pjmorris

5 ms·

31.
by pjmorris 7mo ago
"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile." - Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man M
32.
by pjmorris 7mo ago
I lucked in to meeting him once, in Cambridge. A gentle intellectual giant. I repeatedly borrow this quote from his 1980 Turing Award speech, 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'... "At last, there breezed into my office the most
33.
by pjmorris 8mo ago
Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a conseque
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by pjmorris 8mo ago
> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.
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by pjmorris 9mo ago
I spend a lot of time reading the Bible, and examples aren't coming to mind. Can you give some examples?
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by pjmorris 9mo ago
It's a great analogy. I first came across it in Gerald Weinberg's 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit', where he spends some time talking about burnout, what it means, and how to get out when you
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by pjmorris 9mo ago
In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients. We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tend
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by pjmorris 10mo ago
Jerry Weinberg wrote a number of books to this point, starting with 1971's 'The Psychology of Computer Programming.' Here's what he had to say a decade or so later... "The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what y
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by pjmorris 11mo ago
To your point... 1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industr
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by pjmorris 11mo ago
We were in our 20's when my friend said 'A day in your 20's is worth a year in your 30's, a day in your 30's is worth a year in your 40's, etc...' Now in our 60's we're a little less adamant - ev
41.
by pjmorris 1y ago
Think about how often you got to a museum, library, or park compared to how often you eat and pay the monthly bills. The more expensive the area, the higher the routine bills and wages don't always track that, especially at the low end
42.
by pjmorris 1y ago
I've posted this before, but I think it will be a perennial comment and concern: Excerpted from Tony Hoare's 1980 Turing Award speech, 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'... "At last, there breezed into my office the
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by pjmorris 1y ago
I recently read 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland', Christopher Browning. My takeaway was the same as yours; the Germans (and everybody else) were (are) just like us.
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by pjmorris 1y ago
My guess is that you get practice in habit-building that can be applied to useful habits. Sort of like having students do exercises that have solutions in the back of the textbook. It's not the solution that's needed, it's th
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by pjmorris 1y ago
I love this quote. But, then again, I read LotR multiple times as a teenager and remain suspicious of Rand.
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by pjmorris 1y ago
Generally attributed to George Box
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by pjmorris 1y ago
What's funny to me is that, not only is this also how the financial industry is structured, but that a) this is the currently fashionable means of reducing risk and b) it is seen as a feature not a bug. Citation: Any book about the 200
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by pjmorris 1y ago
I wonder how this change affects what the agents remember about the calls, and how that affects their performance on future calls. And I wonder whether agent performance, as measured by customer satisfaction, will decline over time, and whe
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by pjmorris 1y ago
> IMO, he, and everyone involved with Apollo 13 after it left the ground, truly represent the peak of NASA personnel. Agreed. One of the best books I've read on Apollo was 'Apollo: Race to the Moon', by Murray and Cox. It
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by pjmorris 1y ago
Steve Blank's 'Secret History of Silicon Valley' is great background here. [0] [0] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
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by pjmorris 1y ago
The claim seemed less overblown to me after watching 'Sugar: The Bitter Truth' by Robert Lustig, MD [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dBnniua6-oM&t=8s
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by pjmorris 1y ago
> This is usually solved by violence, sometimes blessedly by negotiation, but it is always solved: once the wishes of ever smaller in number choke out the hope and dignity of the ever larger in number to sufficient degree: change happens
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by pjmorris 1y ago
> Does C, or Java, 'make no sense' because it 'ignores lower level cognition'? It makes sense in context, but that context includes the machine on which the compiled code runs. Without the underlying machine, there&#x
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by pjmorris 1y ago
An inattentive person rear-ended my 82 Civiv in 87. I probably wouldn't still be driving it, but it has led to a long association with Honda/Acura products. If rockets became as common as cars, what kind of accidents would we see?
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by pjmorris 1y ago
Seconded. The two things I most remember about the summer of 1969 were watching the Apollo 11 launch from our balcony and the subsequent moon walk, and hearing 'Everyday People' on the radio. The lyrics stuck with me. I was 6 or
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by pjmorris 1y ago
An automated Ouija board!
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by pjmorris 1y ago
I'm willing to be a cup of coffee that the OP's degree and Atkinson's advice preceded the existence of R. I'm going to excerpt a mid-80's interview of Butler Lampson from Susan Lammer's book 'Programmers A
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by pjmorris 1y ago
> If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie? As someone else pointed out, they do, under various odd brand names. You make what seems like an obvio
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by pjmorris 1y ago
Chris Arnade wrote a book, 'Dignity', traveling and talking with 'back-row' Americans about the individuals who have had the losing end of how the US economy has been run. I also think of James McMurtry's song &#x27
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by pjmorris 1y ago
Excerpted from Tony Hoare's 1980 Turing Award speech, 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'... "At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Joh

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