For years, I’ve watched the destruction of the services and the mechanisms that were responsible for allowing me to have a normal life, to thrive, to be able to speak with a voice that was truly mine. I’ve watched them burn, or worse, turned into abominable growth vehicles for men disconnected from society and humanity. I owe my life to an internet I've watched turned into multiple abuse factories worth multiple trillions of dollars and the people responsible get gladhandled and applauded.

Never Forgive Them

Case in point: former Gov. of Maryland Larry Hogan posted a long thread on X about how he “personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above his residence.” It turns out what he was looking at was the star constellation Orion and the stars Sirius and Procyon.

TikTok is done for - by Taylor Lorenz - User Mag

"People don’t cheer for chaos when they feel like justice is possible. But right now, what options do they have? The Supreme Court is corrupt, voting feels useless, and the people in power are funded by the very corporations they’re supposed to regulate. Of course, Mangione gets turned into a meme hero—it’s not him they love; it’s the idea of someone finally fighting back" - Letters from God

A Poster's Holiday and the merchification of Luigi

Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them.

Dave Anderson: "Now thinking about creating a …" - Hachyderm.io

This realization has an important corollary. A new process won’t make any difference. Even if Scrum is suddenly eliminated, a new system of control will fill its place. The root problem is the imbalance of control in software corporations. Developers have no real power or seat at the table. They are not peers engaged in a common creative enterprise — they are hired, replaceable machinery, no different than the computers and monitors they use all day. In other words, the root problem is the system that allows for something like Scrum to be used in the first place.

Scrum is the Symptom, not the Problem - by Adam Ard

The most common error I see is to assume that shipping is easy. The default state of a project is to not ship: to be delayed indefinitely, cancelled, or to go out half-baked and burst into flames. Projects do not ship automatically once all the code has been written or all the Jira tickets closed. They ship because someone takes up the difficult and delicate job of shipping them.

How I ship projects at big tech companies | sean goedecke

It's surprisingly simple. It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they're doing a good job of it, and are generally effective. If they can't do that, then they themselves are ineffective, and that is the sort of thing that is the responsibility of THEIR manager, and so on up the line. They shouldn't need me (or anyone else) to tell them about what's going on with their damn direct reports!

I've had a change of heart regarding employee metrics

Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was.

Lost In The Future

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed.

Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does - Anil Dash

But too many of those who fought to advocate for increasing access to healthcare, or other similar goals, have been pulled into the trap of "reasonableness". Reasonableness is a slow method of failure in which the first step is to concede half of the goal up front, the turning point is losing the passion and backing of the most enthusiastic supporters to disillusionment, and the final step is poisoning the well for future efforts by providing a cautionary example of defeat.

You have to start with the principle. - Anil Dash