Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

Anyway every fucking piece of news these days (LLMs, tariffs) reminds me of this. Nobody actually needs my input, but it feels like it demands a response. But the response it demands is always the same: this is a bad idea, for very obvious reasons, I am not really an expert in this but I don't need to be, anyone who is actually paying attention can see that this is stupid, please stop. And it's equally futile.

The one thing I *did* learn from this period was a much more visceral understanding of that Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. I misunderstood my role; I was expected to be a "smart guy" rubber-stamping bad proposals so that they could proceed. I did not initially understand that they were going to proceed regardless of my input, and that the value of my input was just social proof, not analysis.

I was stunted because there is no challenge or practice in repeating: "Your proposal is a mistake. I know this because it is a common mistake, that a lot of people in your position have made before. It worked out badly for them; it will work out badly for you. It would be a waste of both our time for me to investigate the specifics of your situation further because I already understand the reasons you are making this mistake and there are no specifics which would make it a good idea."

At one point I had a job where I was frequently consulted in an "advisory role" for a bunch of projects making the same series of bad decisions and having to re-explain some very basic principles of technical decision making. Nominally I had a tremendous amount of flexibility and agency but in practice I was stagnating and stunted in my career growth. 🧵

Good executives describe their expectations in terms of outcomes. They let their staff—who inherently ought to have a better understanding of the mechanics of the processes they are responsible for—determine the appropriate methods to get things done. Leaders getting too involved in details are (correctly) derided as "micromanagers".

When you see an executive mandating a tool or process *over the objections* of their staff, that's a sign of managerial incompetence.

https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648

List of Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Lists of Falsehoods Programmers Believe

If any journalist going to WWDC is reading this, I would love it if you could press folks involved with App Review to give a statement on what their plan is for when armed DOGE agents extrajudicially seize the app store's datacenters in order to deploy tracking software to migrants & trans people's phones.

Not a shitpost; this is a serious question. This is not a plan that we will get to develop after the fact. Do they have a hot spare of their trust root in a different jurisdiction?

this is an excellent example of why awareness of gender-neutral pronouns is important https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3ll7xn343y222

Referring to the CIA agent named by the fascist clown-car group chat as "her" is leaking an additional bit of information about the named agent, a sloppy and embarrassing own-goal by Goldberg in a story just full to bursting with sloppy and embarrassing own-goals, even while he is trying to be responsible.

I am obviously not going to be *too* mad at him. But using gendered pronouns all the time when discussing persons of indeterminate gender is just a bad habit we should all be trying to break.

I did it and you can watch it, if you are interested. Pretty chill, just slogging through interacting with the macOS notifications API, with not much in the way of running anything, but still, if you would like to watch it, here you go: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2415076217

Oh hey it's that time that I said, in just a minute or two come watch me do some #python #opensource #livestreaming on various things

I will be streaming on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/glyph_official/ at 10AM US/Pacific (or, in about 11½ hours from this post), writing some python code and generally trying to pretend that progress can be made and that things still mean things.

Oh and probably doing some UX work to make my password-memorizer actually generally useful, like making it emit notifications about its schedule.

sometimes just the threat of an *implied* audience can make me pay attention

maybe the real executive function was the friends we made along the way

going to go live in a moment at https://www.twitch.tv/glyph_official — please feel free to drop by and help me finish adding websockets natively to twisted

this one was chill even by my standards, to the point of sedation (disregarding spam, exactly one word in chat, iconic) but I did in fact make a bunch of progress on websockets https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2410923169

@jalefkowit in hindsight you can definitely see Elon's hand poking through into the design and manufacturing processes in the earlier models, with the panel gaps and the big stupid iPad knockoff and the racist assembly lines and so on, but yeah, the Cybertruck is a dramatic gravitational collapse, a veritable black hole of his personal id

@onelson @chrisjrn getting rid of GNU would be such a big improvement to _so_ many people's lives, and yet

@Gargron not only did I not know that the button was there, now that I have clicked it, I have no idea what it does

Don't tell independent journalists what tools to use, or police their language or terminology, unless you have some reason to believe that they're not going to send you straight to spam. It's the same dynamic with volunteer open source maintainers. You don't have to give money, but give *something*. File some good bug reports, volunteer to triage, write some patches, do *something* before you start demanding that the project make major direction changes or similar.