my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.

also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.

sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

Feels like an article generated using GPT-1.

Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?

So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.

Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.

Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.

Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.

For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.

i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.

so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.

I cannot describe the disgust I feel seeing my employer's logo on a fucking F1 car.

> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.

>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.

Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.

Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?

I've seen this pattern a bunch:

1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.

2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.

3. They post the content

4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up

5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.

6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.

There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.

(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.

Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.

When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.

Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.

I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.

These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!

I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.

It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.

But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.

- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.

- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".

It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.

... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?

These days it's all just that, or else people flinging AI slop past each other.

I have never seen a single piece of content on LinkedIn that I felt was genuine, or that wasn't obvious engagement bait.

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.

Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?

If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.

The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.

1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.

Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.

I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.

double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

That almost feels too optimistic. Google Drive already has 'Suggest File Moves' aka 'Tell me where I should want my files to be'.

It tells me I should have a real hatred of any files being in the root directory, and completely disregard sharing and permissions boundaries.

Shouldn't that just be your OS? It should show a list of open windows, allow you to group them and switch between windows within a group, show side by side etc

Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.

Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.

Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.

Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.

I need clear, well defined data in the windows and a path.

You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.

I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.

I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.

Fully rendered. After a single video frame.

On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.

Twenty years of progress.

It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.

Even if you didn't read the code if you cared even an ounce you wouldn't ship this crap.

There are still pockets, where if you don’t push it, you loose. But you need to search for it. Average developers won’t ever work at such places. They won’t ever encounter them, because almost no developer jobs needs that.

Btw, you can make such positions in every company. I did it, several times. And it’s very beneficial even salary wise.

If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix it.

Except, they hired all these people and expect them to do Stuff. What are they supposed to do?

First flat design, now sluggish window redraws... Windows is getting retro hipster. Will 26H2 take away overlapping windows?

The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.

A lot of performance issues are down to MDM software.

https://text-edit.go-here.nl

You put it on your desktop and (assuming you have a browser running) instantly brings up a text editor that can only load and save.

If you feel you need some feature you edit the html file and add the code yourself. (Preferably using text-edit)

Unlimited capabilities:)

They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.

Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.

If people really want tabs in everything then have the windows enable tabbing between multiple contained apps.

This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.

It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)

Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.

- the close button in outlook is HIDDEN until you move the window - in Gdrive they list the selected filename at the bottom. They have the entire page width to show the file name. It truncates at like 70px.

I hate Windows 11 immensely. At home I use Mac, Linux and... Windows 7. But at my current client I have to use Windows 11. I have no choice; I can either accept that or leave.

So at this point Windows could send small electrical shocks with every keystroke, it would not make a difference whatsoever.

Modern Explorer is a WinUI/UWP app, nothing to do with Electron, it could be worse.

I do use tabs in Explorer quiet frequently.

Wait, never mind. Stupid question.

"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."

The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.

https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...

btw it costs $9,999 according to google

edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.

Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.

> The Improvement Factor is an average of the Voltage Output and the THD output. It gives you a factor of how much the AC power is improved by the P20.

Which also doesn't make much sense to me. So the lower the THD, the less improvement? And averaging that with the 120 V output? So the 230 V European version has a higher improvement factor?

By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.

But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.

It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.

In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.

I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.

People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.

The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.

So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".

This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

Things are not, however, much better for software that people actually buy. That is, paid-for apps in Android and Apple app stores.

With the physical model you chose your software and it didn't stop working. (It might stop being useful, but that's a different story.) No option to patch later meant a company couldn't ship trash: word would get out and people just wouldn't buy it. (Windows ME, anyone?) Now you can get the rug pulled out from under you on all of your tools, and things "ship" as garbage with a massive "day 1 patch" (and a "day 2 patch" and...) and honestly often never get finished. At least not before they're "retired" and you're "updated" to some dumpster fire that's nothing like what you wanted, and still doesn't even work, and you can't do anything about it.

I think this is an important point - so making the software less effective, so tasks take longer, increases 'engagement'.

There is a separate problem I think and that's who is now designing the UI.

As software shifted to the web - where early web apps were very simply interactive documents - designers from the print sphere moved over. This changed the focus from task based workflow thinking in UI design to a much greater emphasis on the visual layout/design of the page, and it seemed like a whole generation's learning about UI design got replaced with a whole generations learning about typography and visual impact.

Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.

E.G. "As a single mother of four, I want my children to have a nutritious lunch but have very little time to prepare it" might be the first phrase of a user story for your foodmaking robot.

neither "as a user" nor "As a human being fully endowed with creative and critical faculties..." help the product and tech team understand the constraints and yearnings of the person this feature will serve.

PS: I used to have a PO who would write "As a product owner, I want a feature that does X" and it drove me crazy

I found it completely disgusting, and this wasn't unique to one retail chain either. It's how the capital class views people, as a resource to be extracted.

No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.

I know when. 2007 January 9. Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone.

“Manage your privacy your way! Simply sign in to choose what is right for you!”

Nah, I am going to use something else.

Like all generalizations, this is only partly true. There are bad actors.

> The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.

Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...

> So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".

Or more, how to focus the disempowerment on things that matter?

> This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.

Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?

Of course, but in the organisations I have experience of, I'd estimate that the 'bad actor' rate is very low - certainly a low-single-digit percentage. (I don't work in tech, BTW.)

> Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...

I think we need to differentiate between different forms of disempowerment. For example, having a set budget to work within (i.e. the disempowerment that a finance department might generate) is structural in nature; and further may either be empowering if an individual or team has freedom to work within those constraints, or disempowering if the budget is too constrained, or changes unpredictably. In contrast, smart committed people having their ideas stamped on irrationally by a bad egotistical leader ultimately leads to disenchanted people who don't want to invest their energy any more.

> Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?

You're maybe not considering the background context of why such a discussion would even be taking place. These discussions spring out of leadership noting somehow (direct observations, discussions, workplace surveys, workplace transformation initiatives, etc.) that people in their organisations are less "empowered" than they (leadership) would wish (with perceived negative impacts) and therefore this is something they want to reverse. They're frustrated and confused: they think they're offering an environment for people to behave as they hope to see, and yet people aren't stepping through the apparently open door.

It's unpopular because asking why people are disempowered shifts the focus from the failings of individuals ("why is this employee not behaving as I expect them to; what stick or lever or additional incentive can I use to improve their behaviour?") to the failings of leadership ("what have I been doing wrong all along to result in this sorry state of affairs? Am I the cause?")

You would hope a light bulb would turn on, but management who needs those sorts of conversations might often not have the wherewithal to do the right thing, never mind respond positively.

A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...

I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to?

Boring wins almost every time.

> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.

~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.

Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.

Don't make a bad situation worse.

A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.

[0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)

"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"

Yikes; run the other way ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc

The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.

I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)

Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.

On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.

Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second

I feel like that's a result of prior bad experience. Noone goes into university, or even primary school a blank slate.

It's very easy to fall into a trap where education is transactional if that's what was modelled to you or that's how previous teachers treated you

The reason why things get worse is because of systemic problems: misaligned incentives, information asymmetry, diffuse responsibility, etc. It's actually hard to improve these aspects of large systems. Hence, why the world is an imperfect place.