chasingsparks

Joined 19 years ago

Karma
2,070
Submissions
523
Member since
Feb 1
I am a dork. I have a blog. http://pathdependent.com/ I am neat.

john.b.nelson[[@]]chasingsparks[[.]]com

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Recent submissions

Comment · 15 years ago
Yea. I don't see anything wrong with being alone when the right person is not there. Settling is not better than being alone. What I did was worse than that. I had something great and turned my back on it.
Comment · 15 years ago
This is my response to the blog post that I wrote, Mortality and Dating (http://pathdependent.com/articles/mortality-and-dating). It was oddly popular on HN, so I'm submitting the follow up. Although the situation is not very common, I think a lot of people on here make the same mistakes for different reasons.
Comment · 15 years ago
Comment · 15 years ago
Agreed. Furthermore, I would say that's true of most things requiring a lot of experience

The people who come up with the methodologies initially are probably the people who have needed them the most / longest. They had experience that informed the development of the methodologies not methodologies that substituted for experience. Therefore, these methodologies are more successful given people who could figure out a similar methodology independently and could conceivably be worse than nothing for people who couldn't.

Comment · 15 years ago
I enjoy when Zed is appropriately flippant (irony intended). While, I don't have experience working for any teams that consider "XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall," etc, to be gospel, I can see that being more than "fucking" annoying.

That being said, I can see some people who haven't tried these methodologies as immediately devaluing them. Don't do that. As long as you don't view the methodologies as a silver bullet they can teach you a thing or two. Critically playing with something helps you think about why it works and where it doesn't.

(I'm not saying Zed is saying that they are not worth learning; in fact, I don't want to put any words in his mouth, especially because he's here and will probably weigh in, even though he's known for being so reserved and unopinionated.)

Comment · 15 years ago
I actually started working on something like this a week or two ago called falsifiable.org. My time is limited but I've thought about the project a lot. You seem to be doing what I want anyway, so please drop me an email for an exchange of ideas.
Comment · 15 years ago
I think catastrophes demonstrate interesting properties of human communications. All of these reports on imminent meltdown are plausible to people ignorant of the plant's design and even those who are experts on nuclear energy . The levels of distrust and recognition that there is probably noisy communications increase simultaneously.

From a sensationalist viewpoint, the plausibility and terrifying nature of the consequences are seductive, so these stories are widely read; from the expert standpoint, seeing a system with so many redundancies in such a wounded state calls into question just how many things might be going wrong.

At this point, unless your dealing directly with the reactors, your really in the dark and if your one of these people, you're focused on preventing further degredation, not managing the message. Even for organisations that do manage the message based on a team of experts (e.g. nuclear regulatory agencies) things move at such a frantic pace, things are wrong by the time you say them.

Regardless, it really does show that people like watching car crashes.

Comment · 16 years ago
Actually, I should clarify but I don't like editing titles. I wrote WeightNudge to relieve some personal stress; it does not help other people "destress". The project I've been working on full-time suddenly became depressing, as it forced me to remember some people who died. I dropped the project for a few days and wrote this as a temporary escape.

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