Brian Marick

Long-time software person (programming and testing). Involved in Agile from relatively early on. One of those grumpy old-timers who think it's lost its way.

I retired during Covid. I am now focused on https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev, "a podcast for people who want to apply ideas from *outside* software *to* software."

There’s a podcast-specific account at http://social.oddly-influenced.dev. This, my main account, is for other tech tweets, boosts of the amusing or interesting, and some leftish #uspol.

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Last Notes

2025-03-27 18:24:08

Here's a long article about the steps that led to deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-the-alien-enemies-act-deportations-were-orchestrated-to-keep-the-courts-unaware
What's striking is how reporters, without the authority of the legal system, can find out what happened, but an actual judge is still being successfully stonewalled, not being told the (presumably) same details despite a series of demands for information (but, notably, no penalties for misbehavior.)
Justice deferred is justice denied, your honor.

2025-03-20 16:22:49

Dan Davies comments on the "why can't we build anything any more?" debate: "things get exponentially more complicated as they get linearly bigger," which the "regrowthers" overlook. He puts it "the reason that it’s more difficult to build the second million homes is that the first million homes get in the way!"
Put that way, coupled with experience working on, say, growing codebases, it does seem kind of obvious that the solution ain't so simple as is often presented.
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/cybernetic-abundance-and-its-limits

2025-03-18 23:05:21

Something I think I've noticed. Both tech leaders and homeless people talk way more loudly than is necessary, with that coded-male attitude of aggressive self-confidence, and launch into rants at the slightest hint of contradiction.
Also they are not overly concerned with the negative externalities of their actions.
I'm not saying that startups should make homeless people their decision makers, but they might demand fewer stock options.

2025-03-17 22:24:10

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@nprofile…v7mw To directly-attached disk or NAS? It's coping with spinning iron a whole room away, accessed by wifi, that seems to cause Time Machine to have conniptions.

2025-03-17 02:20:31

I have the feeling that I must be the last supposedly-tech-savvy person who uses Apple's Time Machine. True?
(Time Machine is not the backup solution I depend on: that would be https://arqbackup.com/ to the cloud plus the occasional https://bombich.com/ to hard drives. Both have served me well for years. But Time Machine is convenient when buying a new Mac, which admittedly we're doing increasingly less often.)

2025-03-03 13:53:51

For me, these two essays echo in interesting ways:
"Ten Observations about Tokyo": https://www.persuasion.community/p/10-observations-about-tokyo (via @nprofile…m02p, @nprofile…9wrc)
"A critical theory of (or for) America": https://josephheath.substack.com/p/a-critical-theory-of-or-for-america (via @nprofile…maqk, @nprofile…fw2r)

2025-02-14 01:39:53

Back in 2006, I analogized Agile as akin to historical reactions to civilizational collapse / rapid decline. Of stoicism, epicurianism, and monasticism, I pegged Agile as a variant of monasticism. (That might have been wrong.) http://www.exampler.com/old-blog/2006/11/01/index.html#agile-as-fish
My profession has declined a lot since then.
The US is in civilizational/cultural decline.
May be time for software people and US citizens to think about how earlier people have coped with times like these.

2025-01-16 23:28:12

The state of Washington (USA) is debating a bill that would require some schools to *increase* their "lunch hour" to 20 "seated" minutes. WTF?
https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/washington-considers-minimum-lunch-time-for-school-kids/281-c40cedc7-a50d-458c-a9fc-4eb88de7b400
My son (born '95) had "about an hour" for lunch. Has that gone away, nationwide? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/113/840/625/507/842/851/original/d1211aa3b68f3d8e.png

2025-01-06 17:03:36

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@nprofile…9wrc Still reading all the OGs of political blogging, I see.

2024-12-29 00:01:16

"Street medicine providers and homeless outreach workers who travel into Las Vegas’s drainage tunnels have noticed an uptick in the number of people living underground."¹
Any other Olds noticing how much the vibe today resembles the dystopian "New Wave" science fiction of the late '60s and '70s?² Rather more than the later Cyberpunk genre.
¹ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-living-in-las-vegass-tunnels-urged-to-get-medical-treatment/
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_(science_fiction)

2024-12-16 00:14:14

This youtube video on data visualization is pretty good. I've read Tufte, etc., but I still learned some new things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwtwOqdlY5E

2024-12-05 00:00:20

An instance of something we see in software: a US health insurance company tells anesthesiologists that it won't pay them if surgery takes too long.
This is pretty similar to managers telling software teams how long the software will take to finish.
Physicians have historically been resistant to outsiders telling them how to do their job – and have had the clout to make their opinion stick. I suspect that clout has been eroded to nothing over the past 30 years.
https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2024/11/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-will-not-pay-complete-duration-of-anesthesia-for-surgical-procedures

2024-11-19 22:53:46

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@nprofile…9wrc I'd like to see a separate post fleshing out your claim about lineage. It seems the wealth-is-power folk are less successful at passing down power than kings were. Unless you mean something more akin to intellectual lineage (e.g., Thiel -> Vance) than lineage-of-the-loins. Don't know much about George the V, but it seems that if he'd been the son of the original Rockefeller, he would have drifted off into enjoying his wealth and probably been way happier. But he couldn't.

2024-11-19 22:35:32

Which countries have created regulations/laws mandating better ventilation in public spaces?

2024-11-17 23:27:02

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…fw2r I occasionally feel the impulse to read https://worldcomp-proceedings.com/proc/p2013/ICA7331.pdf and then implement 7-valued logic as they did. For fun.

2024-11-16 23:41:27

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…fw2r I wonder if there’s a connection. Buddhism and Jainism were, I think, intersecting religious/philosophical traditions.

2024-11-16 01:40:09

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…fw2r You may be interested in Jainish seven-valued logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic. I think this podcast episode is the one that described it well: https://historyofphilosophy.net/jain-standpoints
(The wikipedia article isn’t great. What I’ve gathered about Jain logic is that it considers context. So, rather than `x is true`, you get `x is true under these conditions`. I think that’s neat.)

2024-11-13 00:35:20

As my eyes fail, I need more light for reading. I would like to pay some independent craft-type-person to make a light fixture for me. See the attached picture. It would somehow attach to the bookshelf on the far left. It would shine down past me (not pictured) sitting in the chair onto the book I’m reading. An unfocused broad illumination, but bright.
If you know of someone who could make such a thing – interesting connections a bonus – please let me know. Thanks.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/113/472/839/232/070/016/original/6f0e4023ba0e2196.png

2024-10-30 15:09:24

I recommend this thread. Lots of anecdotes from oldsters about their experiences and their parents’ experiences. https://beige.party/@Lana/113392065393070274

2024-10-22 12:15:28

A historian takes on economists:
“This year the Riksbank awarded its [Economics Nobel] prize to a treatment of early modern institutions so selective it functions as a bedtime story for capitalists. The good institutions produced prosperity. The bad ones produced misery.
"But good and bad institutions have always been paired. It is not so easy to tease them apart into natural experiments, and just as useful to see how they’re connected.”
https://www.ft.com/content/1e2584d6-65ef-46de-bfb2-28811be65600

2024-10-18 13:44:36

If you have Paypal, you can send money to the Internet Archive: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/internetarchive
They’ve been there for me for 30 years. I’ve been a small-time monthly donor for a long time, but it’s time for me to step it up. I think preserving libraries is going to be the main target of my charity next year. That feels appropriate in these dark times.

2024-10-07 23:06:57

Someone had a link to New College of Florida hosting Steve Sailor (! racist!) for a seminar. Where is that post?
I ask because I think a lot of people think “Oh, Project 2025 is just talk, the Federal government can’t be subverted that easily.” Well, the complete reconfiguration of New College in only a few years by Governor DeSantis and his cronies shows how that it’s not that hard. Not much in the way of resources or effort is required. Just brazenness.
(My son is an alumnus. Not happy, him)

2024-07-26 00:07:44

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@npub1sys…ckr3 My impression is that it’s still backcountry. (Part of the appeal!) Planning on renting a vehicle with good ground clearance.

2024-07-25 22:47:05

Dawn taunts me with this picture. (She’s on vacation with all four generations; I do best vacationing with only Dawn.)
We’ll be going to Chaco Canyon in September or October, so there’s that to look forward to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaco_Culture_National_Historical_Park Anyone been there? (Pity Chris McMahon didn’t join the twitter diaspora.)
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/112/849/570/672/557/533/original/4407b067a111ff73.jpeg

2024-07-11 01:28:52

Timothy Synder (historian of central Europe in the years around WWII) provides “the five basic political lessons of 1933” in https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/how-to-stop-fascism
He’s worried about the US. Me too. I will abbreviate his five lessons in this thread.

2024-06-22 23:41:48

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¹ I picked the name because the Civilian Conservation Corps was a Great Depression-era program to give unemployed people jobs doing useful work that had gone undone because there was no immediate prospect of profit. They did some *excellent* work, some of which is still used today, nearly 100 years later. The “scratch the unscratched itch” attitude fits well with open source. (5/6)

2024-06-22 23:41:48

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As my Faithful Readers know, post retirement I’ve been trying to give money away to help graduate students and such improve the field that’s done so much for me, without success. Consider this potentially another try.
—————————— (4/6)

2024-06-22 23:41:48

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² https://github.com/marick/lens2. Very much still a work in progress, but I’m putting a lot of work into something too many people find mysterious because (I think) it hasn’t been explained accessibly. https://github.com/marick/lens2/blob/main/mostly_words/tutorial01.md
³ https://leanpub.com/lenses
⁴ https://www.infoq.com/news/2007/08/2007-pask-awards/
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Fellows_Program (6/6)

2024-06-22 23:41:47

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Why a “corps”? Why not just have individual programmers do it? After all, that’s what I am doing with the Elixir Lens package² and, before it, the PureScript lens package³.
Because individual people doing Thing X are just weirdos. A group of people dedicated to doing Thing X raises its profile, makes it seem a thing worth doing. (2/6)

2024-06-22 23:41:47

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Also, an organization can encourage people doing the Right Things to keep doing them. When I was chair of the Agile Alliance, I created the Gordon Pask Award⁴ to give small cash grants + recognition to people who were advancing the state of the practice, hoping they would have a higher profile from which to replace Boring Old Farts like me. That didn’t work out so great, but I still think things like MacArthur Genius Grants⁵ can be useful. (3/6)

2024-06-22 23:41:47

So… retired/unemployed programmers or employed ones who’d like to contribute to open source:
What do you think of a “Civilian Documentation Corps”¹?
There are tons of contributed packages to popular languages that are fine but underused because underdocumented. Some of the package owners are well-intentioned but no good at documentation or don’t understand its importance. Why not swoop in with an offer of help? (1/6)

2024-06-17 12:33:17

Everyone makes a big deal about the people who designed and built Voyager 1 because it was supposed to last 4 years and it’s lasted for 47, but all that means is they spent money on reliability that could have been returned to shareholders in a stock buyback.

2024-05-31 12:45:37

I’ve been feeling guilty about being crushingly unmotivated, and let me tell you, the recent conviction of a gentleman for making more than 12,000 harassing phone calls to Congress over an 18 month period hasn’t helped. That’s well over 20 per day! And here I started feeling “oh, what’s the point” about about a new project within an hour of `gh repo create` and `mix new`.

2024-05-24 16:37:05

Oh, so so many wrong paths in coding/design I could have avoided if I’d voiced nagging suspicions.
Life in general, probably. https://botsin.space/@oblique_strategies/112493829786195293

2024-05-23 13:13:31

RIP Paul Parkman, codeveloper of the rubella (“German measles”) vaccine. He and Harry M. Meyer assigned their patent to the government so the vaccine could be put to use more quickly. “I never made a nickel from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everybody.”
The rubella vaccine is the “R” in the MMR vaccine. Andrew Wakefield, who profited handsomely from fraudulently claiming that vaccine was linked to autism, and is responsible for uncounted deaths, lives on.

2024-05-17 17:34:31

Maybe everyone already knows this, but if you use DuckDuckGo, prefixing a search query with !w takes you directly to the relevant wikipedia page. https://mastodon.radio/@k9ox/112456792978006765

2024-03-20 00:29:46

I once read that the value of a middle manager is to say “*you* should talk to *her* about *that*” at key moments. Because people often don’t realize they should talk to each other.
Typically, I told that to Dawn, who’d gotten sucked into an academic administration job¹. She, long practiced at “Brian Management”, politely informed me that she’d known and been doing that all along. https://hachyderm.io/@akareilly/112122041191792952

2024-03-16 15:05:34

Neat little Dan Davies riff on the AI Singularity: “why I do not fear the robot overlords” https://backofmind.substack.com/p/why-i-do-not-fear-the-robot-overlords
“a key premis[e] of the singularity thesis is that as the AI gets more intelligent, it also gets better at learning new things. And my argument at this stage can basically be summarised as “I’m gunna stop you right there”.”
"So my version of the beginning of The Terminator would be:
"At 2:14am, the machine became barely self-aware… (1/3)

2024-02-22 01:09:50

I present myself as an example of the power of ideology, propaganda, and tribal affiliation.
Except for one year, I’ve lived in central Illinois (USA) since 1959. Today, it was 61 degrees (16C). Next Tuesday will be 71 degrees (22C).
So strongly am I captured by the global scientific conspiracy, so attached am I to my woke compatriots, that this February (and several preceding it) seem uncharacteristically warm: quite different from what I remember from my childhood.
Humanity, huh?

2024-02-16 23:29:36

Radley Balko has long done valuable work exposing abuses of justice in the USA. While I wish he’d also exited substack, I just bumped my subscription to https://radleybalko.substack.com/ to the highest level. I encourage you to check him out and, if you can, toss him some money. He does unpopular work: meticulous. To its discredit, the Washington Post cut him loose, perhaps because meticulous work leads to infrequent clickbait headlines.

2024-02-16 14:46:43

An interesting take on the “McDonnell-Douglas ruined Boeing” thesis: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/how-the-wrong-side-won-at-boeing
“I think that’s one of the deep causes of what went wrong in Boeing; the McDonnell-Douglas executives were the ones who could back up their business cases with a ream of hard data. The legacy Boeing executives were left talking about culture and best practice and all sorts of soft-sounding things that were hard to put into a model.”

2024-01-24 00:35:39

#emacs users: I'm currently trying out the OSC 7 way of tracking directory changes in shell mode, as described in the “Directory Tracking" section here: ‪ https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/running-shells-in-emacs-overview
It mostly works, but sometimes shell-mode just stops changing `current-directory`. Most of the time, killing the buffer and restarting the shell fixes it for a while. Not always. Can't find any discussion of this. Any advice?

2023-12-12 23:52:43

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@npub1xr8…3q0g @npub170y…zzvm I continue to use it to decide which places to patronize again in situations where masking is too much trouble (drinking, eating).
I’m not as scrupulous as some, but I haven’t knowingly gotten infected yet.

2023-10-29 14:09:00

In 1993, Gordon Getty, then the richest American, had a net worth ~75,000 times the average American.
In 2019, Jeff Bezos, then the richest American, had a net worth ~2,000,000 times the average American.
Source: @npub1njp…v4es, https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/09/24/how-the-rich-get-richer/

2023-10-19 22:42:44

I remember at one PLoP conference (2001?), Martin Fowler and I were debugging code written in this newly trendy language Ruby, without much luck.
Famed Lisp hacker Richard P. Gabriel leaned over, looked at the code, growled in his deep voice, “That language has too much syntax”, and leaned back to what he’d been doing.
Feeling a bit that way about Swift.
(RPG was right: it was a precedence problem that couldn’t have happened in Common Lisp.)

2023-10-08 16:38:02

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@npub1p4r…6aux Sadly, Gene Wolfe died in 2019..

2023-09-28 14:24:25

Axios has what they literally describe as scoop: Not only is Joe Biden old, he does physical therapy for his spinal arthritis and wear tennis shoes.
After 2794 characters on Biden being old, they mention in passing that Trump just called for the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be executed and suggested Comcast be tried for treason, which seems… erratic?
Then 901 more characters about Biden’s age
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/26/biden-trip-2024-campaign-sneakers

2023-09-05 21:57:09

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“It is the position of the board of the Agile Alliance that *employers should have confidence only in certifications that are skill-based and difficult to achieve.*
“We also believe that *employers should not require certification of employees*.”
Might be cool if the AgileAlliance reaffirmed its position, X years later. (The statement isn’t dated. I’d guess… 2006?)

2023-09-05 21:55:28

Apropos of other things, in the early days of the Certified ScrumMaster, I was chair of the Agile Alliance (a sort of “who can we get to do this job” thing), and I like to think I pushed through this clear(ish) statement of position: https://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/agile-certification/
Thank goodness we did that. Had we not nipped the dumbing-down of Agile in the bud, think how things would be today!
Well at least I tried.

2023-08-30 13:20:07

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@npub1p4r…6aux Don’t know about NLS, but this blog post confirms that #CyberSyn (mostly) had a single computer:
“Also, there are no actual computers in this room. The whole CYBERSYN project only had a single IBM machine for most of its existence. The buttons are there to communicate with people behind the partition walls, who would place transparencies onto an overhead projector to be displayed on those screens.”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/computers-with-ashtrays

2023-08-29 23:03:21

(The interesting bit starts in the reply to this.)
I’ve transferred the best bits of my https://www.crustofcode.com/ blog to https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/. Left behind is a good amount of Elixir content no one gives a damn about. With both the hosting fee and domain registration fee coming up, I’m fine with all that going into the memory hole. (Though I still dream of making programmers care about tabular unit tests: https://www.crustofcode.com/two-formats-for-tabular-elixir-tests/, I understand it ain’t gonna happen.)
…

2023-08-25 21:47:05

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@npub1p4r…6aux I’m suspicious of Caplan’s numbers (and, more generally, people who cite Caplan*). The numbers from the annual NSF survey show ~75% of Americans say the earth goes around the sun. (Which is wrong, since they both revolve around their center of gravity. Which, granted, is pretty deep inside the sun.) The numbers have been stable for decades.
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/overview
…

2023-08-23 00:22:51

Sitting on the front stoop listening to the cicadas is pretty interesting. Each of the big trees on our block seems to have its own population. A tree’s population will be silent, then chirp louder and louder and LOUDER and then fall silent fairly fast. How do they coordinate?
It seems like one tree falling silent will trigger a next tree to start up - but it’s more complicated than that when you pay attention. There’s so much going on with our buggy friends.

2023-08-22 23:10:15

I asked for sightings of Hutchins’ /Cognition in the Wild/ in the, um, wild. Here’s a good one. https://toolsforthought.rocks/@billseitz/110928384519270230
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/935/789/624/953/657/original/63763b232b0e12a1.png

2023-08-20 22:22:13

Another entry in my rather tedious series of “where did Agile go wrong?” It was when we gave up “chickens and pigs”.
Early Scrum people were fond of this anecdote:
A chicken said to a pig, let’s start a restaurant. We’ll call it “Bacon and Eggs”. The pig declined, saying “You’d just be involved, but I’d be *committed*.”
I found that anecdote useful when outsiders (management) tried to meddle in things properly within the authority of the team. It worked. Humorous, but with an edge.
…

2023-08-18 21:40:33

With respect to what is called Agile today, I was reminded of one of my, um, more interesting coinages: “Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism”. Think of how much better the world would have been had “AR⊗TA” replaced “Agile”. Anarcho-Syndicalism weren’t going to be no management fad.
http://arxta.net/
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/912/787/726/140/919/original/0ce4f4572deafe21.png

2023-08-16 22:51:40

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...
I remember around 2002, I visited a successful Scrum team. The product owner told me, “This is a lot more work and responsibility, but I can’t imagine doing a project any other way.” (That echoed the attitude of the whole team.)
It was probably less than a decade later that I was contracted to help with a “rollout of Scrum across the organization”, and a programmer told me “At least my job doesn’t suck as much as it used to.” That was when I resolved to get out of Agile consulting.
…

2023-08-16 14:14:16

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@npub165g…wk4w It doesn’t exactly address your post, but I tried to represent something of what early agile “felt like” from the inside in a podcast episode: https://podcast.oddly-influenced.dev/episodes/bonus-a-circle-centric-reading-of-software-development-through-the-1990s-plus-screech-owls, using Farrell’s /Collaborative Circles/ (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/885223.Collaborative_Circles) as a springboard. (There’s a transcript.) It’s part of a series where I wanted to use his book as something of a “how to” guide for software people like you.
Sigh.

2023-08-13 14:20:31

‘Calling the events of 2020 and 2021 “insurrection” or potentially even “rebellion” might seem to some exaggerated or hyperbolic. It is not. It is simply being legally precise and not shying away from difficult or upsetting consequences that flow from legal precision. We believe it is important to call the events of 2020 and 2021 by their true legal names [...].’ ‪– https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4532751
I was one such person. They’ve convinced me. “Insurrection” it was.

2023-08-07 12:59:29

“[S]ometimes, people forget how nice, gentle things are much harder to put back than they are to remove. So we get treeless, hot-concrete streets; and we beat our libraries into discipline centers; and the world gets worse and uglier; and it will be so much harder to repair than it would be simply to let it alone.” – Alexandra Petri (Humor columnist for the Washington Post. This is more poignant than funny: https://wapo.st/3Kx4BXI - not paywalled.)

2023-08-03 23:03:41

I’m curious. As a retired person, the debate about remote work seems to be:
Con: the synergy of the office! (which is real). Implicitly: “we like the old way.”
Pro: “I am happier working from home.” Also, you can hire from all nearby timezones.
To be blunt: the people with power like the old way, and they don’t give a damn about your happiness. The marginal ability to hire better people is a weak counter; it asks managers to believe individual excellence outweighs what they themselves do.
…

2023-08-02 00:16:57

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@npub1yk6…4zz4 That is very very nice. We may be ordering another print.

2023-07-12 03:13:59

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@npub1yk6…4zz4 I’m similarly obsessive about acknowledging replies. I think anyone who takes the time to reply deserves it.
It’s unfortunate that Notifications feeds implicitly assume that it’s most important to bask in the flow of mentions and favorites. Managing them is unimportant because – look! – here come some more.

2023-07-12 02:52:15

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@npub1yk6…4zz4 Understood. I didn’t stop to think that you must have a gazillion more replies than I do. Mine are at most 10 a day.

2023-07-11 13:13:00

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@npub1yk6…4zz4 If I understand what you’re saying, even Mona (Mac/IOS) has that behavior. The way I keep on top of who I’ve replied to is that, when I reply, I also Favorite. So when I’m in the mood to reply, I scroll down the Notifications timeline until I see the topmost highly-visible “You favorited this” star.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/695/624/137/659/178/original/a319bbe583ea2847.png

2023-06-27 23:55:02

Turns out the Canadians continue their wildfire smoke attack on the US. The visibility here in downstate Illinois is slightly creepy. Not like the pictures from New York a while back. But it does seem perhaps possible that the national press only notice events that happen to affect the city they live in.

2023-06-25 14:04:12

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 @npub1upz…sl58 I learned in /Collaborative Circles/ that as a young member of the English faculty at Oxford, Tolkien thought they shouldn’t teach anything written later than Chaucer.
That seems to me a bit extreme.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/605/228/536/580/026/original/7d1690e2e28ad835.png

2023-06-18 23:19:41

This is the print my daughter chose for her birthday (via @npub1yk6…4zz4). I thought my children were more normal than me, but now I wonder.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/567/776/481/925/395/original/21345d52f8b06212.png

2023-06-13 17:56:45

You know that early London XP team? The one with (I believe) Steve Freeman and Rachel Davies? Egged on by a manager who I’m sure I’m misremembering was named Anthony Eden (not the Prime Minister)? Is there a name people use to refer to it, akin to “the Chrysler C3 project”? Any links to an explanatory page?
cc// @sf105

2023-06-06 23:22:27

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@npub1yk6…4zz4 “Dude” is OK. Better than the Subway sandwich maker who called me a “studmuffin”.

2023-06-06 00:19:13

I’ve donated ~$1000 to @npub1yk6…4zz4 in the hopes that he can produce more books like https://www.dismantlingthedream.com/product-page/signed-copy-of-abandoned-america-the-age-of-consequences (as well more of his online pictures and podcast).
I have no objection to Effective Altruism (in its non-longtermist form), but I think altruism is barren if it restricts itself to the kind of cost-benefit calculations that would prevent one from supporting a kind and unique and dedicated artist.

2023-05-28 16:19:35

Responding to @npub1kd6…w72f, quoting “every corporation is built on the backs of the knowledge of employees they do not value", @npub1vaa…jxpc links to an example of “corporate memory loss”. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110446442213596831

2023-05-23 20:41:58

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Another bit that I think often gets overlooked, caught here. It’s easy to think of “the new thing” (Impressionism, Agile, New Southern poetry) as being something conceptual: a style, a set of propositions. It’s also a *set of skills* that are honed in semi- or fully-collaborative work that is critically observed in the moment or shortly thereafter.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/419/936/194/889/830/original/a4626163707392a5.png

2023-05-23 20:33:11

When talking about pairing, I tend to talk about its disciplining aspect – it makes what might be a private vice (skipping refactoring, say) something social, subject to peer pressure.
This quote, from /Collaborative Circles/ captures the positive aspect: pairs quite often (says the book) enable people to try new things safely. (Each gives the other a “safe space” in which to move.)
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/110/419/901/797/128/314/original/f46668588b32b89d.png

2023-05-17 19:11:00

Here's an interesting fact: in the first version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, women on average did better than men. Since women could not be more intelligent than men, they removed questions women did better on, and replaced them with ones men did better on, until the results came out right. (Hacking, /The Social Construction of What?/, p. 173.)

2023-05-08 13:33:25

Today’s public service announcement: It is not true that 38 neighbors stood by and did nothing when Kitty Genovese was murdered in 1964. The New York times grossly misreported the case – it might be fair to say “made it up” – and only admitted it in 2016, long after promoting “bystander apathy” into common wisdom.
Text: https://allthatsinteresting.com/kitty-genovese
Podcast: https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/3883973 (with extra detail, including the relevance of her and a witness’s homosexuality in a period when that was illegal).

2023-04-23 20:15:06

Oh this is not going well... "Foucault claims that, prior to the age of the prison, humans did not consider their "selves" to have mutable internal state."
Then I could go on to cope with Saul of Tarsus becoming St. Paul by saying that's a complete state swap, as with Erlang's processes or Clojure's actors or reflashing a EPROM.

2023-04-21 15:58:04

#[0] is one of the better follows I’ve made since coming to Mastodon. Tech, especially its intersection with politics.
#[1] is a gifted photographer who photographs what’s been left behind. Also a podcast on the same topic. I bought a copy of his /Abandoned America/ for Dawn, and will buy one for Sophie for her birthday. https://www.dismantlingthedream.com/product-page/signed-copy-of-abandoned-america-the-age-of-consequences