Reflections

Two nights ago, I slept on the floor next to Kika, my sweet black cat, as she neared the end of her life. I told her something that I'd like to remember, because it may be true and it may be important.

I don't know if there's any problem that can't be solved better with love.

I vaguely recall the phrasing being a bit different, perhaps slightly less awkward, but I can't remember the exact wording now. No matter. Rephrase it if you like.

Kika passed peacefully early yesterday morning. She was a wonderful cat, and I miss her very much.

#Life #Maxims

The internet can be a confirmation bias machine. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is amazing, they will find it. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is terrible, they will find it. For that reason, I don't think anyone should celebrate when they find others online who agree with them. It feels like validation, but I believe it's meaningless.

Consensus is different. If almost all people who are knowledgeable about a certain subject agree on some fact, despite their different upbringings, cultures, and worldviews, then it probably is true. Can one find people online who believe that pandas speak Latin? Probably. The internet is a big place. Can one find broad consensus that pandas speak Latin? Absolutely not. That's one way of knowing it's probably bullshit.

Is broad consensus everything? No, but it's a strong indicator of truth. Add it to your truth detection scorecard. Have it replace “my tribe agrees with me.”

#Life #SocialMedia #Tech

About two years ago, I wrote that the Beatles never set OKRs. It was the punchline to a larger point, but at the time, I was working for a company in the music industry, and I didn't want to criticize music manager types.

Now that I've moved on from that company, and especially because my car sports a custom bumper sticker with the phrase, I've decided to share the unabridged version:

I tend to believe that working too hard to come up with a name for a brand or product is pointless. A name doesn't need to be good to stick. I could point to Facebook or Apple, but there may be no better example than The Beatles. It really is a strange name. It's a pun! It's a dad joke! And yet, I can't imagine them being called anything else.

Can you imagine what a committee would have named the band? For that matter, can you imagine The Beatles writing roadmaps and setting OKRs? Sheesh.

Now that's a t-shirt. “The Beatles never set OKRs.”

I obviously feel the same way today. Speaking of music, maybe that's why one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Have a Cigar”. A lot of management—certainly not all, but certainly too much—is worse than pointless. It's actively harmful.

#Life #Maxims #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

I recently discovered a trick which one can use to save money while shopping online. If a store offers a lower price for a product when “autoship” is enabled, purchase the item with autoship, then cancel autoship after the item arrives. I don't know of any store that charges any kind of penalty at that point. Of course, one needs to actually cancel autoship when the item arrives; forgetfulness can be costly.

Is it dishonest? Yes, it is. But the dark patterns that motivate people to choose autoship (for example, making autoship the default) are even more slimy, especially when one considers how many customers these platforms have. I've known people who have enabled autoship accidentally, and I'm sure many, many others do. I consider this trick a reasonable way of fighting back.

edit (2026-03-05): It seems Amazon, at least, is wise to the idea, and it offers me fewer discounts now when using autoship. Some discounts are still offered, though.

#Tech #TechTips

Atom Heart Mother is an underrated album. I think. I mean, I'm no music expert, but I like it.

#Life

Incentives rule the world.

#Life #Maxims #SocialMedia #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved numbers are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills.

This is what the world needs.

#Life #SocialMedia #Tech

I hate to criticize an organization as wonderful as Mozilla, but I must say, Proton is the company I wish Mozilla had become. We need an alternative to Google, a suite of competing web applications that put users first and protect privacy. Proton is accomplishing exactly that.

#SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

You get what you measure.

If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”

Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”

#Life #SocialMedia #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

This is a little sci-fi.

I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, but I'm interested in how the universe works. One thing that interests me is time. Believe it or not, nobody really knows how time works, and phenomena like time dilation demonstrate that time doesn't work the way we intuitively think it does. Personally, I think time is like an undirected graph of cause and effect (or effect and cause), a directionless web of events. It feels like it has a forward direction, but that says more about us than it says about the universe.

When folks start talking about this, they inevitably mention that it's not possible to travel backward in time. There's a problem with that statement, though, and it only recently occurred to me. When people say it's not possible to travel back in time, or that entropy tends to increase, and so we don't generally see wine glasses unshatter and float back to their original resting places, they're really saying that it's not possible for external events to move backward in time while they themselves move forward in time. Why should that be possible? Why should someone be able to retain their memories and continue aging while everything around them reverts to some previous state? That would be like the food in my oven warming up and the food in my microwave cooling down, even though they were started at the same time. Maybe it's simply not possible for time to “move in two directions” at once; the events that led me to start the oven also led me to start the microwave. How could one of those be undone without the other? When we introduce memory and aging, the connection is less direct, but the principle still holds: the events that led the sun to rise also led to me forming a memory of the sunrise. How could we undo the rising without undoing the memory?

I should say, this assumes that we are living in a purely material universe. If minds exist somewhere outside of bodies, then all bets are off. In that case, perhaps the memory could be retained while the sunrise is undone.

If we do live in a purely material universe, though, maybe backward time travel does happen, but we don't notice it. By analogy, if we were living in The Sims and the “player” decided to jump back one hour, wouldn't our memories and experiences also be reverted to their states one hour ago? How would we notice anything changing? Even if the game were rewound, being played backward frame by frame, wouldn't our memory also be restored to previous states frame by frame, and wouldn't each of those frames feel exactly as it did the first time, when they were played forward? The universe may not have frames, exactly, but it does have cause and effect. In the real world, playing the game backward one frame at a time would be like undoing one effect at a time.

I know this is pretty out there, as far as my posts go. Maybe this is easily refuted by people who actually know what they're talking about. But it's interesting to me. And hey, maybe it would make for a fun Star Trek plot point! “We are going back in time, we just don't remember it!“

#Life