, or indie development where there isn't a rush to get something out the door. Here, it's possible to think through a problem and come up with a solution that reduces code surface area. This was about solving the largest number of problems with the least amount of complexity. Most of my time at this company was spent thinking through how to solve the problem and considering edge cases and exploratory coding, the actual implementation was really quick to write. It really helped that I had a boss who understood and encouraged this, and we were working on safety critical systems. My boss liked to say "you can't birth a baby in less than 9 months just by adding another woman".

I think most of the difference is in team size. A larger team inherently results in more code to do less, because of the n*(n-1)/2 communication overhead [1].

Recently I learned the Navy SEALs saying "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" which I feel sums up my experience well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
My hypothesis: we are social creatures and have an innate instinct not to hurt others, but we’ve been trained to various degrees (through upbringing/trauma/school/work) to disassociate from the pain of hurting others.

The people who did continue to administer shocks were attempting to focus on what they thought was the most important part of the task (pressing the lever), but internally the unconscious effort to habitually dissociate from their own discomfort led them to make more mistakes.

Combine this dissociation with a desire for power or status and you get the world we live in today.
jordwest
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I tend to agree, I’ve been thinking a lot over the years that this is the way we get out of this mess - lots and lots of smaller independently owned forums that splinter off onto small communities instead of monolithic single-identity mechanisms like social media & to some extent the fediverse.

> The only social stuff I interact with anymore is a private forum that's paid

Im curious when you say private, do you mean you can only post if you’re a member, or is all post content viewable only by members too? And if the latter, how did you discover the forum, and how did you decide to join?
jordwest
·4 mesi fa·discuss
I’ve been using the offline version of Options+ that somebody recommended me a while back, it removes AI and auto updating and has done the job for me.

It’s kind of hidden on their website but you can grab it here:

https://hub.sync.logitech.com/options/post/logi-options-offl...

That said I think this will be my last Logitech device. They’re just not very durable products and die too quickly