@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 , 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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