rebeccaskinner

> Identities can backfire though because people who don't identify as your identity have different ideas about that identity than you might.

That can be true, and I think it's particularly common with imposed, rather than adopted identities. In fact, people having particular ideas about you that aren't necessarily true is the reason a lot of imposed identities exist in the first place. There's not a lot you can really do about it. I suppose you can try very hard to not identify with anything, but that's not always an option, and even when it is it would be a very lonely existence.

> And in general, I think people who make $IDENTITY the main feature of their personality will have difficulty outside of that one social group.

Another way of saying that is that people who aren't well rounded will have trouble in a lot of social situations. I agree with that, but I don't think it's a problem related to having identities so much as it is someone restricting themselves to a single focal identity.

People find others who have things in common with them. Those things people have in common get names. Those named things become a big part of a persons life and so become an identity.

Sometimes, identities are something that we choose- the article is focused on people choosing a psychiatric diagnosis as an identity but there are a lot of other identities people choose, based on their work, hobbies, where they live, etc.

For example, I am a programmer. It’s an identity I have, based on both my work and hobbies. It’s a useful shorthand for me to share some information about myself and find other likeminded people.

People don’t always choose their identities either. A lot of people have an identity imposed on them. When society creates an identity around something that applies to you, it might be impossible to avoid it even if you want to, and embracing it may be a necessary survival strategy.

I don’t think it’s a matter of desperation that people cling to them. In some cases it’s a matter of pride, people want a way to claim their membership in a group and show their values and things they care about. I think we all do it, but some people are aware of it or do it intentionally more than others. In other cases, like I said, it’s not a choice. People may desperately want to not have a label imposed on them but they can do little to avoid it.

I'm currently using an old iPhone, but my plan once it finally dies is to buy a pixel phone and immediately wipe it and install Graphene. It seems really weird to buy a google device if I want better privacy, but based on the research I've done it really does seem like the best option if you value privacy, are willing to deal with a little bit of pain to get privacy, but also need a phone that can at least sometimes do things like run banking apps that force you into the panopticon of bullshit.

I know you specifically said pre-de-googled, but as you said it seems like the options there are really bad, but graphene does seem to make it pretty easy to install (although I haven't actually tried it yet).

This completely changes the chances that I'll buy this. I love the idea, but I just can't see myself ever buying an android device that is running Google's panopticon. I also noticed there's nothing on the product page about privacy, and was about to write this off as another nice gadget that I'd never be able to use.

I'm very hopeful with an unlocked bootloader that the community will provide a more privacy-focused operating system so that I can enjoy this product.

> Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?

Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide.

It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X".

Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different.

Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.

> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

I’ve simply never seen this happen, although I’ve seen a lot of accusations of it. In a very large organization you might look at how your organizations demographics compare to industry demographics in different ways, but that’s always been at most an individual data point that elicits further investigation.

It seems to me like we’re probably not too far apart in our opinions- and perhaps each of us bringing a separate set of experiences is letting us come to a better and more nuanced view.

I still do personally think that at a high level diverse teams and companies do tend to be better than non-diverse ones, especially when you have many axes of diversity. I imagine that some of that is direct benefit when someone is able to pull on their experiences to directly benefit a project, and some of it is simply that teams who hire the best people without artificial barriers will both be better and tend to be more diverse.

That’s observational rather than prescriptive though. When it comes to individual teams and individual hiring decisions I’d never advocate for anything other than hiring the best available candidate. Similarly, while you can say that across the population having diversity is good, you shouldn’t assume any specific part of an individual’s background or experience should manifest in any particular way.

All that said, I do think understanding the general ways that different aspects of a persons background impacts their work experience is a necessary part of building an effective workforce. How can you remove artificial barriers without taking time to understand what those barriers are?

Although I’ve had my own negative experiences at times, my experience overall is that most DEI initiatives I’ve been involved with have not been unaware of the risks and nuance, and people involved are usually trying to do the right things. I don’t think modern DEI approaches are overall worse- just more controversial because of broader social, cultural, and political tensions.

> Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity.

Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse team since they would not be willing or able to hire the best candidates.

> As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional.

I don't think this is the right angle to look at it. Everyone has a unique combination of experiences that they bring, and what groups someone belongs to are one part of the set of experiences that make up how they experience the world. DEI programs aren't inventing this, it's just a part of the human condition that we're shaped by the unique combination of our experiences.

Focusing on specific unique aspects of individual people's backgrounds isn't the only shape DEI can take though. Done well, I think they instead look at the shape of systems and processes in place and try broadly to consider how to remove artificial barriers so that people have an equal chance to contribute.

> You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.

I think this does happen a lot. Tokenism and only being seen as a particular part of your identity are problems. I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team. It sucks to be told that I'm wrong to suggest take-home exercises in interviews are a good option because women have caregiver duties and can't make time for them when I, a woman, prefer them because I feel like they offer a better opportunity for me to think deeply about a problem.

I don't think this is a reason to ignore DEI programs though, it's simply a failure case to be aware of.

> I don't like the idea that anyone disagreeing with any dei suggestion should be labeled as intentionally disruptive and bad faith.

My point isn't that anyone disagreeing with a particular suggestion is arguing in bad faith, it's that there are enough bad faith arguments that it becomes effectively impossible to have a productive discussion.

> Calling 80% of discussion here bad faith aimed at holding particular groups down is a big claim that shouldn't be thrown around lightly in a good faith post.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Are 80% of the comments I see on DEI related threads actually acting in bad faith, or am I simply so exhausted by the constant stream of bad faith arguments that I lack the ability to discern between people acting in bad faith, uninformed people acting in good faith parroting bad-faith actors arguments, and people who are legitimately trying to engage. For that matter, am I an exhausted person who is simply tired of accusations of "wokeism" being thrown at me when I advocate for basic respect and decency, or am I a bad faith actor who tried to sneak an outrageous claim into a reasonable sounding post in order to undermine people who are in favor of DEI programs by making them all sound unreasonable? I may know that I'm simply exhausted, cynical, and seeing a steadily increasing amount of anti-DEI rhetoric here, but such is the state of discourse that there's no way for you to know for sure one way or another.

There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this:

First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around topics or specific language on a social media site, I'm sure you can name some other examples.

Now, this new thing may be a way to address the problem, or not. The problem it's trying to address might have been well understood or not. One way or another the idea gets some momentum.

Next, bigots get wind of the thing and start concern trolling and spreading FUD about it. Everything they say is carefully crafted with a veneer of respectability and plausibility. Any accusations are re-directed. There are people who are motivated and very skilled at making plausible sounding bad-faith arguments. The plausibility of course also convinces people might not intend to be making a bad faith argument, and so are authentic in their indignant responses to accusations of acting in bad faith. Still, the entire point of the arguments was ultimately to disrupt efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to uphold inequality. In some cases these bad faith arguments can end up being a vast majority of the discussion. They make up maybe 80% (not an exact figure) of the comments in any given HN thread about anything tangentially related to DEI for example.

The people trying to make a positive change who have been at it for a while are generally exhausted with trying to deal with the torrent of bad faith arguments, quickly recognize the pattern of them, and ultimately often end up serving as fuel for further bad-faith arguments.

In the end, it becomes nearly impossible to have a productive good faith discussion about whether the original idea is good or not, or how to improve it, because nobody can disentangle legitimate contributors and arguments from the torrent of bad faith actors who are ultimately just trying to disrupt the process. Meanwhile, communities that ought to be served by the initiative are often left standing around watching their value as people or rights to participate equally being thrown around as an abstract subject of ideological argument.

Without any better options, people double down on the original idea because it was at least made in good faith.

It might sound like all of that is an argument against DEI statements- after all, I just spent several paragraphs talking about why it would be hard to have a reasonable good faith debate about it. Still, I think that in this situation they serve a couple of useful purposes. First, I think that it moves discussions around concrete improvements away from a forum where they can be undermined by bad faith arguments and toward a form where individual authors of DEI statements can focus on concrete actions. It incentivizes action over getting mired in these bad faith arguments. If one is to write specifically about how they have or will work to improve DEI, then they necessarily must move past the bad faith and concern trolling arguments and pick some specific actions. Second, I think that it acts as a useful honeypot for people who simply can't act in good faith. If you can't identify any dimension at all along which you will work to improve DEI for any group, then it's hard to see how you can further that part of the mission of an organization. Finally, while it is virtue signaling, that doesn't necessarily need to be bad.

> Argument 3 I find difficult to understand. Misinformation has existed for a long time, and AI is just one more way of making it (perhaps at scale). You've always been able to claim that your political opponent was a puppy murderer with no basis in reality - the way I see things, AI is just a way of laundering that kind of claim.

As someone who is neutral or leaning slightly positive on AI in general, I think misinformation is the biggest cause of concern. The change in scale is worth some concern I think. The ability to gather nearly unlimited information about people and then use that information to generate _bespoke_ propaganda designed to optimally persuade them is a significant shift from the days where a propaganda campaign required a team of experts and a long time to prepare. In that works a targeted propaganda campaign was only reasonable for very high value targets. Now, it can be used for everything from selling pants to convincing people to overthrow their governments. The commoditization of information warfare.

I've been using Kagi since the early in the beta, and I've been happy with it. I think most of this article is maybe a bit overblown, but there are a few things that give me pause.

On the positive side, I still think Kagi's search results are, practically speaking, better than other search engine's results. I don't make heavy use of filters, but used sparingly they've had a really positive impact on my experience. Same with the AI integrations- I don't use them much, but sometimes I do and I'm glad I have the option.

The investment in AI seems totally sensible to me. I'm not "all in" on AI, but it seems obvious to me that AI both clearly compliments document retrieval for a search engine, and integrating AI services fits well with the idea of putting together a service backed by things like Google or OpenAI's APIs (and maybe slowly replacing those dependencies as you grow).

I'm not a mac user, and Orion on iOS was super buggy so I stopped using it, but I guess I can see an argument that it's a worthwhile investment if it's an effective funnel to get people into Kagi. Apple users seem more likely than other groups to pay for things (like a kagi subscription), and if there aren't other ways of getting Kagi added as a default search engine in Safari or Chrome then it seems like a plausible investment I suppose. Maybe not the choice I'd have made, but not something that really makes me question the company either.

Email seems to fit the same narrative as Orion to me. If I were in charge I'm not sure I'd prioritize it, but Google has normalized bundling of email and search for a lot of users, and I can definitely see a plausible argument that people who are already logging into google to use their gmail account would be more likely to churn than people who stay in the Kagi ecosystem.

I had no idea the tshirt thing happened, and sure, it seems like a weird choice but whatever, I don't think it's worth getting up in arms about either.

All that said, the privacy angle does concern me a fair bit. I'm going to give Vlad a bit of the benefit of the doubt here on email. As a fairly privacy conscious person I still pay Google to host my email. Why? Because email is really only as private as the counterparty you are emailing with. The vast majority of people I correspond with are already using Google for email, so keeping my side of the conversation private has a lower ROI than a lot of other things I could spend effort on.

I do worry a lot about other areas of privacy with Kagi though, especially in light of the "let's not get political" comments. We're only getting one side of the conversation, but it had very "right leaning dogwhistle" type vibes to me. Of course with only a few screen shots of a discord conversation it's very hard to know how accurate those vibes might be. I suppose for the moment I'd just say that it gives me pause, and makes me think about how I could recommend Kagi to people who might not be technically savvy enough to understand the potential consequences of their online behavior. Without a much stronger idea of privacy, I would very much worry about anyone using Kagi to search for information related to, e.g. pregnancy if even something as innocuous as searching for pregnancy tests could be used as evidence in a criminal trial against someone accused of a felony for having an abortion- as is the direction many US states are headed. Similarly, I would wonder if I could, in good conscience, recommend people use Kagi to search for any LGBT related material today because they are significant concerns that such searches could be used to persecute people today in many countries, including some US states today and possibly many more US states in the near future.

I'm not likely to cancel my subscription or stop using Kagi over this today. I'm still getting value out of the product, and I think the basic idea that we should have an option for things like search where users are the customer and not the product is a fundamentally sound and important one. The very fact that a lot of people commenting in this thread about privacy concerns are customers and not the product is a great opportunity to demonstrate why it's an important idea.

> One of them is doing something wrong, or at least something that needs changed. Which one?

While this is as true in FP as it is anywhere, my experience is that it’s rarely true of the kind of small pure functions that tend to be composed like this. When someone is using a chain of functions like this, they usually are good abstractions that don’t change, and are short enough to be trivially correct.

In this example I can’t imagine anyone preferring the second style, but there are cases where it’s nicer. For example compare the tacit:

    foo = h . g . f

With the more verbose:

    foo x =
      let
        a = f x
        b = g a
        c = h b
      in c

If a, b, and c have useful names that help you understand the code then the second function might be preferable- but in a lot of cases all the intermediate variables are just adding noise and making it harder to see what’s happening at a glance. The tacit example makes it very clear at a quick glance exactly what’s happening.

My personal rule of thumb is that if you are passing combinators in as arguments to other combinators then you should probably stop, but straightforward chaining is usually okay.

There is no single easy answer, and I'm not a management consultant so I have no interested in trying to sell one. You simply have to do the hard work of understanding the constraints you are operating under and exercising good judgement on how to work in that environment.

And, now I eagerly await the dozens of replies I'm going to get telling me that exercising good judgement and common sense could only mean that I am in fact following the True Agile (unless it doesn't work, then it was obviously No True Agile process).

Agile is a tainted term. For it's proponents, it's become nothing more than a vacuous manifestation of the No True Scottsman fallacy. Anything that works is True Agile, and anything that doesn't is Not True Agile (or would be True Agile if you weren't holding it wrong). The principles that underlie Agile are either entirely self-evident and can't be claimed as a particular benefit of Agile per-se, or they are hopelessly naive about the way people, and companies, actually work. Agile itself has no real original ideas, and offers nothing of value.

At this point, the best thing we can do is let Agile, all of it, die.

As someone who listens to a _lot_ of audio books, I'll admit that the majority of them are quite entertaining but are definitely not worth vaunting over other forms of entertainment. Most of the more intellectually demanding reading I do tends to not even come from books, but rather from things like academic papers, blog posts, and long form articles.

Everyone replying seems to be assuming this time is all for standups and status meetings, but in practice it’s probably about half an hour a week for status updates for us to. The rest of the time is a mix of reserved time for synchronous technical collaboration (e.g. reserved time for pairing, time to talk about technical architecture at a higher level and for people to opt in to presenting some of their work for feedback)

My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.

For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.

They are doing far better now than with fewer meetings, and they’ve consistently agreed that the additional meetings are valuable, so yeah, I think they are.

I started managing a team with the “no meetings, let people do good work” philosophy and I can just say that I’m glad I was given the space as a new manager to find my feet, because I didn’t find that it worked well when taken to an extreme.

Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.

The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.

I think a significant number of people at least enter into the agreement thinking it's a feature. Roughly:

  - Going to the gym sucks, and I don't want to go
  - I should force myself to go to the gym anyway
  - Gyms are expensive, and hard to cancel
  - The pain and shame of canceling, combined with ongoing cost, will be a motivator for me to actually go to the gym

In short, I think a lot of people erroneously believe that locking themselves into the contract will motivate them. Instead, they end up still not going and also paying because of the contract.

Returning isn't even convenient these days. I've been in the process of moving away from streaming services toward physical media, and Amazon is often the only place that carries certain things on disc. Unfortunately, the failure rate is pretty high. Trying to return some DVDs to Amazon is like pulling teeth. Either you have to drive across town to a Whole Foods to drop off the package, or you have to pay $10 to return a $15 DVD and then you have to make sure you are around at whatever time the UPS driver shows up to pick up your return. They won't even give you the address so that you can ship a return yourself, or allow you to print the label so you can leave it on your porch.

It's so painful at this point I've just started building in a 30% markup in the price mentally to account for things I'm going to have to buy an extra copy of. Returning things isn't worth the hassle it except for with very expensive boxed sets.

As a "bonus" amazon has also removed my reviews on things that I've had a particularly high error rate with, since the poor quality is apparently not relevant to the thing they are selling.

To be clear I agree with this, I didn't intend to downplay the impact of that consequence. I think the continued existence of free software is both a practical and moral necessity.

What I was trying to communicate here is that I think meaningful negative impact to free software and to developers is a worst-case scenario and not the most likely scenario. It's plausible, and we should be concerned, but I think there's also a plausible outcome that is neutral or positive for free software if companies end up contributing more to free software as a way of ensuring they are meeting their obligations under the law.

There are two issues here. The first is when there's some product that's being sold. It could be directly, like selling someone software, or indirectly, like selling them a device that includes software. In that case, whoever sold the thing is responsible for all of the software.

I think that's more-or-less fine. There's a concern that companies don't want to be responsible for open source code, and will write everything in-house instead. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies do that, even if it's a bad idea. I don't know how common it'll be, but the worst case scenario is that it turns out to be bad for developers and for free software.

The second, murkier issue, is what happens when there is no selling involved at all. If I download a debian iso, or clone some random repository on github, then there has been concern that the author of that code will be financially liable for any errors in the software. That would be very, very bad. Early versions of the law seem to explicitly say that it would be the case. More recent versions seem like they might have an exception so long as there is absolutely no money changing hands. It's unclear what would happen in cases where open source software accepts donations. It could still end up being harmful to individual developers and to open source software in general. It's hard to say.

I'm not saying this will happen, just that it's the one of the concerns that people have. I can certainly see the argument that some companies will go this route. It might not be the most rational decision, but people aren't always rational. Having something in your control often _feels_ safer.

I think that this part of it could break either way, but the concern is that when faced with a choice between being liable for their own code or being liable for open source code, most companies will choose to write their own code. If so, that would be a net harm to open source and user freedom. I'm not sure it'll happen, but it might.

The biggest issue I see with this law is around liability for open source projects that people are using directly. It'll be disastrous if all open source software ceases to exist or be available in Europe because volunteers face legal liability if their code has a bug. In theory this could even impact people outside of Europe if they don't prohibit access to their code by EU citizens.

I release a lot of code on github. Most of it is just random crap that I wrote to solve a specific need or to explore an idea, and I put it up under an open source license because why not? If it helps someone, that's great. Now I need to be concerned that the random "example-service" project I wrote in C and published a decade ago to go with a blog post I wrote will end up costing me all the money I have ever or will ever earn in my career.

A bit of consolation may be that It's fairly easy to get ahold of region free players these days. 4k discs aren't even region locked at all. Unfortunately I can imagine shipping might be cost prohibited for individual discs.

I hope they reverse course, but as you say, I'm sure the temptation for control is irresistible.

I’m back to buying physical media for exactly these reasons. It’s unfortunate that a lot of things aren’t getting physical media releases these days, or are still only getting dvd releases, but even for Blu-ray the quality is far superior to streaming in most cases, and 4K is even better. Since we’ve started migrating to physical media we no longer have to worry about streaming ability, losing our license to a show, or even network outages.

This reminds me a lot of org-mode(https://orgmode.org/). Do you have plans to add other org-like features, like evaluating code blocks? I don't personally see myself moving away from org-mode, but it would be nice to have something to recommend to people who are reluctant to use emacs, even if it's only for a single application.

I suspect a lot of authors don’t have much choice. Big authors and people who self-publish sure, but a lot of people struggle to get published and I imagine a sizable fraction of publishers who don’t specifically cater to geek audiences would just drop a book and move on to one of the other hundreds of submissions if someone insisted on a drm free release.