chambers

Great to see. Warpstream's architecture was quite promising and the acquisition helps to validate it.

One curious question: why couldn't Confluent build their own Warpstream, or pioneer one themselves, these last few years? The space seems quite close to their technology and the needs of their customers. "Lack of talent" or "disorganization" would be a dispiriting answer.

Migrating an acquired company's infra to a parent company's infra is common. But marketing it to the world, before starting it, and without a clear product strategy to justify it, is pretty uncommon. For me, it smells of messiness that translates into wasted eng time.

"You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started.

It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous.

I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956

I don't trust Zuckerberg and I don't trust his motivations. That said, I think there's some truth in his words:

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

Skip the political mumbo-jumbo and go straight to page 27 to 29 of this investigation report. Internal emails show FB employees unhappy to onboard to a private takedown request portal, where Government employees would post tickets on "disinformation" that FB & other tech companies would then be obligated to police. Further, the report suggests that CISA & its proxies didn't have a legal mandate to compel FB, Twitter, and other companies to censor content, so the CISA resorted to "suggesting" they would get the FBI involved.

The entire doc has an obvious political slant, but I think it partially explains why the Stanford Internet Observatory and other proxies self-dismantled before litigation commenced.

Reading this statement, DEFCON's, and Reddit: it looks like the lowest bidder was a hired to do a complicated and costly project that the client historically underfunded (paper badges last year).

If it's true that DEFCON wanted dirt cheap badges produced in record time, then I think the fault lies not in the project's management & execution but in the client's expectations & resourcing. No accomplished vendor would accept such a low price point, so that just leaves the unaccomplished. Vendors who overpromise and underdeliver, who would accept payment in terms of "clout", or who would be too afraid to pushback on crazy or high pressure expectations until it's too late.

A classic set-up-to-fail situation.

I was excited for this standard a few years ago, but I've come to believe it's missing understanding of its domain.

For example, Dynamic Configs is an important and relevant concept yet it's only mentioned briefly in the team's meeting notes & blog. Similarly, the spec tries to define how an "experiment" is different from a feature flag, but ended up giving up and leaving their attempt as a rough draft https://openfeature.dev/specification/sections/tracking.

IMO, feature flagging is a red herring for the larger problem of feature control. That perspective is not defined, so I'm doubtful the proposed standard will integrate well with the more advanced use-cases of enterprises, e.g., experimentation.

The author described the frustration of drafting and publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_(Smarsh_book) against concerns about notability. Reading more, I think the notability concerns may not be unfounded. The article feels inflated and its book received mixed feedback in Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38532119-heartland

> Changed the name of the project from Benthos to “Redpanda Connect”, and prohibited anyone from using the term “Benthos.” https://x.com/emaxerrno/status/1796219957589786810

A complete rebranding suggests that the original OSS project will no longer be managed as its own independent entity. I think that alone gives good reason to fork.

I didn't see self-marketing in their words. Rather, I read a promise:

> The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave. This is a one-way promise, or covenant. In other words, the developers are saying: "We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us."

So far as I've seen, SQLite's developers have lived up to their words. They practice what they preach, while most other software communities do not. Rather, most of the popular ones align with your insinuation: pseudo-religious values and holier-than-thou attitudes cloaking misbehavior.

On a side note, this topic inspired me to buy a copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict, the original source of SQLite's ethic.

A few too many principles mixing the BDFL & their project, I think. It's ok for a BDFL to share the things they care for, but I would prefer a harder framework for predicting BDFL behavior.

My short go-to-example is https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/five-core-principles-... . If one imagines a world where each principle is invalidated from last to first, one can have a rough idea on how the actions the country will take.

My long go-to-example is https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html. A list of rules that they place upon themselves and not on others.

Fear, I think. It's unpleasant to know someone is harming the common good because they're being selfish. Some people can handle that knowledge and admit "well someone clearly owed their promotion to a legacy module/abandoned code/unused system". Whereas others are that someone or are afraid of that someone, and they make up a bunch of excuses.

This dynamic comes up often in engineering management.

> You can trust people's greed, you can't trust their morals.

I've lived this experience. It's a time old tale. Judas Iscariot sold out his best friend for a few silver pieces.

However, I've learned I can trust someone's morals so long as it comes from outside themselves. In small ways, that outside is society, school, company or circumstance. But I think the big one is more important, i.e., Jeremiah 17:9-10

I rewatched Ghost in the Shell recently and I was struck by how poorly it aged. Its animation holds up but its story felt weaker than I remembered. Like the director reached for something deep, couldn't get ahold of it, and then covered his tracks behind wordy philosophy.

This piece goes into some detail: https://www.founderscoop.com/2024/what-went-wrong-at-techsta.... An erudite and incisive autopsy of a disintegrating accelerator.

I'm no longer in the startup scene so I can't vouch for its facts, however.

I thought this read as "Quaker News" which would be more compelling if the revival behind it played out.

This article tries to describe the past, present & potential future of the relationships between the Media, Tech, and their Audiences. However, I felt the stream-of-conscious style was disorganized, and its ideas were undeveloped.

If the writer had instead developed a logical mental model of those relationships and presented them in stages, I could follow along easier and appreciate their points better. Even better, a few diagrams to demonstrate how they see the territory shifting over time. Wrap it up with citations on prior art, and then it may yet be a proper tech spec :^)

I've lived this dynamic as a manager. I've come to see it as a problem of "ownership" which obscures a larger problem of role confusion. When competent people try to be responsible & knowledgeable with work but lack control for that work to be done well. Think "engineers are ready to launch a new feature but the PM struggles with written English and can't draft an email." What do you do as an engineer?

There's a few usually bad options like drafting the email yourself, teaching the PM english, etc. Whatever is done, the best engineers I've seen know their job and their role, and can tell others. They balance their sense of responsibility with the reality of what they control. They price work outside of their job role, to be paid in political capital, e.g. a promotion.

If the professional does not define their role, other people will do it for them. If the professional avoids pricing, they're saying their time is free. That person get marked as a patsy or a cog. Someone who messes can be dumped on and who, thanks to corporate Pavlovian conditioning, gets work done without upsetting the status quo. The more messy the work is, the less control you have, the more time you personally need to sacrifice. It's a recipe for burn out, role confusion, and other people's ideals becoming your performance standards.

You raise a good point on how people like us enjoy leveraging ambiguous philosophy for our own amorality. If the philosopher fails to take a stand — something is good, something is bad, something is wrong, something is right — their ideas are easily repurposed for rationalizing, even absolving, immoral acts.

People like me want nice-sounding, undemanding ideas that makes them look good and feel good. We desire ideas that shift with words, ideas that lack solid form and the logical consistency that would ward off our own desires.

Like you said, it's dangerous because people think ambiguous philosophy as a vitamin, when really it's an intellectual candy. Tasty and sweet, but no nutrition for the soul, and certainly it gives no energy for its exercise.

Learning the full context before pushing a problem is alright advice. Same with sharing context on the impact of an otherwise hard-to-see problem.

Otherwise, this article is banal. It lacks a strong or unique take on the topic of "Manager ignoring problem I care about". There's nothing new for staff/principals already skilled in navigating people & forming insights, and nothing deep for juniors who want to see behind the scenes, how the sausage gets made.

This strikes close to home. Until you've experienced love, you cannot understand it. Doubly so for the purest forms of love, love above human love.

I wager we avoid that kind of love because it boils down to "sacrifice yourself for the good that's outside you". In human terms it's something like parents sacrificing themselves for their children, or friends sacrificing themselves for their friends[1]. Losing something painfully that cannot be replaced in the world. A world where we have all the time, money, internet to distract us from hardship & suffering that brings us closer to goodness.

I personally didn't believe in God until I received a tiny part of his love for myself.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2015%3A13&...

See the TV Adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(The_Twilight_Zone) for a different ending, and in my opinion, less edgy ending:

> While Clarke's story ended with the priest in despair after the revelation that the alien civilization had perished in order to light "the Christmas star," the TV episode added an epitaph by the aliens, revealing their acceptance of their place in the universe. Brennert later commented that "Over the years I've taken a little bit of heat from certain fans in the science fiction community for changing the ending of this story. I actually maintain that the ending as it is in this episode is implicit in the story and is not really at odds with the kind of metaphysical work that Clarke did in Childhood's End."[1]

I used to believe in the fancies of the communities I was apart of I thought they represented reality. Everyone talked up small iPhones, Linux on the Desktop, People paying/donating for FOSS, etc. But actually my community really just reflected a small sliver of reality. Even at that, more than a few folks were just talking about topics they wish were true, or they wish that they had done.

Grist was one of the first tools we looked at but it wasn't the desktop-first app my team was hoping for. Self-hosting a service felt like a little too much upkeep, on top of all the other systems we own. I recall the data was also not git diff-able.

More like a git-based log than database. We use it for requests and questions that come up on our slack. We figured out how to extract threads from slack, transform them into CSV files and then load them into Airtable.

Airtable has a great UI but the data becomes isolated from our ETL script and it means we have to re-download and export to CSV to use in other contexts.

It'd be great if we could load a CSV into a desktop editor, and then have it store certain views/linked records to other CSV files in a local "db.json" file.

Love the idea of this. Is there a feature to support views or linked records from other CSV files?

Basically, my team is curious if there's a smaller, lighter, local-alternative to Airtable, which we can collaborate on with Git. It's a big ask and maybe not on your roadmap, but something that is on our minds.

The missing word from this conversation is "duty": a moral obligation to others.

People pretend rights can exists without duties because, like you said, they're trying to get good things for free. They're asking for work from others and not being upfront on the price of the work. I say "I have a right to good service at the DMV", because I can't say the DMV must give me, let alone everyone, good service. In a larger view[1], a language of rights without duties undermines the broader social contract, confuses conversations with indirect terms[2], and provides the selfish with the illusion of care for their fellow man.

As it so happens, the original declaration of human rights[2] specifically calls out the necessary union of duties and rights. However, the UN declaration does not do so, likely because no one, bar a few western countries, actually had the power to enforce those rights on a global scale. Hannah Arendt commented on this topic at length, though it's hard for hyper-individualists to digest[4].

[1] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/samuel-moyn-rights-dut...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights#C...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Declaration_of_the_Ri...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Critique_of_huma...

The proportion of philosophy to features in their marketing seems off. They say "trust our code, not our words" and then spend several paragraphs of words talking up their ideals. It feels like something is being hidden or talked around.

Data-independence may be one aspect that's not transparent. Compared to https://obsidian.md/, I can't just use raw Markdown or CSV file with Anytype. I've paid Obsidian $300+ just because it's data independence with a few obvious strings attached. By the same token, if I pursued a local-version of Notion for my team, I would also want the same freedom that local, open-standard files offer.

Neat. What's the name of the book?

Yeah, the diagnosis is really weak. Superbly weak actually. "<X> is not easy to use" has zero insight and takes no stand. It's a flimsy, worn-out string to connect the dots; the upside is that any stakeholder can grasp it and no one can strangle you with it.

Also, the pattern of "diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action" is copy-pasted from the book "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"[1]. I've seen this internally at companies and even though the article is a great read, the application leaves much to be desired.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

Thank you for coining the term "mod pity". It makes me think about roles where people, myself included, have sought the pity of others as a shield against criticism.