A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little people… unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, in whom every vital impulse withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
I was contemplating whether to write this for quite a while and in general I wouldn't, because it contributes to a bad signal/noise ratio. And I'm not immune to making some semi-snarky remarks that might not contribute too much, myself. But there's a certain... shall we say _behavior_ I recognise from reddit that made me feel it was warranted.
Why? Is that your job? Why do you feel it's your responsibility to inform people when they have strayed from your idea of what someone else's vision of HN is supposed to be? Do you think it's a useful thing to do or that it brings you some benefit?
It's to my benefit because I'd prefer HN not to turn into what reddit ended up as, as then it'd lose its usefulness for me. I don't think it's my job, no, and hence why this is the first time I've done this. But knowing that the moderators aren't heavy handed around here it falls to the existing community to govern itself to a degree. People are free to flag my message if they feel it's inappropriate.
if i am curious about something and want to learn, i don't want to need to sift through jokes and sarcastic comments. i find joy in learning and people can still be informative and use humor.
I'm frustrated this is getting so much pushback - puns are noise. HN is more enjoyable than reddit precisely because of the higher signal-to-noise ratio. But a significant part of the comments of this post are arguing about how much fun to have in the comments, a complete waste of my time.
We are debating, with hushed academic rigour (well some of us are) an article where the author is talking about how they designed and implemented a system to drop hats out of a window at passers by.
Hats.
Out of a Window.
For a joke.
Not a cure for cancer.
Not a peace proposal
Not a way to get people out of poverty
Hats. Out. Of. A. Window.
This hushed "no we mustn't pun or mock" type attitude is one of the main drivers of stupid tech fads
It leads to people in positions of power to write down phrases like "This product isn't seen by our customers as a bridge to the metaverse". The product being a fucking chat app with bulletin board built in. At no point did anyone in the room mercilessly rip the piss out of them. And it shows.
Looking on Google Maps there don't appear to be any planes at all in the satellite view of Heathrow. How can this be? Nothing at the gates. Nothing on the runway. No big planes or small planes. Not even the planes that just sit there doing neither. Is it a security thing?
Having worked 30+ years in various office environments (some good, some bad) I believe that hybrid is the sensible option for everyone. And that should be optional as well. I had a great job working for a company that was one day a fortnight in the office. Pretty much everyone who could make it in did and they came from 50-60 miles (some more) but the expectation when you got there was 'hello let's do a bit of work together, chat, have a nice long'ish lunch and leave before the trains get too busy'.
The comms thing is a bit of a bug bear for me too. I like to respond quickly to messages/emails because I believe the person at the other end appreciates having their questions answered quickly so they can get one with their day. When I have to wait an hour (or whatever timeframe feels disproportionate) for a reply to my message it grates. Still, I can live with it if I don't have work in a noisy shared space.
About the remote work comms there is a widespread attitude that irks me: People texting "can we talk?" or simply "hello".
No! tell me straight away what you need so I can judge how and when to respond.
When people state what they need, most of the time the response is immediate and it's the thing they need or some ok followup.
"can-we-talkers" I'm starting to let stew for a few minutes, because I suspect they do that on purpose to "skip my queue".
I agree. Having worked on the shop floor I don't like my time being wasted and I'm careful to add detail for my colleagues so that they are engaged from the outset with my query. All I ask is 'give me half an hour' or some similar response so I can manage other people's expectations.
This is why so many orgs find remote working hard. Everyone has to be willing to compromise on how they communicate to find a middle ground, or the company has to hire for people who work the same way as everyone else. When you have a team made up of people who communicate with different expectations, and they're not willing to accept that other people will think differently about what's reasonable, remote working starts to break down.
Maybe that's why so many companies push for people to return to the office. In-person working where someone can just walk up and interrupt someone else is equally awful for everyone.
I'm all about the compromise. I don't mind waiting for an answer but I'm often hassled for a response in my role and then I need an update from another member of the team. If that response is not forthcoming guess who gets the follow up? Now I'm badgering people who are probably busy but have neglected to tell me and I'm now the block in the pipe to those above me. I don't mind a pat response that they're busy but someone somewhere always needs a status update.
Urgent ad-hoc status update requested by someone above is in most cases a communication anti-pattern. Why would someone need it outside of regular reporting structure (DSM, weeklies etc)? Even in case of disaster recovery, when updates need to be more frequent than daily, it’s better to agree in advance on how communication proceeds and plan the work correspondingly.
Funny, this was may take on the article too. I suppose one could download x amount of files from one cloud storage and upload it to another to see if there is any obvious discrepancy. Perhaps Apple are still using their old file system format for icloud? It's been around for a good few years now and perhaps they simply haven't bothered to ever change the type of storage format they use. Maybe those with older accounts have their images / videos on the 'older' drives?
I don't believe iCloud is a filesystem, it's not block-level. It's object-level, like S3, with a bunch of OS-side jank to make it look like a conventional directory and filesystem (which often fails miserably and dangerously).
It's similar levels of reliability to an FTP account mounted with curlftpfs[1] - except the latter at least fails in understandable ways and can be debugged.
That's exactly my mental model of it as well, some janky home made s3 fixed with tape. I really advise anybody to save their data somewhere else as well before in inevitably stops working.
After working WP for quite a few years the problem as I see it it that it 'needs' to be all things to all people. Can't code? Not a problem. WordPress.
Before even considering working with a client with a WP site I have to look at what plugins they are using. If they don't have a developer on board (or at least a competent one that built it originally) you know that that it will be stacked with 'useful' plugins. And this is the bit where the issues arise as working out the provenance of each and every one of them and whether they are still supported and/or won't break the functionality of another plugin is pure guesswork. Case in point enabling a nondescript plugin on one client's site broke the main image slider.
—Bertrand Russell