Notices by Donald Ball (donaldball@triangletoot.party)

@jbowles While "reviews performance metrics" is very much in the bailiwick of the engineering manager as constructed by big tech nowadays, I strongly question how accurate and also how useful those metrics actually are. Not only are the data exceedingly coarse and readily manipulable, I hold they do an extremely poor job of capturing the business value performed by engineers working at highly variable tasks.

They measure things that are easy to measure, not necessarily valuable to observe.

@inthehands If the four factors test still applies in practice (lol, lmfao), I’ll grant them transformative, but on each of the other three, the ML argument fails as completely as it is possible to fail, imho.

@cdarwin @inthehands Legitimately believe his two most likely ends are drug overdose or firing squad.

@inthehands Erm, apologies, I wasn’t trying to imply you did. I guess I see less of an abrupt change recently than you do.

@inthehands Mmm Whitewater, Travelgate, Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell - they had an editorial agenda in the 90’s.

Remember too they sat on Bush’s wiretapping story for a full year. Had it come out in 2004, well, he probably still gets reelected but that doesn’t excuse their malpractice.

@mekkaokereke @ohmu I know I don’t need a thing I just learned existed mere minutes ago, but also I do need it.

@mekkaokereke @ohmu WOODEN KITCHENAID BOWL???!!

@justcare The critiques you made are lies.

@inthehands @j_bertolotti @ColinTheMathmo @mothninja I agree, but am curious about your perspective – it seems to me that the path of the… curious bohemian through the academy is less accessible than it once was, as students have shouldered more and more of the financial burden of education. Students have more at risk, so they’re responding rationally to the perverse mismeasures of the academic system.

Is this a thing or am I projecting?

@inthehands @marick @dimsumthinking Totally, and that’s super selfish and… unnecessary? One of the delights of the throttle is that I can and do always slow to a crawl to pass anyone – costs me nothing to regain speed afterwards.

@inthehands @dimsumthinking @marick I have a hip disability and use a class 2 ebike because I need the throttle backup. Keeping me off of bike trails would make my errands sufficiently dangerous that I wouldn’t be able to do them on my bike.

Totally agree there need to be reasonable limits on speed and behavior. Disagree strongly there should be limits on mobility aids.

@inthehands This is exactly the kind of thing I bemoan about the dAtA-dRiVeN fad that's overtaken tech management over the past decade or so.

I've gone to managers with these concerns and been told, how can you prove e.g. these docs are inadequate, that investing more in tech writers will pay off? Come to me with the metrics and we'll talk.

I can't? I don't think it's possible, not in general? Certainly not a priori.

@inthehands Like, maybe I could stroke my chin and posit that you'll get a 35% reduction in support case volume and time, but I don't believe it, not really. I don't think those data are clean enough to support that analysis, or could possibly be disentangled from everything else that's changing.

You also aren't gonna see customer happiness in those metrics. You won't see the potential customers that said nah, this isn't good enough, based on the shitty docs.

@feld @mekkaokereke @Jonricha Eerrrrrmmmmm farming, produce farming in particular, is highly variable with constant risks of catastrophic losses, and utterly necessary for a healthy, stable population. While government food production supports are often a source of graft and corruption, basically every viable state in history has provided it in some form or another for good reason.

@feld @mekkaokereke @Jonricha Corn production in the US is quite a different thing, of course. It’s basically an industrial commodity produced by agricorps.

@inthehands That definitely is the case here. Significant stroads are controlled by the state department of transportation, which exhibits at best contempt and at worst hostility towards the city or any attempt to serve anyone but car operators.

We could do far better within the city though, but our governance is tilted towards cookie-cutter sprawl developments.

@inthehands I guess I'm a little skeptical on how much cities, or at least my city can change housing supply in a way that positively affects the crisis. All developers seem to want to offer are a. luxury condos downtown (but generally no more than 5 stories) or b. suburban sprawl, all but requiring folk to own cars (and I'm convinced by the strong towns analyses that these are a net negative in terms of support costs over 20+ years for infrastructure and utilities).

@inthehands Here in Durham, NC, we apparently hit a home run with our HEART program https://heartforthis.org/about/ for non-violent crisis intervention. Loving it.

And yet, there's a reactionary undercurrent in favor of more policing based, as I see it, on three ongoing problems:

1. gun violence
2. unhoused folk
3. traffic safety

I'm not aware of any *effective* measures the city can bring to bear on these, given state hostility to city governments and, of course, the corrupt Supreme Court.

@inthehands So I fear we're doomed to swing back and forth between tepid progress and reactionary backlash in most cities. Maybe I'm just in a pessimistic mode when it comes to how to ensure public safety — are you aware of any countervailing trends from which I could take inspiration?

@inthehands @StillIRise1963 I said it before, I’ll say it again. If this election gets fucky and these courts try to step in, we strike.