routerl

28 ms·

241.
by routerl 5y ago
> Between 1970 and 1973, the Soviet space program achieved an amazing feat: landing and driving the first remote-controlled roving robots on the Moon. These two vehicles were called Lunokhod-1 and -2, and they gathered invaluable scienti
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by routerl 5y ago
I can't recommend Obra Dinn enough. It's a one and done game, but the experience is pristinely polished. There's nothing else like it, and it proves that Lucas Pope means it when he says he uses the limitations of the art sty
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by routerl 5y ago
Most people forget that nearly all flour is bleached. This process is highly industrial, using benzoyl peroxide to change the flour from its naturally yellowish color to the white we all associate with "clean" flour. The industria
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by routerl 5y ago
I'm impressed by the phrase "eloquent slice of pain", and have felt the !important pain. Thanks for the catharsis.
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by routerl 5y ago
Do you have a source for that please?
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by routerl 5y ago
Sure, but I think the underlying instinct behind "evidence based software engineering" is precisely about turning those "maybes" into measurements. In principle, I'm in favor of this endeavor, and the article at han
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by routerl 5y ago
There's another strategy that works better than searching for a keyword, which is to read the article. It's about the difficulty/expense of systematically and scientifically studying the software development process (e.g. fin
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by routerl 5y ago
Not to mention that MS were actually pretty late to the party. They didn't put any chips down on the growth of the web until win98, which could already be marketed as "web focused" because... the web was already huge. Someone
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by routerl 5y ago
> But that's not what they were measuring. They measured sales revenue per employee How is that not a measure of productivity?
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by routerl 5y ago
You're confusing efficiency and productivity. Your example is correct but is about efficiency. In the case of Microsoft Japan, 40% more work was done in four fifths of the time, which is a greater than 40% increase in efficiency.
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by routerl 5y ago
Yeah, you're right. I misremembered. Thanks for the correction.
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by routerl 5y ago
Even the tired chef can still raise their kids with a healthy respect for food and cooking. By all means, order takeout every night if you can afford it, but take that as an opportunity for thoughtful critique: "maybe this meal was too
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by routerl 5y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. It should be said, however, that Kuhn did cite Polanyi pretty extensively. Related: Destin, at the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel, has been kind of sliding into the same distinction Polanyi outlined, between
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by routerl 5y ago
> What bothers me about this kind of material is it's such good material for someone who's not honest for "one upping" or saying "oh this is just another example of [insert phenomenon]". Without looking at t
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by routerl 5y ago
Fully agreed. A former employer once decided to empower non-technical users to design their own integrations using zapier. It was fine until someone wrote an action that changed a cell on a spreadsheet, which triggered another action that,
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by routerl 5y ago
The comment you replied to gestures at but doesn't outright say this, but I think you have a good point. I genuinely think that many engineering managers see their most important skill as "getting engineers to do things for reason
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by routerl 5y ago
Not only that, but there is a tendency to group too many phenomena under the heading of "woke", both by people describing themselves with that label, and describing others. For instance, I've seen people deride someone for &q
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by routerl 5y ago
> I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. As in programming, there's some truth to this, in that needless complexity can afford a certain job security. But you've ignored another possible interpret
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by routerl 5y ago
> A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing. Agreed, wholeheartedly. Will hitchhike on your comment to recommend two
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by routerl 5y ago
This is just excellent. Thank you.
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by routerl 5y ago
> It's amazing that the iconography of a religion so ancient and "exotic" is so significantly shaped by European culture. It's more an instance of convergence and mutual influence. Hellenistic philosophy (read: immedi
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by routerl 5y ago
In fact, you're talking about digits and numerals, not numbers. But this actually drives your point home, I think.
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by routerl 5y ago
Yeah, I've had the same experience, but I've really had to resist that instinct, to avoid sounding too pompous. E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue than "improve", but it's almos
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by routerl 5y ago
Neal Stephenson coined the idea of "amistics": the evaluation of technologies not for efficiency, but from an existing value system. Named after the Amish. I've been living like this for a while, without having a name for it,
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by routerl 5y ago
Thanks for this comment. You've clearly outlined something I've been trying to convey for years, especially to people who read too much Taleb: "skin in the game" cannot be a purely financial concept, otherwise it fundame
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by routerl 5y ago
> The roots of the valorization of work may well have been religious, and maybe Christian (though I very much doubt it's exclusively Christian in its origin), but it's definitely spread throughout much of the world, even among
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by routerl 5y ago
There are various notions of "focus" in academia, many of which are associated with the "positive psychology" school. In sympathy with your observation, I've looked for studies of these phenomena. But I haven't
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by routerl 5y ago
Weird post. The main insight is easily captured by the phrase "technical debt is a resource, not a vice". It also disregards that developers who care about clean code do exist, such that the title becomes merely metaphorical, and
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by routerl 5y ago
> he basically thinks of "inhibition" and "rational thought" as valuable (and/or higher value than other qualities, probably given his usual day to day work and education) - but his actual "work" - the
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by routerl 5y ago
> Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive It's really wrinkling my brain to think of an author's character being a "better" writer than the author himself. Although, wrinkles aside, I suppose thi

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