tikhonj

12 ms·

151.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
152.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
Struggling with poorly organized docs seems entirely like incidental complexity to me. Good learning resources can be both faster and better pedagogically. (How good today's LLM-based chat tools are is a totally separate question.)
153.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite
154.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
If that's all you need, there are free alternatives that should be more than sufficient today.
155.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
> If it was as great as its advocates say, surely it would have taken over the world by now. That is a big assumption about the way popularity contests work.
156.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
That's because embarrassingly bad writing is useless, while embarrassingly bad code can still make the computer do (roughly) the right thing and lets you tick off a Jira ticket. So we end up having way more room for awful code than for
157.
by tikhonj 11mo ago
The overall trend has been the opposite though, hasn't it? People used to buy a new phone (or new laptop/etc) every couple of years because the underlying tech was improving so quickly, but now that the improvements have slowed do
158.
by tikhonj 11mo ago
There's a high switching cost with substantial information asymmetry. Good places are hard to find in some absolute sense and it's hard to evaluate whether a new team is actually going to be good or not. And even if you do find
159.
by tikhonj 11mo ago
All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost . The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention . The dynamics are qualitatively different. The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizz
160.
by tikhonj 11mo ago
In the world of human-readable data formats (ie not programming languages), the best one I ever used was Jane Street's sexplib[1] s-expression format. It was concise and expressive. There was a direct way to describe variants (types wi
161.
by tikhonj 11mo ago
> Imagine you are driving a car. Rally races sometimes have two people, a navigator and a driver. The dynamic between them is absolutely fascinating. I recommend watching some videos because, before I saw it, I would not have imagined
162.
by tikhonj 1y ago
There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not. It also changes th
163.
by tikhonj 1y ago
It's used here as a specific term from Seeing like a State [1][2], which is one of those books that got popular with a specific set of online tech folks. "Legibitility" in that particular sense is a very useful concept with
164.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Category theory gives us a nice, high-level set of conceptual tools to try to understand and generalize over things that are hard to connect otherwise. Some people find that useful directly, other people just enjoy it for its own sake, or e
165.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I've also worked on some relatively senior/high-trust teams using roughly scrum-style processes, and the experience was decidedly worse. Even with the best setup and intentions in the world, the process still makes focusing on sma
166.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Working on somebody else's goals, and being systematically micromanaged are two very different things.
167.
by tikhonj 1y ago
My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if t
168.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Sure, but there's a gap between being poor and being wealthy . $15 million is a lot more than most people have and it's certainly enough to be comfortable and not have to worry about money, but it's still categorically diffe
169.
by tikhonj 1y ago
For whatever reason, the Berkeley campus maps[1] have East at the top. And, for whatever reason, it always felt natural—probably because it matches the terrain (East is up-hill). It's still surprising how much that has colored my menta
170.
by tikhonj 1y ago
> You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. If humans did not have any facilities for abstraction, sure. But then "knowledge work" would be im
171.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Performative hours are, fundamentally, a symptom of a lack of trust. A lack of trust in others but also a lack of trust in yourself. Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be
172.
by tikhonj 1y ago
performative hours ≠ excitement if folks were actually excited and motivated, you wouldn't need forced hours, you'd just trust people to work in the best way for them
173.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Delight sounds similar to what game designers call "juice" and, done well, it really does make a game feel delightful beyond its pure gameplay. I've had the same feeling with more utilitarian interfaces, but it's pretty
174.
by tikhonj 1y ago
It's "meaningless" because if you broaden out the definition of "value" to "anything that will make people interested in what you're doing", the advice turns into a tautology.
175.
by tikhonj 1y ago
One way is for senior engineers to give junior folks well-defined areas of responsibility, and then not worry about assigning and tracking small tasks within that. The more senior folks explain and motivate what we need and talk through wha
176.
by tikhonj 1y ago
There's a massive difference between "don't write anything down" and "don't use tickets". There are lots of (much better!) ways to write things down and to communicate than tickets. More importantly, there
177.
by tikhonj 1y ago
One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-tell) that you're doing something different and interesting. How you demons
178.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers. And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.
179.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Slight variations on "This isn't X—it's Y." have been popping up all over the place, almost definitely because it's a pattern that ChatGPT has been tuned to (over-) use.
180.
by tikhonj 1y ago
The best software around is Emacs. Does that count as "opinionated" in your view? In some ways it is—Emacs does a lot of things its own way, completely unbothered by mainstream conventions—but, at the same time, it's also tot

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