“As a Facebook user, I want to have my personal information stored and utilized in very specific ways so that I can be manipulated into attempting to dismantle democracy.”
For those who don't get the joke, user stories are used in software development to describe features that should be added to applications. They describe the features concisely, but they are also supposed to be written from the point of view of someone who would want that feature (“As a… I want… so that…”). In practice, many user stories are written based on some mandate from management, even though no reasonable human being would ever want such a thing. In those cases, the user stories sound extremely awkward. Another example might be something like, “As a user, I want to pay more for the software so that the company can make it better over time.” That's the basis of the “Shit User Story” humor. It's funny because it's all to easy to imagine some product manager at Facebook actually writing this.
User stories come from Agile Software Development—a method of developing software that originally intended to empower developers, reward craftsmanship, and improve customer interaction. It saddens me that Agile has become yet another tool of lazy corporate bean counting, yet another half-assed, top-down process that engineers are forced to follow after the concept has been twisted and mutilated past the point of utility. That's been going on for years, though. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a thousand times already. I suppose it could now be called the enshittification of Agile.
Apparently, Dan Nigro, who I saw twice around 2004 with As Tall as Lions at the fun but ill-fated Downtown in Farmingdale, who joked on stage about being from “Massapequa Pawk,” is now one of the world's biggest pop music songwriters. That's kind of inspiring. He probably didn't end up where he thought he would, but he still ended up doing good work he seems to love.
I think a former coworker named Brandon claimed to have signed As Tall as Lions, or at least worked on a management team related to them in some capacity. I don't remember exactly. Small world, though.
I was pretty excited recently to speak with a customer support agent who knew the NATO phonetic alphabet. Finally, some clarity! With a last name like mine, it really helps.
My Gmail address frequently receives spam messages from other Gmail addresses. Gmail even marks the messages as spam. Why does Google not automatically close the offending accounts or help their proper users to recover them? (In some cases, spammers hijack legitimate accounts so that they can send the spam out as that person.) I find this so irresponsible. It seems like another case where Congress should force a tech company to do the right thing, if only Congress knew anything about technology.
Vitalik Buterin's excellent essay What do I think about Community Notes? is one of the very few articles about social media that has left me feeling extremely optimistic.
Even if less than one percent of misinformative tweets get a note providing context or correcting them, Community Notes is still providing an exceedingly valuable service as an educational tool. The goal is not to correct everything; rather, the goal is to remind people that multiple perspectives exist, that certain kinds of posts that look convincing and engaging in isolation are actually quite incorrect, and you, yes you, can often go do a basic internet search to verify that it's incorrect.
It's clear Community Notes is imperfect, and X does incalculable harm, just as pre-Elon Twitter did. Still, this project is genuinely impressive: a smart, thoughtful, verifiable open-source algorithm that aims to reduce misinformation and that actually stands a chance of decreasing political polarization. As terrible as X can be, I don't see this happening over at Meta or ByteDance.
Why do non-technical people sometimes dramatically underestimate the time, money, and effort required to build software? I think it’s because they only see the end result: the app, website, or other product.
If a Martian visited Earth and inspected War and Peace or the encyclopedia, they might assume books were easy to produce. Some paper, some ink… what’s the big deal? How hard is it to scribble on pulp or bang on a keyboard? Of course, the visitor wouldn’t understand what the ink and pages represent. They wouldn’t understand how much research went into the work, let alone reading, planning, conversation, editing, and life experience. Thankfully, most of us have had some writing experience in school, and we understand it’s not so simple.
If we want to create a better world, good people need to persuade others to at least consider their perspectives. Dunking on them does not achieve that. In fact, dunking on outsiders has to be one of the most effective ways of pushing them even further away.
