This is the coolest place! I'm so sad to see they're in financial distress.
As a kid I would browse their website endlessly, just fascinated by all the weird stuff. It scratched the same itch that watching Mythbusters would scratch. In adulthood I rediscovered them and went to their Milwaukee location for the first time. We spent hours there, looking through all the cool stuff they have. It really gives you ideas!
> ...getting insecure or jealous of all the other social connections that your extrovert friends have. There’s an asymmetry there that can feed lots of insecurities.
I wouldn't sweat this too much. Mathematically, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.
I don’t fully understand how this is a paradox. I guess it’s based on the fact that there are „super nodes“ in human social networks, where one person has many friends, while most others don’t? Or is there anything more to it?
It's the more expansive definition of paradox, meaning something like "counterintuitive result". In expectancy, a randomly chosen person has an average number of friends. You might therefore think that a random person and their friends, all of whom seem randomly chosen, would have the same expected number of friends. But you'd be wrong, because the friends weren't random after all: they had at least one friend. Not a logical paradox, but a surprising fact.
There is a fun but rare kind of humanist that doesn't think they are special but are curious about others, see the value in randos they meet and thinks that _others_ are special and they really _listen_, you know?
Pretty sure its just that they all have superior statistical intuition.
> Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.
Just as a side note, I worked for several ad agencies with art directors who did the same thing. We'd make the final ad, then screw it up intentionally and show it to the client so they'd spot the obvious flaws/mistakes, tell us to fix them, and then we'd give them what we'd already done.
It's not a strategy I use in my own work now, but it taught me something interesting about the psychology of clients. I think there are better ways to let them know they got their money's worth, like writing full explanations of your choices and thought processes. But intentionally sabotaging your first draft is definitely a well-worn method in the art and design world.
I got a general contractor talking shop once and he confessed to me that they overwhelm the customers with cosmetic choices on purpose. People need to put a certain amount of energy into a process to feel they have done their due diligence, and it often doesn't really matter how that energy is spent, just that it is.
In his case it was to distract the customer from worrying about things they can't control, like physics and building codes. The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance. Trying to fight that can snowball an entire project.
Easy decisions that you ultimately question leave a sliver of doubt and regret in your mind. I could have done more. I should have said something. Things you work your ass of on and still don't succeed, you can say you did your best.
> The bones of a building only allow so many locations for a sink, for instance
Why not just tell the customer that instead. I'd rather pay for someone to tell it to me straight, than someone who wants to purposefully overload the customer with trivial decisions.
Because you don’t get paid for arguing with customers. Neither the physical time nor the stress.
If you don’t deal with it all day you may have no idea/empathy for the sorts of coping mechanisms people develop to reduce trauma. People can be the worst. They pay you for copper and expect gold.
Also as I stated above, until the customer has invested a certain amount of energy into the process, they will second guess themselves and you. Reviews are often tainted by how the customer feels about themselves. Ultimately the same problem the Duck is solving. They need to pee on it to mark it as theirs.
Every ad / design agency I’ve worked for engages in this practice. Futhermore, in the large corporate rebranding exercises I’ve witnessed approximately 75% of the engagement consists of make-work designed to justify the price.
From a purely psychological perspective I find it fascinating. If you want to get a handle on how it looks IDEO is a company that publishes and speaks on ”process” quite prolifically. Keyword: “Design Thinking.”
One of my big quarrels in my professional life is how clients/bosses want exposure to creative process but can't really handle it, if it's anything but linear, which, in actual reality, it never is.
Going through the creative process without exposing the bossman to it and then playing "creative process theater" for them is a solution to the problem, because the theater caters to their unrealistic expectations, not to reality.
But, the more tightly controlling they are, and the shorter the reporting interval, the more difficult it becomes to execute on this charade. This is particularly poignant, because the point applies not just to ad agencies and design work, but also other types of creative endeavor like software engineering. I really pity the wretched souls having to do daily standups, who end up getting caught in the crossfire there.
In particular: Bosses have unrealistic expectations of what creative process looks like. Those unrealistic expectations get reinforced because so much of the creative process they witness is "creative process theater". And then the poor soul who finds themselves in a situation where they have no other choice but to expose their boss to real creative process obviously can't deliver on their boss's expectations.
Most bosses have never gone through the creative processes that are being discussed here. Or if the boss did it for bread they won’t know how to apply the process to cars. A corporate rebranding is done many times by an agency but once or twice, ever, by the individuals on the client personnel. The boss who knows how it’s actually done will get less theater than the uncertain or over-eager boss who’s doing their first agency rebrand. And, sometimes, the marketing exec is party to the theater because they know a straight up offer to their upline won’t get accepted.
Put another way: I’ve done rebrands for agencies themselves. They’re still prone to the errors even though they know how the sausage is made. It’s an innate human tendency.
And btw — nothing is pretty. Branding, marketing, coding, project management, budgeting. It doesn’t have to be bullshit, but process is not often going to be pretty.
This is a bit like the age-old tale about the contractor that adds waits at the end of each function in his codebase, then when the client complains about performance in one area, he just removes the wait, then bills them more money for "optimizations."
I remember reading here on HN of some web or ad agency intentionally adding a duck to a page before a demo to the customer. The customer eventually said, it's all OK but please remove the duck. They directed the customer's need to fix something to an obvious target. The customer is happy to have made a difference, the agency is happy not to have to do some extra work on something expensive to fix.
> Duck: a feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.
> I always found this frustrating in high school, as some assignments required submission of a first draft, second draft, and final version of a paper. I always wrote the final version first and then worked backwards to created a second and then a first draft by removing sentences and generally making it worse.
I always did this as well. You are the first other person I've heard describe that.
(It’s Larry McEnerney’s very excellent lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively, aimed at writers who are either academians or otherwise experts in some field.)
I am also a Basher. But I've always suspected it as a sort of perfectionism that ultimately holds you back from getting better. I have a couple of pastimes where I've gone out of my way to try to avoid this. I find it is often easier to 'change your ways' in one context than globally. But it's also a sort of 'end of the beginning' rather than 'beginning of the end' in spending more energy on doing and less on fussing about doing it well. Take that too more and you're trying to do well on your first try.
If you ever played board games with someone who operates this way, it's exhausting. The fact that it's meant to be fun probably amplifies that experience, but I do wonder sometimes how people experience me and whether they think the same sorts of things I think about a perfectionist gamer.
Fellow Basher here. I’ve heard the advice to “just get it all on the page and edit later” so many times and it has never really made sense to me. I write something like Shlemiel the painter’s algorithm from this old Joel on Software article [0]. Write a bit, reread everything, tweak, write some more, reread everything again, tweak. The re-reading cycles aren’t always back to the very beginning, sometimes it’s just the current paragraph or sentence. But I’d definitely say I edit as I go. I’ve tried not doing this, but I never get very far with that before it starts to stress me out that the writing isn’t coming out right.
And then afterwards, read the thing another 50 times just in case, especially if it’s an email.
I just submitted the same draft all three times. I might make minor changes based on feedback but generally there wasn't any backlash from teachers for not changing enough things, if your initial draft was already high quality.
Someone should make the enso for bashers! Not sure what that would look like. Maybe a text editor is enough.
I am not much of a writer at all but if I write a blog post I am both basher and swooper. Swooping happens after I publish. Something psychological about someone might read it motivates the swoop.
Funny, I just checked up on the status of this project yesterday! I've been on the lookout for a personal CRM for a long time and have had my eye on Monica for months.
It looks really promising but I could not for the life of me get it to run in the Docker container last time I tried. I have a dozen or so other Docker containers running without issue, so I don't think it's my setup. Are people reporting better success with Chandler when it comes to containerization? I'd love to use it but have spent too many hours trying to get it to work.
People often resort to containerization when they've lost control of their dependencies. Containerization is only completely effective when you control your dependencies and if you control your dependencies... You don't need the container.
Back when I had very slow DSL (as opposed to just slow DSL) I found it was almost impossible to install complex container layouts because the Docker client was not at all smart about caching and failed downloads.
Later on I worked at a place that had gigabit Ethernet and got into an argument with the CTO who couldn't believe the build process (which built software packed it into containers and ran a system based on containers) took 20 minutes. I set my stopwatch and it was 18 minutes and 27 seconds and a lot of that time was Docker doing ultimately meaningless I/O.
People think Docker is doing something positive for them when it is really killing their productivity, making their projects late, giving them time to go get coffee, etc.
I am using it with specific sequencing for different apps. One of the more strange use -cases is the combination of BTT and touch-bar-simmulator with Figma. Adding functionality to my vertical mouse and trackballs with different profiles for apps and so on.
This is a fantastic analogy for something which has bothered me for years! One example which comes to mind is pushback received on a pull request for a cron job. This script did some heavy lifting so it took a few minutes to run.
The reviewer suggested all sorts of minor optimizations so a script which runs once per week in the middle of the night with no one waiting on it could run tens of seconds faster. A complete waste of time and effort to my mind, and one understandable as the OP describes: a technical challenge which, when solved, equates to zero consumer upside.
Glad you liked the analogy! Yes, keeping this in mind is useful for developers, not just product people. It's tempting to fix or automate things that don't need it. I think there is a meme that goes "I could have done this in 2 minutes, but I chose to spend 2 days automating it instead." Sums it all up :-)
It's similar, but not quite a binary search. Imagine you have a book and you're trying to determine if a certain page number exists or if it's been torn out. You know the order, as pages are numbered in sequence, but you don't know whether the target page is still in the book or not. (For very large, cryptographically secure books you can assume the pages have been torn out uniformly.)
With the method described, you would measure the thickness of the book (the size of the lookup file) and open to a proportional page. e.g. If you're looking for page 120 and the book is 360 pages long, that's 1/3 of the thickness. So, find the point that's a third of the thickness of the book and open the book there. You'll be pretty close.
With a binary search, you wouldn't measure the thickness of the book. You'd always just blindly start in the middle, assess which half the target page is, and repeat the operation on that half and you'll get there pretty quickly.
Both exploit the knowledge of how the data is organized and both are most well-suited to uniform data (like pages in a book or random hashes), but are just different strategies requiring different means of accessing the data.
Admittedly not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
Wiki lists a variation of binary search called "interpolation search" [1] which
> Instead of calculating the midpoint, interpolation search estimates the position of the target value, taking into account the lowest and highest elements in the array as well as length of the array.
As I recall, one of the clinchers was his use of the phrase, "you can’t eat your cake and have it too" as opposed to the now-predominant variant "you can’t have your cake and eat it too."
I often wonder if stylometry can be used to positively identify a person based not on general word frequency, but by a single phrase or two which are rare in general but commonly used by the individual. In theory this could be relatively easy to find given a large corpus. You'd pick out the top few n-grams for short phrases by an individual and identify the ones which are most overly-represented compared to the rest of the population.
I suspect it's part of an effort to push back against the overwhelming number of thoughtless "listicles" which seem to dominate the internet. I'm planning a trip abroad right now and half the effort is in finding a list of places to visit which was put together by someone who actually went there and has some thoughts rather than someone who slapped together some nonsense. Or someone who has taken the time to really whittle a list down to 7 items rather than making another useless "1200 Things to Do in Italy Mega Post!!!"
I think you're right in that "opinionated" seems like a shorthand for "thoughtful curation" which is the opposite of what search engines tend to turn up.
As a kid I would browse their website endlessly, just fascinated by all the weird stuff. It scratched the same itch that watching Mythbusters would scratch. In adulthood I rediscovered them and went to their Milwaukee location for the first time. We spent hours there, looking through all the cool stuff they have. It really gives you ideas!