Notices by Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io), page 2

Now you might be reading this and going "Hazel, that's a lotta emotions, goodness; but, be real now, how do you actually expect a company to pay millions of dollars for knowledge workers and not want to optimize them?"

[you, my dears, are probably not thinking this, but this is unfortunately a realistic question one might ask when attempting to be Doing a Capitalism™]

Sure, fair enough, let me rephrase that question a bit:

"How does one measure creativity, the growth of institutional knowledge, and the value of that knowledge in terms of dollars per hour?"

Which is really what you're asking when trying to define productivity for Knowledge Work.

But it probably feels like a more ridiculous question now, doesn't it? (That's because it is)

And the answer to that question, about dollars per hour and knowledge work? Sure, here it is:

One can no more abuse a dog into loving them than one can "productivity" a knowledge worker into generating a positive ROI.

In fact, you can replace "measuing productivity" with "inflicting animal abuse" and get an accurate idea of what'll work and what won't. If it *sounds* like animal abuse, it won't actually measure productivity.

> BEFORE: I'd like to [[measure productivity]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and withhold promotions for the bottom 10% performers]]

> AFTER: I'd like to [[inflict animal abuse]] by [[tracking the lines of code per hour produced and using shock treatment on the bottom 10% performers]]

Sounds horrific, doesn't it? Guess what: it doesn't work.

Amazing. Who woulda thunk. Fear and abuse and spreadsheet hacking doesn't help people be creative and share ideas? Astounding really

Humans want to be creative, humans want to love each other, humans want to make the world a better place, humans want to do art, humans want to *be* art, humans want to inspire, humans want to be inspired, humans want to learn, humans want to teach, humans want to heal the world, humans want to heal each other, humans want to collaborate, humans want to build, humans want to be beautiful, humans want to find beauty, humans want to create, humans want to be awed, humans love this fucking universe

One of the best things for me recently has been watching all of the research fly out about how humans work, how they cooperate, how they *really* learn, and guess what?

It's not even a "you can have your cake and eat it too" thing. It's literally "you can stop eating coal and start eating cake". Seriously!

Humans are *wired* to be productive *by* sharing, by loving, by growing.

I spent my entire life thinking I had to put that aside when Doing Capitalism. That's not true!

If there's one thing I wish I burn entirely to the ground and wipe away all traces and remnants of, its the misplaced notion that the productivity of Knowledge Work can be managed, measured, analyzed, and optimized as if all one needed to do was drip feed heroin up the arse of their hapless workers.

What is Knowledge Work™, you ask? There's two concepts of Knowledge Work that I'm thinking about right now. The first is Knowledge Work as imagined, and Knowledge Work as done.

(I'm temporarily ignoring the actual literature definitions of Knowledge Work for the sake of ranting out some frustration. Forgive me pls)

Knowledge Work as imagined is when you take the best of humanity, you embrace it, and you turn the lovely unbridled enthusiasm and exploratory nature of humanity into a powerful self-feeding engine that paints the world with the colors of the human soul itself as it learns to understand the world around it.

It's art, beauty, love, and life. It's this amazing fucking thing that happens when you take a bunch of humans and you stick them in a pile and say "go forth and learn to love the world"

Core competencies are something I think about a lot. I love to dig into what makes companies or ecosystems or social groups tick. Especially when that core competency *enables* what they do:

McDonald's, for example, is a real estate company that happens to make burgers.

Walmart is a shipping logistics company that also sells things.

What other examples can you think of where the core competency of the company is such that the "thing" a company does falls out naturally as a consequence?

I love explaining complicated subjects in a quippy way that isn't necessarily wrong. For example:

Kubernetes is 20 while-true loops in a trench coat pretending to be a container orchestration platform.

What are your favorite quippy ways to explain a complicated topic? It could be anything! I'm just curious what y'all have :)

If you're ever curious about what zero trust security is and you've been afraid to ask, here's the explanation:

Zero trust security is when you map authorization credentials to the scope and lifetime of a service request rather than to the scope and lifetime of your network topology.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

@irenes oh absolutely, unfortunately.

Entire industries would be out of work if we actually just tried to do what's the most efficient and cost effective for everyone and benefited humanity over individual gain.

Insurance companies, gone; US tax preparation companies, gone; the entire concept of predatory loans, gone; the list goes on and on

It just really gets me that LLMs are absolutely incredible. It's undeniable. They're amazing; as awe-inspiring in their capabilities as they are in the horrific crimes against humanity required to produce them. A venerable testament to our continued ability to repackage slave labor into more palatable forms

They're also super effective at quite a few things. Just... Not what we use them for. Isn't it shocking? The vast majority of our usage of AI goes against its strengths

The more I see AI take over the world, the harder I have to look to not just view it all as this type of nonsense.

But really, how much of our work is meaningful and how much of it is taking efficient work and shoving it into preconceived notions of how efficient one "should" be and how much work one "should" be doing?

Would LLMs be consuming the world if people didn't need to fill the universe with noise for the sake of eating a meal and putting clothing on their body?

What's your favorite rhythm? I love rhythms, and I love hearing new rhythms and figuring them out

My favorite has to be a halftime shuffle. I am absolutely down for a halftime shuffle groove, I am so nasty for it, I am uncontrollably and undeniably a massive fan of it. It speaks to my *soul*

Purdie shuffle, Rosanna shuffle, halftime breakdowns, it doesn't matter, that syncopated semi-swing gets me going so hard

What's yours?

I'm all for highly distributed systems, I love them; I'm all for correctness, and resilience, and so many other fun things. That's my bread and butter.

But SERIOUSLY. How the fuck is it that we ended up with this absolutely bimodal nonsense of "one single static binary of goodiness" vs "500,000 node compute cluster of goodiness" and this absolutely hellish quagmire of disgusting bullshit in the middle?

You know what kubernetes is? Do you know what it is? It's 20 while true loops in a trench coat pretending to be a control plane. And that's fine!

But somehow, somehow, the only fucking way you can run that thing is to shell out to a CSP and have them manage your control plane because absolutely nobody has ever figured out how to make it run reliably in bootstrap or less-than-5000,000-node-scale as a commodity.

We've spent 800x more energy on service meshes than *actually running it*. The fuck?

I would give my kingdom for a culture in which people figured out how to build good *primitives* and *protocols*. Things that can scale down as well as scale up.

"If your service can't be run on a laptop, your service doesn't deserve to be ran in a cluster" - Marilyn Monroe

This article is fucking amazing. It lays out _exactly_ how to do database changes, codebase changes, and feature flag deployment strategies step by step with code examples in order to practice continuous deployment without downtime or breaking anything.

I've wanted to write this article for years and never got around to it. Now I don't have to!

(Looks like they have a book on continuous deployment coming out soon. I might have to get this for my teams 👀 )

https://oooops.dev/2021/07/30/surviving-continuous-deployment-in-distributed-systems/