a4isms

Louis CK deserves credit for calling this out in a brilliant bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl-1jc1oDRk

(Yes, this video is framed and has Italian subtitles, but all the others I found do weird things with panning and clipping to evade censorship filters, and I believe that his body language is an important part of the delivery.)

There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God!

https://norberthaupt.com/2015/11/22/the-rabbit-god-and-the-d...

Vocational Awe and the Lies We Tell Ourselves (2018):

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...

HN Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602956

This has always applied to tech workers.

A long time ago, in a dystopic project far, far, away:

Depressed and quite pessimistic about the team’s ability to orchestrate Java development in parallel with the rapid changes to the workbook, he came up with the solution: a series of XSLT files that would automatically build Java classes to handle the Struts actions defined by the XML that was built by Visual Basic from the workbook that was written in Excel.

https://raganwald.com/2008/02/21/mouse-trap.html

HN Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120379 · https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947952

> This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

This is very, very germane and a very quotable line. And these people have been around from long before LLMs appeared. These are the people who dash off an incomplete idea on Friday afternoon and expect to see a finished product in production by next Tuesday, latest. They have no self-awareness of how much context and disambiguation is needed to go from "idea in my head" to working, deterministic software that drives something like a process change in a business.

For those fascinated with Mondrian and/or De Stijl, I strongly recommend the book “Inside out Victory Boogie Woogie: A Material History of Mondrian's Masterpiece,” which is mentioned in TFA. As a lifelong fan, I found the detailed analysis of Mondrian’s unfinished masterpiece riveting.

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089643735/inside-out-victory-...

To adapt the words of composer Frank Wilhoit:

"Crony capitalism consists of but one principle: In-corporations who are protected by regulation, but not bound by it, alongside out-corporations who are bound by regulation, but not protected by it."

That is a false dichotomy.

They had Sir Humphrey Appleby run a poll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks

> everyone should want

Leaving everything else you've written aside... Really‽ You believe that it's possible to make a single kind of car with minimal variation in styles and capabilities that will appeal to the entire world, at every price point, every demographic?

I suggest you are over-extrapolating your own confirmation bias. I drive a Volvo, it is not possible for Tesla to sell me a vehicle with a single flat screen to replace my buttons, screen, digital gauge cluster, and heads-up display. It is not possible to sell me a Model Y or Model X to replace my wagon. I am obviously not Tesla's market for Tesla's current product lineup, period.

My neighbour has a cottage and owns a truck they use for all sorts of hauling things around. I have spoken with them, it is not possible to sell them a CyberTruck, they are interested in the F150 Lightning, a vehicle designed for truck owners who want to electrify. My neighbour is not Tesla's market either.

Tesla is not into broad market segmentation. Tesla is into having a well-defined market and offering a handful of models to that market. You're in that market and you're happy with your Tesla. Ok. But come on, do you understand that the rest of the 7 billion people on this planet make up a wide variety of humans with a wide variety of wants and needs where a vehicle is concerned?

And that literally ZERO manufacturers can make a handful of cars that everyone will want?

p.s. I said it wasn't easy, do I have any suggestions for selling to Enterprises where there may not be trust between the users of your product and their leadership?

Yes I do, here's one that is very well-suited to startups who want to sell to the enterprise: Product-Led Growth ("PLG"). This is defined as building a product and customer acquisition strategy around people trying the product for themselves and then buying the product without interacting with a human.

To make this work, you have to strategize which feature or features will close people using the product, as opposed to leaders looking at a PowerPoint with estimated ROI numbers. You have to make them discoverable, and you have to find a way to surface the value to users... In the product, not in a white paper or on a marketing web site.

You also have to have someone own PLG and ruthlessly experiment with user experience design and product design to drive better and better PLG. Yes, you have to track it and prioritize it.

PLG can't be your only strategy, you still need Enterprise Sales. For most enterprise products, PLG will never generate as much revenue as sales. It will be tempting to ditch it as wasteful compared to just building whatever the C-Suite demands from salespeople. BUT!

If you have any traction at all with PLG, your product will also be an easier enterprise sale. The problem the author listed is greatly mitigated by a product that has even modest success getting individuals and/or small businesses to buy it based on their trial experience only.

PLG can be the key to unlocking enterprise revenue, you just have to play the "long game" with PLG and treat it as a particularly honest way of obtaining user feedback, which must be coupled with a mechanism for improving the product based on that honest feedback: Someone must own PLG, must be held accountable for driving PLG, and they must have enough authority not to be swept aside by prioritizing top-down features.

Before I went into development full-time, I was in Enterprise Sales.

There were times I sold a product that the users (Dev Team in the author's case) wanted desperately, but leadership (VPs of Product, CPOs, PMs in the author's case) didn't see the importance and/or urgency of. And yes, there were times when I sold a product that leadership wanted desperately, but users didn't see the importance and/or urgency of.

The second case can be wrangled over user objections, but in the long run, such products end up failing once past harvesting the Hawthorne Effect. The lasting successes were the ones where all the stakeholders (I know, I know, buzzword alert) bought in.

And that's why closing Enterprise Sales is a load-bearing role in an Enterprise Software business. It's hard to do, but through a combination of product design that creates discoverable value for every "buying influencer" (another term of art from sales) and needs discovery on the part of sales and product management, followed by tailoring pitches and demonstrations for each group, you can get them all in a room nodding together and close the deal.

It is NOT easy. And a lot of this is not the vendor's fault. Beneath the superficial appearance of a recalcitrant dev team, there may be scars from previous top-down dictated changes that did not, in fact, do anything for the users or the company, so closing a deal may involve a lot of listening and empathy and a very open mind.

People make fun of Enterprise Sales as a perfectly coiffed salesman golfing with the customer's CIO, but the hard truth is that Enterprise Sales is hard because Enterprises are full of people with complicated needs and relationships and perception and the entire thing is steeped in hidden historical legacy context.

I feel for the author, I really do. But I also reflexively feel for the customer's dev team. And for the customer's leadership. A change to communications tooling is a change to a load-bearing part of a company's processes and culture.

Selling this kind of thing is not easy.

You the customer are only a minor part of the grift. In fact, you're an unwitting prop for the grift. The entire point of the grift is the stock price, not your $8,000 or monthly subscription.

What they want from you are comments like this. What they want to do with those comments is to preserve the consensus amongst Tesla bulls that they are on their way to selling robots and renting robot taxis by the ride.

I have been in this industry since the mid 80s. I can't tell you how many people worry that I can't handle change because as a veteran, I must cling to what was. Meanwhile, of course, the reason I am still in the industry is because of my plasticity. Nothing is as it was for me, and I have changed just about everything about how I work multiple times. But what does stay the same all this time are people and businesses and how we/they behave.

Which brings me to your comment. The comparison to Uber drivers is apt, and to use a fashionable word these days, the threat to people and startups alike is "enshittification." These tools are not sold, they are rented. Should a few behemoths gain effective control of the market, we know from history that we won't see these tools become commodities and nearly free, we'll see the users of these tools (again, both people and businesses) squeezed until their margins are paper-thin.

Back when articles by Joel Spolsky regularly hit the top page of Hacker News, he wrote "Strategy Letter V:" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

The relevant takeaway was that companies try to commoditize their complements, and for LLM vendors, every startup is a complement. A brick-and-mortar metaphor is that of a retailer in a mall. If you as a retailer are paying more in rent than you're making, you are "working for the landlord," just as if you are making less than 30% of profit on everything you sell or rent through Apple's App Store, you're working for Apple.

I once described that as "Sharecropping in Apple's Orchard," and if I'm hesitant about the direction we're going, it's not anything about clinging to punch cards and ferromagnetic RAM, it's more the worry that it's not just a question of programmers becoming enshittified by their tools, it's also the entire notion of a software business "Sharecropping the LLM vendor's fields."

We spend way too much time talking about programming itself and not enough about whither the software business if its leverage is bound to tools that can only be rented on terms set by vendors.

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I don't know for certain where things will go or how we'll get there. I actually like the idea that a solo founder could create a billion-dollar company with no employees in my lifetime. And I have always liked the idea of software being "Wheels for the Mind," and we could be on a path to that, rather than turning humans into "reverse centaurs" that labour for the software rather than the other way around.

Once upon a time, VCs would always ask a startup, "What is your Plan B should you start getting traction and then Microsoft decides to compete with you/commoditize you by giving the same thing away?" That era passed, and Paul Graham celebrated it: https://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Then when startups became cheap to launch—thank you increased tech leverage and cheap money and YCombinator industrializing early-stage venture capital—the question became, "What is your moat against three smart kids launching a competitor?"

Now I wonder if the key question will bifurcate:

1. What is your moat against somebody launching competition even more cheaply than smart kids with YCombinator's backing, and;

2. How are you insulated against the cost of load-bearing tooling for everything in your business becoming arbitrarily more expensive?

Yes, this will be familiar to people creating objects or classes that are intended to represent iterable collections. You do the same dynamic key syntax with a class declaration or object literal, but use `Symbol.iterator` as the well-known symbol for the method.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

As long as we're talking about concatenative languages, here's Joy:

https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

True!

Of course, Shrink-wrap 2020-2025 is not exactly the same as Shrink-wrap 1995-2000. You mentioned digital distribution. Speaking from my lived experience... We shipped software on golden masters that were used to manufacture DVDs at scale.

At that time, the entire software industry worked on long release cycles because of the friction of shipping software on manufactured media. And in those days, people read physical dead tree computer magazines, which had long lead times for articles. This affected software development, because months before we were scheduled to "ship," we were sharing screen shots with journalists, doing interviews, and placing stories in magazines timed to drop when we released.

I remember a death march to get a product ready so that we'd have DVDs to give away at JavaOne in the Moscone Center, where our CTO was scheduled to give a talk. The way software was distributed in those days all strongly influenced the way companies attempted to manage software development.

Oh, I do believe we're in general agreement!

Blogs and news sites are both in the "content publishing" space, so yes their requirements will overlap. There's likely a complexity continuum from:

1. Something like a one-person blog published by committing Markdown to a GitHub repository and having that published automatically, all the way to; 2. A journalistic news site that has a full CMS back-end tracking multiple authors/bylines, some kind of editor/approval/review workflow, features for deciding what gets shown "above the fold," linters that enforce style guidelines, specialized search features, &c.

While some blogs can have complex requirements and some news sites might be simple, I hope we can appreciate that there will be some blogs that are much, much simpler than the NYT and this have fewer and simpler requirements.

They're both "publishing words," but the back-end complexity reflects the complexity of the business -processes and model more than the complexity of displaying articles on web pages.

Many years ago—2002!—Joel Spolsky wrote this:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/

His thesis was that before arguing about software development tools, practices, anything really, it's vital to establish what kind of development you're doing, because each "world" has its own requirements that in turn motivate different practices and tools.

The worlds he quoted were Shrink-wrap; Internal; Embedded; Games; and Throwaway. Shrink-wrap is no longer a thing for most developers, and we can probably name some others today that didn't exist then. But the basic advice he gave then matches what you're saying today:

We need to anchor arguments about tooling in a statement about the type of development we're trying to address, and we need to appreciate that the needs of each world are different.

I am also unsure whether recursion is fundamentally linguistic, but I thought that “language remains the easiest demonstration of recursion in our daily lives” to be useful. If I ever write another essay about recursion, I'll now consider starting with a linguistic example before diving into recursive functions or data structures.

Short reply:

I agree, it only goes half-way.

Elaboration:

I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.

Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.

Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

The key observation for me is Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of everything is crud."

My most impressionable years for music were the 70s and 80s. I remember fantastic music from that time... But the fact is, most of what we hear today from that era has been curated for us. We hear the 10% of the 70s and 80s hits that weren't crud. Or maybe even the 1% that was great. If we actually listen to the top twenty-five singles from any month in those two decades, 90% of them would be crud.

I think most people comparing the present to the past are comparing everything today to the 10% of yesterday that wasn't crud.

For those who haven't heard of it, "The Hawthorne Effect" is the name given to a phenomena where when a person or group being studied is aware they are being studied, their performance goes up but as much as 50% for 4-8 weeks, then regresses to its norm.

This is true if they are just being observed, or if some novel new processes are introduced. If the new things are beneficial, the performance rises for 4-8 weeks as usual, but when it regresses it regresses to a higher performance reflecting the value of the new process.

But when poor management introduce a counter-productive change, the Hawthorne Effect makes it look like a resounding success for 4-8 weeks. Then the effect fades, and performance drops below the original level. Sufficiently devious managers either move on to new projects or blame the workers for failing to maintain the new higher pace of performance.

This explains a lot of the incentive for certain types of leaders to champion arbitrary changes, take a victory lap, and then disassociate themselves from accountability for the long-term success or failure of their initiative.

(There is quite a bit of controversy over what the mechanisms for the Hawthorne Effect are, and whether change alone can introduce it for whether participants need to feel they are being observed, but the model as I see it fits my anecdotal experience where new processes are always accompanied by attempts to meet new performance goals, and everyone is extremely aware that the outcome is being measured.)

Delighted by the resemblance of the HN title to Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Soul of a New Machine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

I suggest the simplest explanation of how Trump is different from other felons is right there in Wilhoit's observation on conservatism:

"In-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it, alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it."

He may have been convicted, but he faced no consequences. He was not bound by the law, so not only did his convictions and investigations not deter him, the lack of consequences emboldened him.

Price discrimination isn't just "rich people pay more." It's also, "Our data shows that people in these demographic locations will pay more."

I recall a hotelier who advertised free WiFi at a time when everyone thought that monetizing WiFi was a hot new revenue stream.

"What," he was asked, "is the business model for free WiFi?"

"What," he retorted, "is the business model for free washrooms?"

And in disturbingly relevant news from 1933...

"Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head or tail out of it." --Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly, "Duck Soup"

In some parts of the world, they auction houses in this exact manner. You show up, post a very large amount of money to prove you're serious, then everyone bids in person like an art auction.

Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.

The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.

I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.

Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.