> all the useful artifacts from it happened naturally because product and dev were so closely aligned.
Aren't you just saying that DDD wasn't proposed as a solution to the problem because the problem didn't exist? Starting to jog is a smell that you're out of shape, if you were in shape you wouldn't need to start jogging.
One of the ideas that DDD pushes is that product and dev should be closely aligned. The reason that's emphasized is that it isn't the case in a lot of organizations. Of course you could try to avoid all orgs with these kinds of problems (I haven't been able to, unfortunately), but the question is, if encountering an org that _does_ have problems, what solution would you propose?
I am indeed saying DDD wasn't proposed as a solution to the problem because the problem didn't exist.
I even call that out in the post you're responding to - "Every place I've encountered it, it was attempting to fix with process something that needed to be fixed with culture." And then expound how places with the right culture didn't see value in DDD, and places with poor culture tried to band-aid over it with DDD. As I comment elsewhere, that's not an indictment of DDD as a practice, just that when orgs seek to adopt it it's indicative of a problem, one that DDD won't fix.
>>> Starting to jog is a smell that you're out of shape, if you were in shape you wouldn't need to start jogging.
Let me rephrase that, since it's not 'starting to jog', but 'jogging'. Trying DDD (because of purported benefits) is different than continuing to use DDD (because of actualized benefits).
So "jogging is a smell that you're out of shape; if you're in shape you won't be jogging". And that's patently false.
What I think you're trying to say is that jogging will help keep in shape people in shape, and will help out of shape people get into shape as well, yes? Which would equate to "DDD can help effective software orgs stay effective, and ineffective software orgs become effective". Which is a reasonable claim, but one I've simply not seen; I've not encountered an effective software org that used it, and all the ones I've encountered that used it were ineffective, and, at least during my tenure there, remained so.
>>> One of the ideas that DDD pushes is that product and dev should be closely aligned.
It may try to push that idea, but it does nothing to help it occur. It's implicit, but no more than anything else software related (in that to build something the builders have to know what to build). Certainly, if you asked anyone, using any process, whether or not it's a good idea to have product and dev -unaligned-, they would say "of course not! As a practitioner of X I certainly believe they should be aligned".
Completely agree. I mostly get around by bike or running and I doubt I'll use scooters very much, but I'm excited for these to come to the city. The more people there are using alternative forms of transport, the more people become aware of how insane it is that we allocate so much of our scarce space in the city exclusively to the needs of car owners.
I agree. Seems like what Feynman really wants to say here is “this isn’t a question I’m personally interested in”, but frames it as “it’s dumb to be interested in this question”.
We are only experiencing the end result of what our senses sample and our brain processes. That’s clearly true. How much that end result diverges from the real thing is difficult to answer, but in a straight forward way you can look at an optical illusion to see that there is some divergence.
I, too, can speculate about what Feynman's message is, and while I think you are right in supposing he was not interested in the problem, I also think he is saying that not much in life depends on answering the question. It's not like even philosophy itself is hung up on this issue in the way that, for example, fundamental physics seems to be at something of an impasse over string theory.
Neither our sensory perception nor our language are entirely accurate representations of the world we live in, but they are both good enough for most purposes, so long as we don't get nerd-swiped into obsessing over questions of what it all means.
The startup speed of DOOM Emacs is outstanding, as others have noted.
Additionally, I've found adding my own customizations is much easier in Doom than Spacemacs. While the Spacemacs "layers" approach is nice for setup, it can become very brittle when you start hacking on it yourself. Some of that could also be due to my own lack of skill with elisp, though.
Something I realized recently is that I'm not addicted to social media or any apps in particular, but I am addicted to my phone. I managed to give up pretty much all social media, save for an occasional peek at reddit and this site, but still take out my phone about as often as I did before. Mostly I just check the news for the umpteenth time in a day. My current plan is to keep using my phone, but switch to using it for more productive things. For example, I started using Anki for memorization and I use a bunch of music theory/sight-reading apps.
I have an entrenched Anki habit – I picked it up while studying for an exam, and now it says I’ve been using it for an average of 17 minutes a day for 2 years. It’s a great tool and I recommend it. But I don’t think it helps to fix the phone addiction problem. Getting to an average of 17 minutes was hard work that required a lot of willpower. I’m sure most people with a phone addiction problem are spending much more than 17 minutes a day on unproductive scrolling.
Similar realization here. Just can't get myself off the damn thing - doesn't seem to matter what I'm using it for. Hopefully the more productive route works for you!
There's been endless discussion about Damore. In particular podcasts you'd think that the firing of a random engineer at Google ranked alongside 9/11 as a defining event in modern history. If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired. It doesn't matter if the memo I circulated would have gotten a passing grade in a college class. The fact that people use that as an argument tells me that they've never worked a normal job before.
I can't tell if you're trying to say that a policy from management is beyond all reproach or if "these things just happen in the real world". Either way, the former shouldn't be true and the latter should be wrong. Of course, correctness doesn't stop anyone from being terminated, but that's not the point.
There are appropriate and inappropriate avenues for disagreeing with corporate policy; publicly on a large mailing list is going to get you in hot water no matter what the policy is.
I guess I take issue with this. Google encouraged discussion and disagreement on large mailing lists, unlike most companies. It doesn't seem right that Google would simultaneously sollicit such feedback and then punish somebody for giving them negative feedback.
I think what you're saying is valid, but the point I've been making is that the entire James Damore affair is interesting for pretty much the opposite reason to that which people who tend to bring it up claim.
"It doesn't seem right" is one thing, but that's not why it's still brought up 3 years after the memo was written. A lot has gone on in the world in the past 3 years that doesn't seem right that we've forgotten about or didn't hear about in the first place. Damore is used as a data point (in fact, as a central data point) in the thesis that "political correctness gone awry" or "social justice warriors run amok" are problems that rank highly in a list of society's most concerning. I think it's absurd. That this random dev's firing is doing so much work in bolstering this thesis just highlights the absurdity.
It’s unclear exactly what the limits of such a forum are; if I were to hypothetically respond with a pro-nazi screed, I think that most people here would be fine with me being fired. But there’s certainly a gray area.
I will say that it was extremely short sighted of google to setup such a forum in a public and non-anonymous manner. That was just begging for trouble.
Policy from management is not beyond all reproach, but what venue you have for expressing disagreement varies by company. Do you think the firing of James Damore warranted the attention it got?
> If I circulated a memo to my co-workers that not only opposed a new policy from management, but did obvious harm to the expressed intent of that policy, I might be fired.
Google had fostered a culture were it was expected to respond with to new policies from management that you didn't agree with.
Google wasn't a normal job where whatever management says gos. Although, it's certainly seems to be moving in that direction from the outsiders perspective.
I think that's because a lot of people think that some corporations now have much greater power than governments, especially when it comes to influencing / controlling social thought.
My understanding is that it was "normal" for Google to have these kind of discussions on internal boards. A remnant of the libertarian message board and usenet culture of the early silicon valley.
They only fully cracked down on political speech like a big boring company last year:
It was never normal. The politically charged boards were always playing with fire. Damore also shared his ideas outside of these spaces where it was even less “normal”. What might be okay to say in an opt-in discussion board about politics may be less okay to say in a training session, for example. Time and place and all that.
Saying that people who disagreed with him must not have read the memo is a cliche at this point. It wouldn’t add anything to the conversation even if it wasn’t factually incorrect, and the guidelines here discourage that kind of behavior.
As someone who did read it, I also don’t see how the comment you’re dismissing is inaccurate. Can you point out exactly why you feel it is?
How so, I didn't say anything about the content of the memo? Or you disagree that it did obvious harm to Google's policy on gender? We know that female employees received the memo and stated that it made them feel excluded, which did harm to the intent of the policy. That's not really debatable is it?
The phrasing implied that Damore willfully created that harm. It's a simpler explanation, at the time of authorship, that he did not expect the reaction it got. It seemed to be an attempt to explain his logic in an inoffensive way, in fact.
> Electron is always a point, no matter what wave function it has. Therefore, from this perspective space is all empty.
That depends on what interpretation you're going with. Even with that caveat, I'd be surprised if most physicists would agree with that statement. Electrons are in fact described by the wave function. It's not that the wave function tells us where the electron is, but that the best way of describing the reality of the electron is through its wave function. How and why measurements seem to cause that wave function to collapse to a definite location is different depending on your interpretation of QM.
What appears to have happened here was that a climate denialist group that deliberately use "NAS" to confuse people into thinking they are receiving an invitation to speak at a conference by the National Academy of Sciences, was called out by an open science advocate who himself felt mislead. Then the Wall Street Journal was snookered into publishing an editorial because they'll publish pretty much anything that claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.
Wow, I hadn't realized. How insidiously dangerous. Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.
Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at MIT and former member of NAS, says he was initially drawn to the organization because he was worried about what he saw as a growing relativism in the academy, evident in the work of deconstructionist philosophers like Jacques Derrida. NAS seemed to be taking a stand against those intellectual currents, Emanuel said — though he adds that he eventually became concerned about the organization’s stances on climate change, especially during a much-publicized incident in which hackers stole thousands of emails from a group of climate scientists and accused them of misusing data.
In a 2010 article published on the NAS website, Emanuel described the event as “a scandal” — but he didn’t see it as a challenge to the scientific consensus on climate change. The National Association of Scholars, on the other hand, sought to extrapolate the Climategate incident “into a universal condemnation of the field,” Emanuel told me. “It was just patently disingenuous.”
He left the organization soon afterward.
“It sort of revealed them not to be what they claimed to be — people who stood for scientific truth and scientific integrity. It was just another organization that used that as a front,” Emanuel said. “They’re basically a political organization posing as an organization dedicated to free inquiry,” he added.
Aren't you just saying that DDD wasn't proposed as a solution to the problem because the problem didn't exist? Starting to jog is a smell that you're out of shape, if you were in shape you wouldn't need to start jogging.
One of the ideas that DDD pushes is that product and dev should be closely aligned. The reason that's emphasized is that it isn't the case in a lot of organizations. Of course you could try to avoid all orgs with these kinds of problems (I haven't been able to, unfortunately), but the question is, if encountering an org that _does_ have problems, what solution would you propose?