human20190310

The outgoing product is nevertheless fully determined by the incoming work being done. It would make more sense to group a set of tasks into a deliverable than a time period. You have to do that anyway to deliver anything coherent.

Sprints to me seem completely contrived.

In reality, there are only things that people are working on, and things that no one is working on. There's no need for a third category of "things that are in the sprint" as long as someone (anyone!) keeps the task queue sorted in priority order.

Moreover it might not just be developer time vs. latency that's being traded off.

Maintaining a stateful websocket connection on the server side isn't cost-free, and that connection would be idle nearly 100% of the time. The bandwidth consumed via Google's polling solution might well be cheaper than open socket file descriptors of a websockets solution.

> There is no good way for a person to identify another person without first mutually agreeing on Brand identities.

How is this absence not a good thing? If someone wants to be identified, they have to go through the trouble of creating an identity. In fact, it would be preferable to also not have a permanent or consistent personal identity with respect to brands either.

> if they pump out people that don't have skills over time their "Prestige" doesn't amount to much

I think you're underestimating the degree to which corrupt, inept institutions can maintain their influence over society.

Hippies are at least as greedy as anyone else.

Anything that is more advanced than necessary is too advanced to be comfortable with.

It's a great, succinct post. Deeply uncool. A programmer should be modest about their skills, skeptical about new-new things, eschew bullshit, and terrified of dependencies. I buy the whole thing.

Moreover, I trust the advice of someone who rates themselves poorly more than someone proclaiming that they're a hotshot.

While I agree that in many cases JSON parsing is not the largest consumer of resources, it really sucks when it is.

At some point it seems like a general mindset shifted from making things efficient at every level to assuming things don’t matter if you’re probably doing something worse anyway.

At risk of embarrassing my self statistically, what exactly happens when you do this?

I.e., if you're controlling for country, that means you're bucketing by country, and looking at each subset, right? So if country is represented by a non-discrete value... what exactly happens?

> However, if the top-level politicians, who remain technically inept, are the ones giving the orders, confusion will remain.

The converse would also be true though; a technologically adept leadership that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion, likely worse confusion.

Deeper still, a militarily adept leadership, or any other narrowly adept leadership, that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion.

Politicians have to deal with society as a whole, and as long as no one can master every area of expertise, they need to have someone doing analyses on their behalf.