I've been quoting von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design for over a decade, since it is a great summary of why I switched from engineering to product design mid-career. That law is the one that says engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept. I didn't engineer spacecraft, but on web projects I noticed that whoever made the documents furthest upstream had a ridiculous amount of influence over the outcome of the product. Even just being the one taking notes in the first meeting gives you leverage in a process which, despite claims of being agile, is definitively path-dependent most of the time.
I'm sometimes asked to produce meaningless 30-page documents that nobody ever reads. I mean literally nobody, since I can see the history of who has accessed it. Me and a proof-reader, and occasionally someone will open it up to check that it exists. But nobody reads them, let alone reads them closely. Not the distant funder who added it as a line-item requirement to their grant (their job is adding line items to grants, not reading documents), nor the actual people involved in the project, who don't have time to read a meaningless document, and don't need to. It's of use to no one, it's just something that must be done because we live in a stupid world.
I've started having AI write those documents. Each one used to take me a full week to produce, now it's maybe one day, including editing. I don't feel bad about it. I'm ecstatic about it, actually; this shouldn't be part of my job, so reducing its footprint in my life is a blessing. Someday, someone will realize that such documents do not need to exist in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now, and I can't change it. I'm just glad AI exists for this kind of pointless yeoman's work.
This is the same argument as “why is software X so bloated when nobody uses more than 10% of the features?”
Because everyone uses a different 10%.
I write these documents too and I’ve watched people “read” them. They all do the same thing: flip to the conclusions and then if there is a need they will skim the section that’s relevant to their role.
The project manager cares only about the risks, costs, and time estimates.
The architect just wants to see the diagram and maybe check that the naming conventions have been followed.
Sysops just wants to know what they’re on the hook for after go-live.
None of them read the whole document, but the whole document ends up being read.
PS: I’ve found I have to take care of distributing documents myself. All organisations big and small are shockingly bad at disseminating information. Help them!
It's like burning fuel to till the soil so you can plant corn to make ethanol.
Almost an inverse Kafka universe; there are tools that can empower you to work the system in such a way that the effects of the externalities are very diffuse.
Still not good, but better than a typical Catch-22.
Some programmers are engineers, but not all programmers are engineers. A lot of us are plumbers, basically. We connect together things other people have engineered. There's nothing wrong with plumbing; it's an important, honorable profession. It's just a different thing than engineering. And I'm not saying that a really good programmer transforms into an engineer by virtue of being really productive, or smart, or whatever—I'm saying engineering is a specific activity that most of us don't do every day as part of our jobs. So, to the point of this article, I'd like evidence to be gathered from engineers, specifically, and not programmers like me.
I bought all the Affinity programs after ditching Adobe, which I'd used for 20 years or so. I'm a professional designer, and even though most of my work is in Figma these days, it's nice having dedicated bitmap editing and document design applications.
I bought (two different versions of) these apps specifically because they weren't a SaaS suite with a predatory monthly subscription model, and a constant barrage of cross-promotion and integration with their other products.
Now that Figma is public, it's rapidly become another fully enshittified SaaS suite whose only selling point is that there's nothing better out there for now. Affinity is now pivoting in the same direction. What a time to be a designer!
The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.
The ideal scenario isn't the government forcing a sale of TikTok for political reasons. The ideal is that people stop using TikTok because they realize it's not good for them, but I guess I don't see that happening. Instead we'll just continue scrolling while wondering why we're so unhappy and angry all the time.
I had heard that the existing TikTok app will shut down in the U.S, with the investment consortium launching a new TikTok US app and re-training the algorithm on U.S. users only. If this is true, it might have the same effect: speedbumps where users have to download a new app and lose all their personalization often lead to massive drops in userbase, as they figure that if they have to start from scratch anyway, they might as well start from scratch doing something else.
Fill in the blank with whatever you find personally disagreeable: TikTok, alcohol, sports gambling, hallucinogens, video games, cigars, sugary foods, etc.
Yeah, it's just benign ads and people having fun. What's all the fuss about?
/s
Is it really a mystery that there's concern about corporate media consolidation and collusion with governments to self-serve their interests over individuals?
I mean, this is beyond naive if you dismiss what's happening and will continue.
what do you think people will do, get off tiktok and go outside to hike? if anything they will just switch to instagram reels there's no good scenario here.
IMO the ideal is incredibly strong data privacy laws such that it does not matter if consumer products are owned by a rich guy in Mountain View or Abu Dhabi.
As a developer, I think most documentation is terrible both for developers and non-developers alike. And if you write your documentation so that it is useful to non-developers, it's still useful for developers.
There's no downside to writing accessible documentation, except that it requires a modicum of skill and effort. That's the real reason it's so rare, I think.
I also disagree that developer documentation is like academic papers. The ways they fail are almost opposite: academic papers are overly long and overwritten, because the authors want to be very careful and complete. Developer documentation is too short and hastily written, because they often don't care if it's helpful to anybody else.
The end result may be the same: neither are useful except to a small number of experts: the people who could probably do it themselves already, and thus may not even really need the write up to begin with. But that's a failure, not a feature to be celebrated.
You'd think so, but I've been hosting MM for about 6 years, and it's definitely gotten more user- and admin-hostile in that time. They've restricted really vital improvements to paying customers (basic stuff, like having a functioning search), removed existing features (like video calls) and started shoving in more advertisements and nags to upgrade to a higher tier.
The fact that they've ramped that stuff up so much in the last couple years does not bode well for the future, in my opinion.
My installation isn't associated with a business, it's just a chat board for about 30 people, so there's no question of me being willing to pay $300 a month for the privilege.
I'm sticking with Mattermost because there's no better option, and I've got hundreds of thousands of messages I don't want to lose. However, it isn't like they don't try to extort you just because they're better than Slack about it.
For what it's worth, Zulip has a Mattermost data import tool, and communities are an important use case when we set product direction.
While I can't promise we won't ever change our exact monetization strategy, we're not venture-funded, and thus are immune to the usual enshittification pressures. https://zulip.com/values/ has some context.
If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.
Lot's of small businesses dependent on imports are already shutting down. I know dropshippers are unpopular, but the policy flip-flops are affecting more than that. A lot of low-volume, custom-designed niche products[1] have disappeared, and won't come back when the tariff payment mechanisms are implemented
1. e.g. PCBs for vintage computers, and some potential kickstarter projects are now non-viable.
Does "hyper-rational" allow for arguments about how this affects soft power and the relationships with foreign businesses? Does it allow adding additional tallies in the ongoing list of reasons other countries should not trust us or the dollar as a reserve?
The US economy is currently being operated by a single man, who has no actual long-term plan and randomly flips levers and switches beyond his legal power to do so. He randomly targets companies and policies based on whoever last spoke to him or whatever social media post he saw at 3 AM. And now he's shut down an entire lane of trade for several months. Just... Dead.
Many businesses will simply not take US orders anymore after this fiasco. Some may go out of business by the time things come back.
And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country.
As an example: in my part of the woods, women don't really like to buy from retail stores anymore. The quality is crap and they're often ugly clothes with inconsistent sizing. So a lot of them would be custom stuff from Etsy, slightly more expensive but MUCH higher quality and made to fit. A lot of it came from eastern Europe.
That market is dead. Guess it's back to cheap Chinese T-shirts.
But don't, worry 5 billionaires came to the white house and worshipped Trump on camera like some weird North Korea / Stalinistic shit.
> And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country.
How does it kill the ability to custom order? My understanding of removing de minimus is only that the tariffs now apply to all orders. And because most tariffs now have been set ~30%, an order that was previously $100 is now $130. It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.
No, now you also need to go through formal customs entry and pay the other related fees. I think the minimum flat duty fee is $80-200 depending on country, so that'd be a $50 shirt becoming a $130 shirt.
Or they can switch courier, but that comes with the ad valorem tax and then that couriers brokerage fees - at least $30 dollars (though they'll probably raise it now that they don't have to compete). So a $50 shirt is now $85.
On top of that is the extra paperwork the seller now has to go through. And who knows if the tariff will change on the way, so maybe throw on a surcharge for Americans or just refuse the orders entirely.
> It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.
These aren't rich people. They're paying a little extra already to avoid the poor tax of cheap, unethical crap they have to replace more often. Even just 30% is a huge markup because now instead of being double the price, it's almost triple the price of the worse stuff where those fees are amortized.
It's hard for me to believe I'm hearing, on HN of all places, "it's just 30% more expensive".
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