essayist

"In brief: Can you bring a dozen brownies to the noon lunch tomorrow?

Details: Dessert plans fell through. Your brownies are the best, and you owe me..."

This structure is liberating for me. I can distill what I want/need into something brief and even brusque, knowing that people will read on if the need justification. It also makes me clarify what I want. Probably not appropriate if I'm too far down the totem pole from the addressee.

The monthly database textfile is not that large, but it is unwieldy.

I'm a web consultant, but database backends are not yet a thing, at least not for us. Static webpages, all the way down.

So I use a script to parse the database into a series of text files and directories. E.g. JFK/index.html is a list of all the airports receiving flights from JFK, e.g. LAX, SFO, etc. And JFK/LAX.html is that month's results for all JFK to LAX flights. Etc.

As I recall, once I'd worked it out, it took 15 minutes to generate all those files on my Mac laptop, and then a little ftp action got the job done. Worked great, but someone did complain that we were polluting search results with so many pages for LAX, SFO, etc. etc. (SEO, sadly, was not really on our radar.)

That was replaced within a year by a php setup with a proper Oracle backend, and I had to explain to a DB admin what a weighted average was, but that's another story.

  The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it can become another full-time job. At best it will be a consuming and challenging part-time task that requires ongoing skills.

Bonus true story: I worked for an economic consulting/data/analytical software timesharing firm in the early '80s. They could see that PCs were going to be a huge threat, so they tried to sell "data kits". For instance (and I'm making up the numbers), for $50 you could buy a download of 10 years of GDP data or similar.

Their market logic was: if we just get 1% of the PC market, we'll be rich.

Spoiler: we didn't get 0.1%.

DRI (since absorbed into McGraw Hill) had EPS, an advanced economic/financial analysis scripting language, provided via timesharing (mainframes on the East Coast of the USA). I was a customer support programmer in San Francisco the day that they rolled out a powerful arrays feature on the testing mainframe (no clients, but lots of real work going on).

One could put anything as an element inside an array. So I tried:

    X=array(123, "abc")
    Y=Array(X)

    i=loop from 1 to 1000
    x(i+1) = array (xi)

So far, so good, excusable as "clever programmer tests the limits". And then I ran it again.

Same result, plus, 2 minutes later, a call for me from my friend Kevin, who was a lead developer on EPS in DRI HQ: "Chris, what the ^&^&^!@@ are you doing?"

But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.

The company I worked for offered very expensive timesharing by the hour. Clients used an "Englishy" interpreted language to do economic forecasts, and client staff often programmed their own procedures.

My boss came to me one day to request that I speed up something a client had developed themselves, because it had become too expensive for them to run, and they were ready to bolt.

I had no desire to understand what their code did, and so treated the code mostly like a blackbox, and my job as speeding things up while leaving the transformation of inputs to particular outputs intact.

I had enough experience to know what the low hanging fruit were and went after those in the code. A day's work or so, and we got a 50-90% speed-up, enough to satisfy the client. I still don't really know what the code did. But I enjoyed the effort.

Phrased in terms of Zoom since I've become oh so familiar with it these past few months. I see the value, since it's probably easier to connect to than a Zoom meeting.

Yes! Another way to say this: would-be innovators often fail or are delayed because the game they perceive is not the game being played. In aerospace, as you point out, we ought to change the game.

In other situations, say nutrition, we shouldn't (or at least I won't). E.g. Soylent sees the "game" as "get nutrition with minimal muss/fuss", whereas I prefer to see it as "enjoy experimenting with food prep and then consume with friends".

Missing the "game" perspective, the article too much boils down to "people are stupid", and that's not a winning perspective if you're trying to drive technology adoption.

But I'm arguing (SSC may not be) that effective scissor statements create both passion and tunnel vision in people, even one at a time. And so when there are people with passion and tunnel vision on both sides, voilà, scissor. (It's a little bit like "drunken mob". You can't have a mob with just one person, but each person, arguably, gets drunk on their own.)

SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to ensnare a lot of people.

If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune.

I sure am not.