allgreed

Would you be so kind as to elaborate? I definitely see you’re onto something.

How does the real world works? What are the hard parts? What’s wrong with using other people’s software?

> there are such better alternatives

Would you please elaborate about the alternatives (beside Ansible which you’ve already mentioned)?

But there are cases where the interacting with company which engages in said practices is due to a transitive relationship.

Example: My preferred clothing vendor uses a certain of delivery company.

If I, personally, am sending a package then switching the delivery company is usually trivial. Switching clothing vendor because UPS has crappy international package management and you need to say the package id instead of typing it would hurt me more than it would hurt them.

And the other shipping companies aren’t much better anyway. And afaik there isn’t much incentive for trading off something in exchange for pissing parcels receivers less, because see above.

On the other hand, there are great shipping companies, end user experiance-wise. One I can think of is a polish automated pickup station company. Somehow the experience (including customer support in case of a stuck door, etc.) only gets better with time so far. But they were the first and afaik remain the only company in the automated pickup station space that counts in Poland.

This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together.

Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.

Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?

[0] https://acoup.blog/

I think believes is the key here. There are definitely people who believe that if they can work on complex graph colouring problem in a real-time processing scenario and the interruptions are minimal - then indeed their talent is utilised well. And I can imagine such a scenario happening at Google in advertising department/division/tribe .

I’m not sure I follow your argument about ESPP.

It’s almost always the case that maxing out your ESPP contribution is a good idea instead of getting the money earlier and investing it in something else. It might even be worth getting a loan and still maxing out the contribution should you require more cashflow (because 10% loan is still cheaper than missing out on ~90% return). But the t return is limited to your max contribution percentage * your salary, therefore you still need to think about what to do with rest of your money.

How making more money in absolute terms in some other investment invalidate the above?

Not strictly curve grading, but when I was studying electronics one of the professors had a 9-step algorithm for processing raw scores into grades. That involved normalizing the lab scores between different reviewers (so that harshness of a particular reviewer would be compensated for). He also assigned `cos(percentage_from_other_test as radians)` instead of resits if you missed one of the tests for valid reason but had shown up on the other.

On one hand I really like the former approach and could understand the latter (organizing resits is likely a huge PITA). On the other that's the only professor I heard of that was attacked with an axe by one of his students.

I've managed a few projects and IMO the state of the art in terms of wording is "ideas" for the long list of tasks that might be a good >idea< to maybe do sometime in the future and "plans" for the shortlist of concrete activities that we >plan< to implement soon.

As for your a bit sarcastic proposals [did I read that correctly?], I see the following problems: - "queue" implies meaningful ordering and you don't get to skip or totally rearrange a queue without a good reason in most situations that involve a queue - "roadmap" according to Cambridge dictionary is a form of plan, which doesn't quite cut if for describing the can-be-postponed-without-consequences part of the backlog.

Regarding the matter of language: I'm assuming [in this context] the presupposition that words are tools. And you can do a good job with crappy tools and vice versa. Yet there is a correlation between tool quality and the outcome. Example: the WIP limit in kanban - sometimes referred to as "work in progress limit". Why the hell would you like to limit progress? But when you change it to "in process" the whole concept suddenly makes a lot more sense. If everything is in process nothing will ever get done, so putting a limit on that ensures output.