> it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said.
There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management:
One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why.
I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.
> the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth
Pieter Hintjens (creator of ZeroMQ) wrote a lot about this, and how organizations from big companies to small charities to software projects ought to design their internal structures of roles, titles, voting, auditing, to defend themselves against this kind of attack. Particularly if there's any kind of treasury, an opportunist will become tempted to take that role, but any kind of credit will attract people who want to take the credit without doing the work, power structures will attract people who want the power, and programmers who "just want to code" and avoid politics will find themselves at the bottom of a dysfunctional infected organisation structure with no power, no credit, and being instructed by distorted requests.
IIRC he tried to design the ZeroMQ organisation so that there wasn't any way for one person to insert themselves in a key point.
I'm not sure where on his blog I was reading that, but it's related to his writings about psycopaths[1] as the opportunists, and might be part of his book Social Architecture[2]
Years ago for my sister's 30th birthday, I did a fun project involving the USPS.
I wanted to send her the message "Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday!", which is 30 characters, via postcards, one character per postcard.
I found 30 post offices in unique places throughout the U.S. (For example, I found a town that had the same name as her given name in Illinois. I found another with my name, etc.)
I used Zazzle to print a custom post card for each location with a picture of the location on one side, and a large block letter on the other. I just did a Google image search at the time to find photos of the location. Here's the image I used for "Truth or Consequences, NM":
I then hand wrote a message on each postcard that started with the block letter. This was because she'd be receiving the postcards one-by-one and I didn't want her to realize right away that a message was being spelled out. It would seem like a postcard I might send her from that location if I'd actually been there.
I also found a set of 50-state stamps the USPS had previously issued on eBay, and used the correct state's stamp for its postcard.
Finally, I round-tripped each postcard through its respective post office by mailing it inside an envelope addressed to the postmaster at that post office along with a note to the post master:
Dear Postmaster:
I am mailing my sister 30 postcards from 30 towns for her 30th birthday. I have enclosed a postcard, which I ask be hand-cancelled with a postmark from your town. To protect the postcard from machine cancels in its journey through the mail system, I have enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to my sister in which to seal and mail the postcard. Thank you very much for your time!
I wasn't sure if this would work, but damn if she didn't get all 30 postcards each properly postmarked.
I dropped them all in the mail in NC. Some went as far as Alaska and Hawaii.
She received them in Miami. I think she got the first one within a few days and the rest dribbled in over the next two weeks.
I think the move of Kali Linux from bash to zsh is sane. I sometimes have to use the default shell of Linux distribution, especially on servers, and my main pain points with bash are:
- The history is editable by default. If I move to a previous history line and change it, the old line disappears. Hitting Ctrl-c will remove it from the history.
- If I use simultaneous shells (screen, tmux, or several ssh connections), the history saved will be the one of the last shell to quit. The bash config `histappend` should be the default, IMO.
- Most of the time, I search the history by the beginning of the command I just typed, which zsh maps to alt-p and which bash does not map by default. I rarely use the ctrl-r search.
- No way to pause a command and view the man. With zsh, `git clone<alt-h>` will display `man git-clone`, then return to the incomplete command line.
- No way to set a command aside. E.g. if I realise while typing that I'm not in the right directory, `git clone<alt-q>cd src<return>`.
The key is that money is, for most people, a negative need, not a positive one. The authors of seL4 didn't write it because they expected to get superrich — but they could have been prevented from doing it by needing a job to pay the rent. Remember that Bram Cohen wrote BitTorrent while couchsurfing on friends' couches and living off credit card balance transfers. YC was founded with the idea that three months of "ramen money" would be enough to get a lot of ideas off the ground.
I think there are a lot of things we can do:
1. Promote free software, peer-to-peer networking, cryptocurrencies, and privacy software like Tor. Don't forget, governments burn libraries. Free hardware like RISC-V will become extremely important once we have matter compilers.
2. Lobby against patent, copyright, trade secret, noncompete enforceability, and other legislation that make the contents of employees' minds the property of their employers and legally impose censorship. We don't need to eliminate these entirely, but the more we can reduce their scope, the better off we are. California's pioneering legislation in this area was probably a significant factor in the 1980s move of the computer world's center of gravity from Boston to Silicon Valley; China's nonenforcement was probably a significant factor in its 2000s move from California to China.
3. Remind people that the freedom to tinker is a human-rights issue, a government transparency and accountability issue, a consumer-protection issue. We need all the allies we can get.
4. Reduce people's dependency on employers and employment for what they need to survive, through programs like public libraries, public healthcare, retirement, public education, universal basic income, churches, widespread solar panel deployment, squatters' rights and easier adverse possession, homesteading, soup kitchens, the Rainbow Gathering, ashrams, food banks, police reform, volunteer mental health counseling, decent public housing like Britain's 1960s council housing, BeWelcome, Hospitality Club, and open borders. Our current society already produces so much that scarcity of basic goods need not imperil anybody's survival. (There are of course cases on the margin like funding Gilead's development of new drugs, and perhaps synthesizing some drugs that are especially difficult, but that's no reason for people to die on the streets of homelessness-induced hypothermia.)
5. Organize programs like GSoC, Patreon, and Kickstarter that can raise funds to the people working on public goods such as free software. Alex Tabarrok's "dominant assurance contracts" might provide an incentive structure for this that improves on Kickstarter's incentive structure.
6. Organize into collectives such as monasteries, Google, or universities — organizations like these, imperfect though they are, have often been very effective at protecting their members from the societal pressures of the "life-and-death contest of startups and the private sector", not to mention law enforcement, with constructs such as academic freedom, tenure, "Googliness", and 20% time. Today's Google, like today's universities, are unfortunately not as strong as it once was — hierarchical command relationships make them vulnerable to political takeovers. But a university is fundamentally a faculty senate organized around a library, and Google was at one time fundamentally a group of hackers organized around a search engine. Such things can be destroyed, but they can also be created. They can survive by receiving donations, as some monasteries do; by providing services to outside entities, as universities often have; or by earning rent from an endowment, as state land-grant universities and other monasteries do.
The housing issue is particularly bad because, in many places, legally housing a person costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than an average employee can earn in many years. I wrote a bit in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264786 about the underlying economics of the situation.
Okcuipd (and Sparknotes!) co-founder Christian Rudder wrote an article entitled "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" saying exactly that. When Match Group acquired them, they took it down. I found a mirror, though.
With a little polishing this would be quite the "exploit" - trap the user in your fake browser, actually load pages that are entered into the fake URL bar, replace content only on certain patterns...
The only solution here is a proper line of death [0]. It defeats the purpose of the LoD when it dynamically shrinks from user action.
Every day, find yourself some wins and celebrate them.
Maybe it's something as small as brushing your teeth. Dental hygene rocks -- go you!
Or leaving the house and going to Starbucks, even if only to browse Reddit. Hey, getting out that door can be a big challenge.
Maybe it's going for a run or a hike. You totally owned that half-mile.
Whatever it is, write it down in a list, and look at yesterday's list every morning.
Every accomplishment, no matter how small, is a step forward.
Celebrate the fact that you made that step, and didn't give up.
One more thing:
I don't know where you, the OOP, are, mentally.
So while burnout is serious shit, depression is even more serious shit.
And we don't talk about it enough in the tech community.
Whenever I move to a new country, I immediately identify a local English-speaking hospital and dental practice. Because if I ever need them, I will need them on a very tight timeframe.
So, I would invest a little time and find a quality psychiatrist. Somebody that you feel comfortable talking to, and that gives you good advice.
Do what you would do with any professional service, and shop around until you find one you really like.
That way, if you ever really do hit rock bottom, you know where you can go, and don't need to start searching when you're in no shape to do so.
- "More wood behind fewer arrows". This was actually a Steve Jobs principle that Larry adopted: kill off all your insignificant products to focus on just a few key areas.
- More willingness to take on moonshots; less tolerance for projects that might be good for a small segment of the userbase, but don't appreciably move the needle.
- Seemingly less collegial atmosphere. Eric tolerated a lot of "You'll do your thing, I'll do mine, and it's okay if Google has half a dozen products that all do slight variations of each other." Larry insisted on more product discipline, but that often meant more of a scarcity mentality among execs, which led to more turf wars and infighting.
- More top-down culture. Eric had few opinions on what Google should be doing, he just wanted to make sure we were doing it well. Larry had very definite opinions on what Google should be doing, and if you didn't share them, go start your own company.
- More chaotic management style. I got the sense that Larry didn't actually know what was going on with the company, on an individual-contributor level, and so when he made decisions, they often made no sense to the rest of the company. Eric didn't know what was going on with the company either, but he was okay with that, as long as the money kept coming in and we didn't do anything illegal, so he made fewer decisions that weren't a direct reaction to an issue that was brought to him.
From Larry -> Sundar. Keep in mind that I left before Sundar became CEO, so this is all second-hand:
- Hierarchy and top-down culture has persisted.
- Collegiality seems to have returned. Just my perception, but Google seems a nicer place to work now than when G+ was seemingly taking over the company in 2012.
- Sundar is generally more informed and, well, sane, as perceived by the employees.
- Sundar is a caretaker: the core areas of Google are explicitly designed not to require massive company-changing innovation, instead relying on incremental improvement to existing products that can be driven by middle-management, and all the innovation is shunted off to the rest of Alphabet where Larry & Sergey have a more direct role in shepherding it.
I think all 3 CEOs were strong in their own way, but the CEO transition made me appreciate how oftentimes a leader's biggest strengths are often also their biggest weaknesses. Larry is insane, for instance; IMHO he's insane in a good way, because we outright wouldn't have Google otherwise, but that same oddness of perception made him a maddening CEO to work under. Similarly, Eric was a great peacemaker and good at quickly making decisions that pleased as many people as possible, but that same ability to compromise made him a poor innovator and unlikely to have the moral courage to bet the company on crazy ideas.
It also convinced me that Paul Graham's thesis, that big companies are constitutionally incapable of innovating, was correct. The reason is precisely that duality above; in order to innovate, you need someone whose personality is insane, but who then has to directly butt up against reality, and experience that resistance first-hand. It doesn't work for someone insane to direct lots of not-insane employees who get paid to build the product, because the type of creative insights that come from facing contradiction directly can't survive outside of a single mind. The innovator has to do the work directly.
There's valid uses for the $1/mo. server, I can have five boxes for the price of one. Spread out amongst different providers, that's called redundancy. I don't get that hosting everything w/AWS. Customer service? What's that? I have ssh I don't need customer service, only if the box goes down. My $1 servers been up for months, and if one drops, I have four others. I've had great experience paying $1/mo and never contacting the provider for anything.
"Don't use $1 servers" is FUD and probably will be showing up "news stories" from Amazon soon about how terrible and evil these low cost provider are..
Let me address the security issue quickly too. Look, anything - you put on a server not owned by you, is not your data anymore. That's what people need to understand about the cloud. I don't care if its Bob's hosting, or AWS or Dropbox or Onedrive. Anything you don't want others to read should be encrypted before it leaves your PC, period.
There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management:
One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why.
I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.