sgignoux - Tumblr blog

[sgignoux]

I should write about my third attempt at the JLPT N1, but here is a random picture of today.

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China by youknowcyc

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Musicians practice until they get it right, Great Musicians practice until they can’t get it wrong.

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by taromoberly

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The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will

[sgignoux]

Slowly building lists to discover the terrain.

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Dr Carol Dweck points out in Mindset that it is a fairly standard fixed mindset response to see effort as evidence of failure. I see this attitude all around: success should be easy. Only plodders and thickos have to try. This is not only pernicious, it’s untrue. I think this holds true for contemporary views on relationships: if they’re not easy, they’re bad. Hence divorce. The alternative is hard work and no wants to do that!

http://www.learningspy.co.uk/featured/easy-vs-hard/

[sgignoux]

The rest of the paper is an excellent analysis for why Lisp lost out to C as a programming language, even though Lisp was a superior language. Or at least superior on the grounds that Dick found most important. But this doesn't necessarily show that Lisp was in fact superior to C; it can just as easily be taken to show that the metrics that were cited in the article were not the ones that were taken to be most important by those choosing a programming language. The fact that C produced faster code, was easier to master, was easier to use in groups, and ran well on less expensive hardware were not considerations that Gabriel found important. But others did. On those metrics, the dominance of C as a programming language was an example of better is better, not worse is better. [...] In all of these cases, there is an alternate interpretation of the choices that were made that lead us to the conclusion that worse is not better. Instead, what we see is that better is a complicated notion, and can depend on a variety of different metrics. It may be disappointing to find out that what we geeks think of as better may not be what our customers think is better. But finding this out shouldn't surprise us too much.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807

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Pick a large market but build for specific users.

[sgignoux]

Unfortunately you’re not in the market you think you’re in – you’re in the market your users think you’re in.

http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

[sgignoux]

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

Jeff Bezos, 2016 Letter to Shareholders

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https://twitter.com/wakaleo/status/854702550469234692

[sgignoux]

Business level constraints (time, human, fiscal and other resources, stakeholders) trump technical constraints every time. Identifying these should be step zero in any design process.

contingencies

[sgignoux]

Biggest challenge in education is to divorce "Design" definition from aesthetics.

Jonathan Lupo

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From Concept Design, Ping-Pong Style How business can inspire early ideas in design