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penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Study finds mushrooms magnify memory by boosting nerve growth

I don't think it's a lack of will. It is more an environment that is overwhelming most peoples capacity of will, as well as simply just material circumstances that make all those changes even more difficult, or impossible. Inbetween working long times, low wages, unavailability of healthy food in a lot of places, car-centred culture, you will need absolutely crazy amounts of will power. The solutions to these problems are not individual, but systemic.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Google Search Is Dying (2022)

Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Unit of Value: A Framework for Scaling (2016)

When you draw the line, for both investors and owners, the unit of value is indeed dollars. The goal is to maximise the amount of money you make (subject to some constraints of course), and the use value that people derive is secondary. I think the two are even to an extend opposed in our world - you want to maximise the exchange value (i.e. the money you make) for the least amount of use value (i.e. how useful it is to the person) you can, because ultimately you do not want to permanently fulfil that persons need - you need them to come back and pay again.

Startups are constrained by the same thing, the whole "doing it to save the world" is just a bullshit story, and monetisation will always rear its ugly head eventually, or the startup will die, because what is doing is genuinely good, but cannot be monetised or ads cannot be inserted in it ...

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Unit of Value: A Framework for Scaling (2016)

It's interesting when you see tech people trying to reason about concepts that have been thoroughly discussed and rediscussed, without said tech people seemingly having any background in that. At least its better than MBA and business types doing it ...

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: DIB Guide: Detecting Agile BS (2018) [pdf]

I think a large organisation absolutely can be agile... but you will have to rethink what organisations are and how they work, dispense with things like orgcharts, and the way that power works and think about the underspecified parts of agile - i.e. strategy, team coordination and so on. The book Team Topologies outlines something that looks very much like it tbf...

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Most data work seems fundamentally worthless

The late David Grabber had a great book about this - Bullshit Jobs. And when you draw the line, we do keep a lot of work and a lot of jobs around purely because if we don't a lot of people are going to have a lot of free time to ask a lot of questions about the way that the world works. And the very foundation of our system is that you have to go work, sell your labour to make someone else rich, then buy things to make someone else rich and eventually die.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Most data work seems fundamentally worthless

The problem is that there are a loooot of ethical implication on using your own personal data in the first place, where that goes, who has access to it, how is it handled, and so on and so on. Then advertisements isn't anything but propaganda, which has its own set of implications. And then finally we have the ever present pressure to push more and more ads, thereby making the internet in general worse and worse, so the very field of ads is in itself unethical, as it is destroying the virtual environments we are building.

Also ads != recommendations. In a sense after a while these two are also at odds with each other. Cause there is again, the ever present need to sell you more stuff.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Most data work seems fundamentally worthless

OMG, pretty much a lot of what I have personally been through. But the problem is deeper and goes beyond a company not knowing what to do with someone that does ML/Data Science ... Most of software that comes out either does not contribute to society at all or is in some form harmful to it, usually due to the need for such things to be somehow profitable. And pretty much all the senior devs I know are burned out on this in one form or another and want to quit and have a farm/bakery or whatever that actually does something

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Pessimistic thoughts on startups (2020)

> The idea was always build something impactful and make it as profitable as possible via fulfilling your company's mission.

Nah, the idea was always to make a lot of money. It was never to build something impactful or useful. Sure that may be stated goal, but without path to monetisation it aint happening, and for so many things that are either good or helpful, they can't be monetised ...

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: Consultants: the real reason it costs so much to build new subways in America

Quite the opposite. In many ways employers are like tenants - they rent out the position to you and in return cash in a certain part of the value you produce. Just like with landlords in a properly just society you do not need that middleman ... The hordes of unhoused people are there not because of desirable or undesirable tenants, but because of landlords gatekeeping the access to homes.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: The age of cargo cult Agile must end

I think both the rebuttal and the original articles are good, but talk about different things. The original one seems to talk about the way Agile tends to be done, especially via the world of corporate, consultant agile, certified scrum masters and so on, whereas the rebuttal is talking from the point of view of what Agile should be. Two very different things, both very valid, and in a sense the discrepancy between the two tells you a lot about the state of agile itself.

That said I love the thing about ending Sillicon Valley bullshit - IMO it has led to a lot more hurt than good.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: The age of cargo cult Agile must end

There is also what Stafford Beer writes about when discussing viable systems - the goal for most organisations, is not their stated goals, but survival and perpetuating the system. The stated goals are a byproduct of that, if and when achieved.i.e. in a lot of universities education is a byproduct, in a lot of hospitals, healthcare is a byproduct, hell in a lot of governments, governance and actually improving things is a byproduct, that will not happen unless there is an absolute need for it...

In a way it's like running a tricky multi-objective optimisation, and the AI will find a way to cheat the stated goal.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: The age of cargo cult Agile must end

Oh, there is definitely something to that. There are people, not just managers, in general who for one reason or another _want_ someone to take charge, be responsible and tell everyone what to do. Which is not bad, per se, it gets bad when the insistence is that this be a boss assigned to you, rather than someone you choose, but that is broader than just agile and the topic in question.

penguinvondoom | 3 years ago | on: The age of cargo cult Agile must end

IMO the main problem is in the very way organisations are structured - it is about power, and people (really meaning management) want to achieve good enough results, given that their control is maintained. Agile as aesthetics is cool, but actual implementations move power away from management and we can't have that. So we will rebrand project managers to POs and whatever managers to scrum masters, and will follow the rituals as long as they don't get in the way of normal run of things.

Agile was grounded on solid principles, but is very ideologically naive, which allowed its easy cooption by consultants and management.

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