I've been quoting von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design for over a decade, since it is a great summary of why I switched from engineering to product design mid-career. That law is the one that says engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept. I didn't engineer spacecraft, but on web projects I noticed that whoever made the documents furthest upstream had a ridiculous amount of influence over the outcome of the product. Even just being the one taking notes in the first meeting gives you leverage in a process which, despite claims of being agile, is definitively path-dependent most of the time.
I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.
I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.
Some programmers are engineers, but not all programmers are engineers. A lot of us are plumbers, basically. We connect together things other people have engineered. There's nothing wrong with plumbing; it's an important, honorable profession. It's just a different thing than engineering. And I'm not saying that a really good programmer transforms into an engineer by virtue of being really productive, or smart, or whatever—I'm saying engineering is a specific activity that most of us don't do every day as part of our jobs. So, to the point of this article, I'd like evidence to be gathered from engineers, specifically, and not programmers like me.
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.
I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.
Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.
The ideal scenario isn't the government forcing a sale of TikTok for political reasons. The ideal is that people stop using TikTok because they realize it's not good for them, but I guess I don't see that happening. Instead we'll just continue scrolling while wondering why we're so unhappy and angry all the time.
As a developer, I think most documentation is terrible both for developers and non-developers alike. And if you write your documentation so that it is useful to non-developers, it's still useful for developers.
There's no downside to writing accessible documentation, except that it requires a modicum of skill and effort. That's the real reason it's so rare, I think.
I also disagree that developer documentation is like academic papers. The ways they fail are almost opposite: academic papers are overly long and overwritten, because the authors want to be very careful and complete. Developer documentation is too short and hastily written, because they often don't care if it's helpful to anybody else.
The end result may be the same: neither are useful except to a small number of experts: the people who could probably do it themselves already, and thus may not even really need the write up to begin with. But that's a failure, not a feature to be celebrated.
You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.
The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.
My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.
I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.
Well, for any future archaeologists reading this, please know that This American Life was a great show that was made for a specific audience, by a specific set of creators, and it absolutely did not represent the breadth of life in America at the turn of the 21st century. This was a common mistake: thinking a rather small niche was universal because it's what you see. It led to a lot of surprises.
Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between something that has fallen off the radar, and something that is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not). Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e. how long does it take me to find the right tab from among these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some possible wrinkles I see from the outside.
> Recent studies have shown that interactivity between media customers and service providers and between users themselves will be one of the most important features in the next-generation media service. In this document, this unique opportunity is addressed by defining a Dedicated Return Channel (DRC) system for the next-generation broadcasting system.
Wow, that's one of the best uses of corporate-speak euphemism I've seen. Everybody who reads it knows what it really means, but if you just don't say it, it's fine. Recent studies indeed!
> The 1962 film based on a romanticized version of Lawrence’s journey... rested on the idea of the ‘white savior,’ whose role was to lend a sympathetic ear to oppressed peoples and provide assistance to improve their lot in life.
I really think this is the wrong interpretation of the end of that movie.
I have had people pirate things I created, and even though it was hypocritical of me, I got frustrated because it cost me so much time and money to make. It felt like people just pirate everything without consideration for whether it is actually expensive to buy, or hard to obtain, or if it was made by a giant, faceless corporation, or me and my friend Charlie after work and on weekends. There is a pipeline that just puts everything out there, no introspection, no questions asked.
It's not conceivable to me that we'd ever run into a situation where a pirate group would say "it'd be wrong of us to rip this and distribute it." It just wouldn't ever happen.
I said it was hypocritical, because I pirate a lot of stuff myself. I think it's great, it lets me be exposed to so much more than I would otherwise. So, I'm not complaining. But, I'm also not rushing out to spend another year making something small and personal just to have it show up on torrent sites a couple days later. Not sure what to do about that. Ultimately, I guess it comes down to people's choices, but people don't think too hard about the ethics of this stuff—I know I don't, 99% of the time.
The funny part of this exchange was how Thiel and Zuckerberg are at such a remove from the daily functioning of Facebook that they can write long, polished, bloviating emails with vague ideas in them. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, who works for them, writes business-style emails with short sentences and bullet points, and seems to just want to know what specific actions they are telling him to take so he can keep his job.
Irrationally, this seems preferable to me to simply holding it hostage indefinitely. It always bothered me that they just stored all my old messages, but held them for ransom at a price I could not possibly afford to pay (something like $12k a year for my stupid little chat board that has $0 a year in revenue). It's better in my mind for them to delete my messages to free up space, because at least that's a reason I can wrap my brain around.
I think your criticism is unfair. I didn't know how biological age, and I thought he was probably in his early-mid 20s. Not because he's rich and white, but because he acts, dresses, and cuts his hair like an emotionally immature boy genius right out of college.
This is sure reading a lot into an unpublished letter that just says he disliked Dune without giving a reason. Maybe he hates sand, I hear some people do. Maybe he thought it was too long and should have been split into three volumes. Interesting way to discuss some related issues, but, like Dune and Tolkien's own work, highly speculative!