lemmsjid

The original Star Trek was explicitly pitched as heartening back to the age of sail. And it was an exploration vessel, not tied to a fleet. So you’d look to Captain Cook as an historical parallel: the Captain was a combination of chief scientist, diplomat, and strategist. And indeed Cook died in an onshore altercation that left his final expedition in a precarious situation.

Picard was much closer to a modern naval captain: his ship had a clear chain of command and it was part of the plot that his xo did the dangerous expeditions so he could remain in command of the overall mission.

I would add that Eisenhower was a general of generals in d day. Generals closer to the action would sometimes find themselves in danger. For example Roosevelt Jr landed under fire and received the Medal of Honor. And for ship captains that was quite a bit more true.

A historian can make their interpretation of history plausible. A group of historians can reinforce a narrative that is then undercut by the next generation of historians. What made Rommel a good commander is a complex question and we might not yet be done exploring the answer.

Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.

If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.

Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?

TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.

Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.

Interesting. Things I think of as quite reasonable, though certainly with counter arguments, are to him fundamentally preposterous and not even worthy of reasonable consideration.

My kid goes to a very liberal California school. The main difference between it and my school growing up is that it is no longer acceptable to ostracize or beat up lgbtq kids or kids who are different in other ways. Part of that is because, gasp, the school builds acceptance into the curriculum. I wish I grew up now, it’s such a nicer time to be a weird nerd.

You’re ignoring general heavy workloads such as observability. How much telemetry do they gather and analyze for tracking and fraud detection. A quick google on Tesco engineering shows that they process 35k qps against couchbase, and 35 terrabytes of telemetry data per day. They track 150k devices in their ecosystem, which, reading between the lines, would produce the telemetry and require observability, state management, anomaly detection, etc. They have hundreds of thousands of employees using these devices for varying purposes. We’re talking quite a bit of compute, which also requires high availability.

I know nothing about Tesco beyond that quick google search, but I’ve been at several companies where I would read online comments claiming we could reduce our workload to a few servers, and I would think of our tens of thousands of fully loaded machines and roll my eyes.

I’d say a useful way of thinking about caching is through the lens of the CAP theorem. You are facing a situation where compute requirements exceed the bounds of a single process. There are a variety of things you can do here, all with consequences to the Consistency aspect of your data. Two strategies with consequences are caching and horizontal scaling. So look to vertical scaling or efficiencies in data modeling first.

I like your comment btw. I’d add Observability to CAP to incorporate what you’re saying.

Quite agree, this is how I explain it to people. When you think of cache as another derived dataset then you start to realize that the issues caches bring to architectures are often the result of not having an agreement between the business and engineering on acceptable data consistency tolerances. For example, outside the world of caching, if you email users a report, and the data is embedded in the email, then you are accepting that the user will see a snapshot of data at a particular time. In many cases this is fine, even preferred. Sometimes not, and instead you link the user to a realtime dashboard instead.

Pretty much every view the user sees of data should include an understanding as to how consistent that data is with the source of truth. Issues with caching (besides basic bugs) often come up when a performance issue comes up and people slap in a cache without renegotiating how the end user would expect the data to look relative to its upstream state.

I enjoy wordle and wouldn’t automate it to replace my play. I also enjoy techie people demonstrating that you can automate X with Y tool. That’s another form of problem solving. Can’t those enjoyments exist simultaneously?

Huh, I agree with your last sentence but think the author did a good job of explaining that the cost of layout experimentation in a startup can grow over time if the results of the experiments are overstated. The first question for a startup should always be: is this work worth doing in the first place? Tinkering with layout can be a tempting but fruitless rabbit hole. Even if it doesn’t tie up resources it can lead to a false sense of progress and get product thinking stuck in local maximae.

As an ex new englander I approve of y’all over youse because it’s hard to use “youse” efficiently without saying “youse guys”.

I partially agree with you but have some counter thoughts.

Tone is something that can be adopted intentionally or unintentionally. If you hear a pilot on a radio dryly say something in a calm and detached tone, it could be in the context of an emergency. Pilots are enculturated to adopt that tone (for various reasons). Meanwhile particular cultures have different levels of acceptability when it comes to tone: some cultures perceive other cultures as more angry, or detached, because of the norms of communication within those cultures.

In short, I think the tone of “calm, scientific detachment” is often weaponized to lend undeserved credibility to an argument, because people tend to believe people more when they adopt that tone.

Furthermore, tone does have a purpose if used alongside a well done argument. For example, in the article the OP linked to, there is a rather exhaustive refutation of the book in question. The tone of the author previews that their entire opinion on the book is negative, given all the arguments they put forth in their review. If the author of the review had adopted a calm and thoughtful tone, perhaps it would indeed have been more effective because the reader would decide. On the other hand, most people won’t read the entire review, so the tone of the author makes it clear what their opinion is.

That said I am not wholly disagreeing with you: would be interesting to do a study using some varying markers to identify tone, and identify, I don’t know, argumentative complexity, and see if snarkiness is associated with a lack of complexity. Assuming you can find markers with predictive power.

I was intrigued and took a Quick Look at the top studies on this subject and the metrics used are things like relative overdose deaths in an area, crime statistics, and usage of treatment programs. They say that by virtue of a number of epidemiological metrics that safe consumption sites appear to be associated with harm reduction in terms of overdoses, while not increasing crime stats. I don’t see outsized claims of objective truth being made, more of the standard, “here’s how we got the numbers, here’s the numbers, they appear to point in this direction.”

I’m not doubting your claim but I’m wondering how that very weird paper you’re citing bubbles up to the top, when there’s some very middle of the road meta analyses that don’t make outsized claims like access to objective truth.

Personally, I find a team seems to be healthiest if a mixture of personalities are on it. They should all be competent.

When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.

Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering.

Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.

In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.

Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.

I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.

I think what you're seeing there is Jemisin actively foregrounding and exploring a difficult fact, which is that people who were abused are more likely to turn around and be abusers.

Often times books turn abuse into the catalyst for a noble struggle and cathartic improvement, when in fact that often isn't the case. There's large swathes of human history where oppressive regimes were powerful enough to quickly and brutually suppress rebellions. When violence and abuse are normalized in a culture, it can take a long time and a lot of failed struggles to truly unwind the violence.

I think Jemisin is actively trying to explore that mentality, which is pretty brave because it does make the characters off putting. As the reader you want so badly for them to rise out of the muck and take on a noble struggle, but they're caught up in the cycle of violence.

I say this with respect for your viewpoint, I think you're being very fair about expressing your response, and I completely see where you're coming from.

On your first point, you have to at least acknowledge that a ton of people strongly disagree with you. I've certainly bounced off of widely read and highly rated novels before, but rarely do I leave with a complete dismissal of the quality of the work. It seems almost personal to you, calling a widely and multiply published author a "child throwing out random ideas".

On your second point: The Nebula Awards specifically target "science fiction" and "fantasy" genres. I'm quite widely read in science fiction. I took a look at the list of novels that have won or been finalists for the Nebula Awards. It turns out I've read quite a few of them, scattered over the decades the Nebulas have existed. The Fifth Season is far from the only set of books with fantastical elements to have won, and the ones I've read that have won have plenty of world building elements that would be incorrect by a fourth grade textbook (FTL? Reincarnation? Fire breathing dragons?). Yes, the Game of Thrones novels (a Song of Ice and Fire), though quite excellent, are quite firmly in the realm of fantasy, and they were often Nebula finalists! By your criteria, the Nebula Awards were "destroyed" a long time ago. Several books, including some from the very early years of the Nebula Awards, are now called "science fantasy", i.e. science fiction that leans into fantastical elements. The Fifth Season is actually typically labeled as "science fantasy".

If the Fifth Season "destroyed" the Nebula Awards, then you would see more recent winners being almost exclusively science fantasy. I haven't read as many of the newer winners as I have older winners, but two of my favorite novels of recent years won or were finalists: Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is pretty much a core science fiction novel, and Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, which is even more fantastical than the Broken Earth.

One of my favorite recent-years science fiction novels, Children of Time, surprisingly didn't get a Nebula, but it did get a Hugo. Looking at its publishing year though, 2015, I see why! Three Body Problem was nominated, and Annihilation, which I absolutely adore (but can't spell), won that year.