@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

vaurora

@vaurora@wandering.shop

Systems consultant, writer, cat appreciator

I post about computers, nuclear stuff, science fiction, and science fact. I have ADHD so I'm into things that are Novel, Interesting, Challenging, and Urgent.

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vaurora , to random
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I read The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies on the train yesterday and wow. Attempted summary: society is in crisis because our current systems of governance and feedback are unable to hear the signal that is the vast majority of people screaming, "My life is intolerable." This signal gets routed into any channel available: Brexit referendum, far-right parties, protests against masks or wind turbines or housing - anything to signal rebellion

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

vaurora OP ,
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The author structures this using the theory of cybernetics, approximately that there are a series of systems that regulate each other at higher and higher levels, using feedback that reduces complex information into simpler signals. When too much signal is lost or the regulating system is too simple to manage a more complex system, the system goes awry. Capitalism and markets are effective simplifiers in that everything has a price, a fungible easily compared signal. This has many downsides

vaurora OP ,
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He argues quite convincingly that one of the types of systems that regulate business, System 3, or "what to do here-and-now" is running amok with little input from System 4, "what to do in the future," which is pretty hard to argue with. The current financial system, shaped by private equity and leveraged buyouts, forces most companies to behave as if they must make a huge debt payment this month or else face extinction. Which matches exactly what we see: Google devouring search for AI, etc.

vaurora OP ,
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He also argues for not attempting to understand the inner workings of systems but to observe their behavior (a key element of cybernetics) and suggesting we may have to give up on explaining why things happen or holding individual people accountable for things they neither control nor understand. "Accountability sinks" are a useful concept: the customer service agent who can do nothing to help yet must receive the signal from the customer that something is wrong

vaurora OP ,
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Much of this is represented in the catch phrase of cybernetics:

"The Purpose of the System is What It Does"

If you try to look inside the system, you will see a lot of people who think their job is about producing petroleum products. On the outside, you will see an entire industry hell-bent on making the earth unlivable. This is the result of the overall economic system that focuses on this quarter's share price to the exclusion of nearly all else.

vaurora OP ,
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Another interesting point is that the system outsources the bad stuff to individual humans because they have no way to communicate back to the system that things are bad. This brings me back to the discussion of funding open source maintenance at . Software engineers in general are burned out because we have to do jobs that require maintenance work but are not allowed to do maintenance work on company time because of the short-sighted quarter-at-a-time planning horizon of business

vaurora OP ,
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But the maintenance work must be done or we will lose our jobs, one way or another. So the software engineers with internal motivation and the ability to work unpaid end up doing the maintenance work - in addition to a full time job. The system has succeeded in blocking the signal that would prevent the focus on generating short-term profits by forcing the negatives onto individual humans. This, but for the entirety of humanity - and that's the polycrisis

vaurora OP ,
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Hopefully this analysis makes it really clear why "why don't people just individually suddenly decide to do the 'right thing'" is never never the answer, in open source funding or supporting the arts or fighting climate change...

vaurora OP ,
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One specific recommendation from The Unaccountability Machine is very simple: if a company does a leveraged buyout of another company (buys the company with a little of their own money and puts a lot of debt on the company to pay the rest) then the buyer should have to guarantee the purchased company's debts - no more limited liability for you. This is one element of Elizabeth Warren's plan to rein in private equity - and the only one Davies thinks is necessary for that

vaurora OP ,
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A general problem is wealth concentration, and there are many solutions to that, starting from the nicest one (a global wealth tax) to runaway inflation to massive destruction of capital to guillotines and assassinations and wars. It's been nice to see that a global wealth tax has recently become thinkable in many circles. But ultimately no one really knows what will emerge from the polycrisis

vaurora OP ,
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@weaselx86 @Npars01 I also managed to read Piketty, whose point can be summarized as "whenever the rate of return on capital is higher than the growth rate of the entire economy, wealth will accumulate to the owners of capital." He then goes on to show that a global wealth tax is the most effective way to achieve downward redistribution

ElleGray , to random
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who would you rather have at your author Q & A, a "this is more of a comment" person, or a bear

vaurora ,
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@ElleGray @cathygellis a bear would be better for publicity for the book

vaurora , to random
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Academic journals can price gouge because universities are relieved to be able to outsource performance reviews of PhD students and faculty to them

(From https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ )

A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profitmaking company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices. It is, as you'd expect from that description, highly profitable - and passionately hated by the academics. However, the model persists because somewhere along the way, the journal industry managed to insert itself into the staff promotion and recruitment function of universities all over the world. In doing so, it created an extremely useful accountability sink for senior academics and managers of universities, while also solving an awkward and unpleasant interpersonal problem for them - how to judge the quality of scholarship without offending the scholars.
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    • vaurora , to random
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    Back in the day, a common SEO grift was to email the author of a popular HOWTO and ask them to add a link to a poor quality "translation" of the resource on their website. This would increase the backlinks to a domain and improve the search engine ranking. Having had things I wrote legitimately translated into a dozen languages, I added several of those links to other works (not knowing e.g. Croatian) before I caught on. They are all part of the LLM training set now

    https://mstdn.social/@ppatel/111924863186976404

    vaurora , to random
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    One way to be a 10x engineer is to make the engineers around you 90% less productive

    Via https://x.com/ghosttyped/status/1760734197311000828

    Try to keep this going for as many rounds as possible, make the developer resubmit multiple times. My boss said that we should aim to keep all their reviews open for at least 15 days. Meanwhile for all teams other than the targeted team we should give easy reviews within an hour or two of the PR opening, so that the targeted team can't complain about our PR metrics. ex-Dropbox EbPD76 Also the other team complained about our code quality. So my boss suggested that we prioritize some major refactors on the areas they're working on. We then land these PRs by surprise as soon as they finish their work. This way they have to do a difficult merge or even a complete rewrite of their finished work.

    ex-Dropbox EbPD76 Lots of the suggestions were specific to my team's situation. For example the TL of the targeted team had recently taken mental health leave. My boss suggested that by bullying and undermining them in meetings we could push them into having a breakdown and quitting. Generic sabotage advice was to exploit the PR process. Delay as long as possible before giving reviews. When you get around to the review leave as many nitpicks as possible. Use harsh language which undermines the developers' confidence and try to leave 30 comments to further shake them. Reject PRs for being too large to land. Require extremely detailed descriptions with breakdowns of all affected scenarios and manual testing steps. Require extensive automated test coverage due to risk factors, particularly when it is hard to test.
    ALT
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