WFMU: Techtonic with Mark Hurst: Playlist from August 19, 2024

Listener comments!
	5:54pm ultradamno: Mark! Techtontrists!
	🤖 6:00pm Bas NL: Hi Mark! Hi all!
	🤖 6:01pm chresti: Hi Mark and techtonicians!
	🤖 6:01pm Deano de los Muertos: Howdy Mark
	🤖 6:01pm Wendy del Formaggio: Hello Mark and friends!
	🤖 6:03pm Webhamster Henry: Hi Friends! The perfect is the enemy of the good!
	🤖 6:03pm tim: Hey Mark! Hi everyone!
	🤖 6:04pm PaulRobeson1924: Hi Hi Hi!
	🤖 6:05pm Will thee SG OCNY: Good evening Mark Hurst and all!!!
	6:07pm The Butterman: Evening, Mark. Hi folks
	🤖 6:07pm DjLorraine: Hi. Oh, so the bug they claim is an undocumented feature
	6:07pm Hugo (NL): Hello!
	6:07pm Fredericks: This guy still talking about technology?
	6:08pm Marie in Chicago: Hey Mark, hey Everybody.
	6:11pm Ciggy: My nephew had to deal with this Crowdstrike issue for well over a week. The 1st 72 hours were a tremendous strain for him. His company is a Wholesale Food distributor servicing the Tri-state area. Luckily, the refrigerated trucks went out early that Friday morning.
	6:12pm Mark Hurst: ultra, Bas, chresti, Deano, Wendy, Webham, tim, PaulR, WtSG, Butterman, DjL, Hugo, Fredericks, Marie, Ciggy - welcome! Thanks for joining this evening.
	🤖 6:13pm Webhamster Henry: hahah I AM legacy code.
	6:14pm dk50b: Greetings Techtonics. How shocking this is my first time hearing about the Google monopolist ruling. I'm at a complete loss to explain the lack of media attention. As usual, there was only room for one story, and it was CrowdStrike.
	6:15pm morphe': ↳ Song: "Mark's intro" Barbie Gif ... Todd Haynes Film: "SuperStar = The Karen Carpenter Story" is worth a watch...
	6:15pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski" Not stupid questions; more, basic questions. Which are essential for people who aren't already marinating in domain-specific knowledge.
	6:16pm βrian: When you're congested by an early strain of covid, a legacy cold becomes a legacy code.
	🤖 6:17pm chresti: Oooh fighting!
	6:17pm Jeff Moore: The way she works is also how I get my best photos of people. Just be there, embedded, until you cease to be a novelty.
	6:17pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ dk50b @6:14 Suzi Hotrod dropped the bomb on her show a week ago yesterday. Who said WFMU is all about music?
	🤖 6:17pm Folsom: I assume the company is Tom Tom?
	6:17pm Mark Hurst: ↳ dk50b @6:14 It's the biggest news in the tech industry in over 20 years - except the media 20 years ago wasn't so dependent on Big Tech for survival...
	6:18pm Quinn02: ↳ Mark Hurst @6:17 thank you for introducing me to Hamsterdance
	🤖 6:19pm Will thee SG OCNY: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:13 nice
	6:19pm nick!: A lot of this is very similar to telco culture. As someone working at a US telco, it’s very much a typical office. Not flush with amenities, very 9-to-5. And I think this middle-tech culture you describe is mainly sourced from telco culture…because tech came from telco.
	🤖 6:19pm tim: ↳ Franco Twinkie @6:17 What did Suzy say?
	6:19pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:15 Well said, Jeff! I agree - we need more basic fluency in the public about how these things work. (This way, among other reasons, people know when they're being totally exploited or ripped off.)
	6:20pm nick!: It spans the globe too. Many of the big telcos have big commonalities in their origins, state-owned or state-affiliated and now privatized, trying to keep up with demand and still innovate
	6:20pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Quinn02 @6:18 Glad you enjoyed it. A classic meme song!
	6:21pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ tim @6:19 Just the facts - not an opinion piece.
	6:21pm Dean: I'll repeat my recommendation of a title, Robert Britt Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (1991).
	🤖 6:22pm DjLorraine: Sturgeon Blue Moon tonight, right?
	6:23pm Dean: I thought the Google decision was well-covered. Here's the opinion: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c368725101c/43d7c2a0-full.pdf
	6:23pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ DjLorraine @6:22 Right!
	🤖 6:23pm chresti: ↳ DjLorraine @6:22 Super and Blue Moon!
	6:23pm nick!: The "move fast break things" attitude is especially NOT present in telco. Which has requirements much more similar to a utility company in terms of reliability.
	6:23pm βrian: Ooh, I'd love to hear what Paula thinks about "Best Practice," which is an almost meaningless term, especially re refactoring legacy code.
	6:23pm paddy in matawan: I have been testing refactored code for over a week and it has been driving me nuts. Finally finished today!
	🤖 6:24pm Will thee SG OCNY: the GPS is also dependent on solar flares, bad trajectories, gps reflections off buildings, mountains, and bodies of water... soo many variables to put you on the right level of the bridge...
	6:26pm (Murakami Whywolf))): Life in a small start-up when things are still going well is, I've found, in fact something of an high. There's nothing like being pushed a little beyond your limits of ability routinely, though it's more survivable if it's not all the time. There's also a lot of room for craftsperson-ethical decisions, down to 'Will I document this line better even though Iʼm tired and thereʼs a lot to do?', or 'Can I find the best short name for this variable or method so that what Iʼm doing were clear to the next person who has to deal with it (fix it or change it or generalise it)?'. There's nothing like exercising even a limited mastery and doing the right thing, hour after hour.
	🤖 6:26pm Webhamster Henry: Crowdstrike was where the testing system needed testing.
	6:27pm (((Murakami Whywolf): ↳ paddy in matawan @6:23 How much automated unit-testing is in place for it?
	🤖 6:27pm Webhamster Henry: Ai refactoring and translating to more capable computer languages will help with a lot of these problems.
	6:28pm paddy in matawan: Ha! We have 2 "I'll fix it laters" after tonight's deployment.
	6:28pm (Murakami Whywolf))): ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:26 Not just a joke: I've found defects in automated testing when valid stuff I've written's failed.
	6:29pm paddy in matawan: ↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:27 I am a happy (mostly) E2E manual tester. We have some automation and I know the devs talk about unit testing but I am not so familiar.
	6:29pm βrian: Unit testing is an interesting idea. So far, that is.
	6:29pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski" In addition to the actual information being shared... I'm very much enjoying listening to and appreciating the subtle facets of accents in Dr. Bialski's speaking voice, which carry all sorts of little flavors which I assume tell the tale of all the places she's spent time in.
	6:30pm Mark Hurst: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26 Good perspective, thanks
	🤖 6:31pm Webhamster Henry: They tried to make me a manager, and I said "Why? that's not my skill set!"
	6:31pm Jeff Moore: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26 Yes! It's a really compelling ride, one I miss even though it was exhausting. Because it was both exhausting and exhilarating.
	6:32pm morphe': ↳ βrian @6:29 [Gilda Radna voice] What's All This I Hear About Eunuch Testing ????
	🤖 6:33pm Webhamster Henry: Mamgers love all the stats that come out of the "Agile process"
	6:33pm (((Murakami Whywolf): I once nearly ruined a release by fixing—not in inverted commas, actually fixing—a bug. …because the bug short-circuited a clean-up routine that resulted, eventually, in the damned thing running out of memory…but in the short-term it prevented another bug from getting reached. The fix exposed the underlying bug and killed one part of the demo.
	6:33pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33 The book does go into Agile processes a bit (daily standups etc.)
	6:33pm βrian: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33 Agile? Oh, I remember the early oughts, too!
	6:35pm nick!: Management's flowery language is always so fun to hear. At least where I am, there is a realism and a settling for what's possible. Or good attempts to remove roadblocks and make something happen. Squeezing people for the impossible is limited thankfully.
	🤖 6:35pm chresti: In around 2012 someone messed with the location of the Hollywood sign on GPS so that all these visitors were showing up at the tennis courts in Griffith Park asking where the Hollywood sign was and could they walk there, (it's about 3 miles away).
	6:35pm Dean: Huh. I don't hear management genuinely promoting perfection. It's just marketing puffery. Management tends to demand good-enoughness: get it done so that it works in time for the release.
	6:35pm nick!: ↳ Dean @6:35 Yes I agree. It's a lot of hype and then a settling for something reasonable.
	6:36pm (Murakami Whywolf))): In my experience the developers strove for perfection and we fought the managers not to make it 'just good enough'. This was both pride on our part—we wanted to 'do it right'—but also because we didn't want to create spaghetti and leave time-bombs in place in the code.
	6:38pm Dean: That comports with my experience on the sideline, @(Murakami Whywolf))). My career as a developer culminated in 1977, when in high school I wrote a program to calculate the volume of a function revolved around an axis. It wasn't just good enough; it was perfect.
	6:39pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Mark Hurst @6:33 I... must not really understand this "Agile" thing. Because I remember getting the impression that it meant something like "Instead of actually designing something thoroughly and correctly, just throw some shit against the wall and fix it later, you'll learn what you meant to design through that iterative process." Which is an approach I hate absolutely everything about. So... I must not actually understand what they mean?
	6:39pm Dean: The perfect, they say is the enemy of the good. I reply, it's also the enemy of the bad.
	🤖 6:39pm tim: Thanks for covering for us, Mark! ;)
	6:40pm Dean: The program, by the way, produced a visual depiction, too.
	6:41pm (((Murakami Whywolf): There's nothing like social negotiation between literally aspergic people and managers who remind them of their middle-school bullies. That was a big difference between my small start-ups and medium-sized post–start-ups and the large firm in which I ended my working days—no bros in the former.
	6:41pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 I see that as a potential drawback of Agile for sure... my impression of Agile practitioners is that they believe the method has other advantages, if practiced properly...
	6:41pm Mark Hurst: ↳ tim @6:39 Thanks, Tim
	🤖 6:41pm Webhamster Henry: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 Agile is differently interpreted in every shop, in my experience. Lots and lots of Agile lip-service! I suspect that when it was done with actual post-it notes, it worked a little better.
	🤖 6:42pm PaulRobeson1924: ↳ Fredericks @6:07 egg and ham Sandwich with a beer, please
	🤖 6:42pm tim: New premium t-shirt: Techtonic - Good Enough Since 2017.
	6:43pm Mark Hurst: ↳ tim @6:42 Heh!
	6:43pm nick!: Paula said The C Word! The source of it all Hahaha
	6:43pm Marie in Chicago: I don't think silicon valley really cares about perfection. It's like perfection as PR;it it serves thier purposes to saddle people into working 60-80 hours a week
	6:44pm Dean: You're looking at the wrong outcomes, Mark. Look a the 10-Ks. This is why "lean" companies are not by virtue of that characteristic beneficial. "Lean" tends to mean fewer workers, more productivity from each remaining worker.
	6:45pm Wild Neil\|\|Peace All: There was a book put out by Air Force Thunderbird pilot talking about perfect execution. The idea of such a thing kinda pissed me off. I dropped out of Cooper Union because I got a C in my 20's. Glad I am not an architect, but my 14 year old needs to learn about good enough ness.
	6:46pm morphe': From Good to Great => there was a period in the NYC Dept of Education [= 2000s???] where there were constant mandatory workshops ="From Good to Great " which could be inspirational yet the workshop leaders were so uninspiring ... we would trundle towards the library mumbling "staff infection..."
	🤖 6:47pm chresti: You get what you pay for?
	🤖 6:48pm Deano de los Muertos: Good interview, thanks Mark and Paula
	6:48pm Wild Neil\|\|Peace All: I used to spend 8am to midnight 7 days a week at Cooper Union thinking I was accomplishing. I should have listened to the students that said "don't you ever go home??".
	🤖 6:49pm Will thee SG OCNY: Thank you Mark and Paula!
	6:49pm Dean: St. Gall is a site of rich musical history and lore. Not "indie" by any stretch, but damn fine melisma.
	6:50pm morphe': Great Vibrant Interview !!!! Intelligence, Wit and Enthusiasm ... amazing blend...
	6:50pm (((Murakami Whywolf): ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 As far as I understand it, the notion is that believing that you have a perfect design is always illusory, and even if it _were_ perfect you would find-out as you implenented that the requirements, resources, and limitations weren't what you thought ab initio, so you strive to have a reasonably good design and then evolve it from there. For the evolution to work, the selection-mechanism must be right…otherwise you get software with antlers that cost a lot of calories to grow and are heavy enough to hobble it.
	🤖 6:50pm chresti: Thanks Mark and Paula!
	6:50pm ultradamno: Mandl will evidently have something sleeping bunny related mastodon.social...
	🤖 6:50pm tim: Thanks, Paula and Mark! I'm looking forward to reading the book. This conversation gave me a lot to think about.
	🤖 6:51pm Webhamster Henry: ↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:50 And there are also people, borderline Dunning Kruger, who know they have the perfect software idea. These people can Peter Princlple themselves into management...
	🤖 6:52pm tim: I hate to tell you this, guys, but the concept of 'good enough' IS NOT good enough on It's Complicated.
	🤖 6:54pm Webhamster Henry: Maybe our tech is aging, but Kraftwerk's COMPUTER WORLD is timeless and as relevant today as ever.
	6:55pm Dean: There are very narrow avenues that permit stepping away from big tech, e.g., deploying and developing technology in libraries. I work with colleagues who are tech-skilled and who understand the demands of providing reliable information, which go way beyond tech. They contribute a huge amount to their operation's work, and they find the work immensely rewarding.
	6:56pm GC in Bmore: Here’s a question to ponder: what if all this aging code was not complicated by the fact that it is owned by domineering surveillance monopolies? Would things be different if there weren’t so many monopolies?
	6:56pm dk50b: The proprietary software we use at work uses mapping software riddled with errors that shows a lack of familiarity with US cities. The company is in Germany. I wonder....
	🤖 6:56pm Webhamster Henry: Actually the early code is more stable than the newer, because all that surveillance means lots of vulnerable I/O. freeform.wfmu.org
	6:56pm Jeff Moore: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:36 Yes. Telling this anecdote is the tech equivalent of the former High School football star re-telling the story of that great play well past late middle age, but... Once I was working at an outpost of certain Labs largely funded by a telecom monopoly, and our team was doing a port of the X Window System to some different hardware. Several of us were writing code which wrote directly to some addresses controlled by graphics hardware. Simultaneously, Just For Fun, I was reading drafts of the newfangled ANSI C spec whose details were being hammered out. I came across a section where they said that in the future, under ANSI C, the compiler might be allowed to optimize away instructions writing to places which were never seen to be read from anywhere else in the code; but you could apply a special type specification to pointers the compiler should just damned well use as written. So I put declarations like that where appropriate in my code, set off in #ifdef sections such that they'd only be the active code if a special flag was set which should only be set in a future ANSI C compiler. And then I forgot about it. And eventually that gig ended, and I moved on to a different job. And years (5 or 10?) later, a former co-worker from that job reached out to me to say that they had indeed eventually migrated to using an ANSI C compiler; it had become the standard. And the driver code was breaking all over the place. Except for mine. He thought I'd enjoy hearing that, and indeed I was most pleased.
	6:56pm morphe': ↳ Song: "Mark's comments" A not so old John Oliver show said/showed North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) using 7 or 9" Floppy Discs ???
	6:57pm Dean: Earlier today, pre-Techtonic, it struck me that we almost never have to deal with having the wrong hammer. Technology is not "just a tool," as some believe. A device that is "just a tool" works almost 100% of the time, perfectly reliably. Software always demands our vigilance, pretty much on a daily basis.
	🤖 6:57pm Bas NL: Thanks Mark! Thanks Paula!
	🤖 6:57pm Will thee SG OCNY: be well everyone!!!
	6:57pm bleubombersune: Mark excellent discussion Thanks All stay safe and be well
	6:57pm Saltonstall: Has Dave Mandl ever voted a panhandl? Y’know, like Oklahoma or West Virginia?
	🤖 6:58pm tim: Thanks, Mark!!!
	6:58pm morphe': Thanks Mark !!!!
	6:58pm Dean: Nobody holds a candle to Dave Mandl.
	6:58pm The Butterman: Thanks Mark. Don’t get coal-rolled!
	🤖 6:59pm Deano de los Muertos: ↳ Dean @6:58 Place it on the mantle
	7:00pm Mark Hurst: Thanks, everyone! Have a good two weeks.
	🤖 7:00pm Will thee SG OCNY: ↳ Mark Hurst @7:00 enjoy the week off!
	7:12pm shambolic: This show feels very adjacent to Cory Doctrow’s theory of enshitification. Code, platforms, services degrade over time after luring you in and then becoming capital generating machines by being good enough but steadily degrading… in other words, input in, profit out, I guess.
	7:14pm (Murakami Whywolf))): ↳ Jeff Moore @6:56 I didn't have to deal with this, but we had some driver code for an early card used to implement audio-video codecs. It turns-out that the code was designed to create a delay in one thread by doing a gigantic for(){} loop that did _nothing_…and which the optimising compiler we were trying to use to boost efficiency and frame-rates was smart enough to recognise and completely to remove.
	8:10pm joe_rosevear: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @7:14 That's a problem, right?
	8:12pm joe_rosevear: Hello, and Goodbye to all. Sorry I didn't chime in sooner--I was listening while eating a late lunch. Great show!

Techtonic with Mark Hurst: Playlist from August 19, 2024

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Conversations with creators and thinkers who are charting the way forward in a tech-saturated society. In our shift to a digital future, we need alternatives to Big Tech. Homepage: techtonic.fm

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Upcoming events:

Mon. Nov 11th, 6pm - 7pm: Station Mgr Ken Guest Hosts Techtonic: Music and the Military (More info...)
Station Manager Ken welcomes David Suisman (pronounced: Soosman) on his new book "Instruments of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers." David and Ken will be discussing David's study of music's role in the making of the US military and the making of war.
Mon. Dec 23rd, 6pm - 7pm: Don Fleming guest hosts Techtonic

August 19, 2024: Paula Bialski, author, "Middle Tech"

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K | Pop-up listen Pop-up player!

Today: Paula Bialski, author, “Middle Tech”

• Middle Tech: Software Work and Culture of Good Enough by Paula Bialski, published by Princeton University Press

• paulabialski.com

• Paula and Karol (Paula’s band) on Bandcamp

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Artist	Track	Approx. start time
Paula Bialski, author, "Middle Tech: Software Work and Culture of Good Enough"
Tomaš Dvořák	Game Boy Tune "Game Boy Tune" by "Tomaš Dvořák"
	Mark's intro "Mark's intro"
	Interview with Paula Bialski "Interview with Paula Bialski"	0:08:14 (MP3 \| Pop-up)
	Mark's comments "Mark's comments"	0:45:59 (MP3 \| Pop-up)
Paula and Karol	Expectations "Expectations" by "Paula and Karol"	0:55:05 (MP3 \| Pop-up)

RSS feeds for Techtonic with Mark Hurst: Playlists feed | MP3 archives feed

| E-mail Mark Hurst | Other WFMU Playlists | All artists played by Techtonic with Mark Hurst |

Listener comments!
	5:54pm ultradamno: Mark! Techtontrists!
	🤖 6:00pm Bas NL: Hi Mark! Hi all!
	🤖 6:01pm chresti: Hi Mark and techtonicians!
	🤖 6:01pm Deano de los Muertos: Howdy Mark
	🤖 6:01pm Wendy del Formaggio: Hello Mark and friends!
	🤖 6:03pm Webhamster Henry: Hi Friends! The perfect is the enemy of the good!
	🤖 6:03pm tim: Hey Mark! Hi everyone!
	🤖 6:04pm PaulRobeson1924: Hi Hi Hi!
	🤖 6:05pm Will thee SG OCNY: Good evening Mark Hurst and all!!!
	6:07pm The Butterman: Evening, Mark. Hi folks
	🤖 6:07pm DjLorraine: Hi. Oh, so the bug they claim is an undocumented feature
	6:07pm Hugo (NL): Hello!
	6:07pm Fredericks: This guy still talking about technology?
	6:08pm Marie in Chicago: Hey Mark, hey Everybody.
	6:11pm Ciggy: My nephew had to deal with this Crowdstrike issue for well over a week. The 1st 72 hours were a tremendous strain for him. His company is a Wholesale Food distributor servicing the Tri-state area. Luckily, the refrigerated trucks went out early that Friday morning.
	6:12pm Mark Hurst: ultra, Bas, chresti, Deano, Wendy, Webham, tim, PaulR, WtSG, Butterman, DjL, Hugo, Fredericks, Marie, Ciggy - welcome! Thanks for joining this evening.
	🤖 6:13pm Webhamster Henry: hahah I AM legacy code.
	6:14pm dk50b: Greetings Techtonics. How shocking this is my first time hearing about the Google monopolist ruling. I'm at a complete loss to explain the lack of media attention. As usual, there was only room for one story, and it was CrowdStrike.
	6:15pm morphe': ↳ Song: "Mark's intro" Barbie Gif ... Todd Haynes Film: "SuperStar = The Karen Carpenter Story" is worth a watch...
	6:15pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski" Not stupid questions; more, basic questions. Which are essential for people who aren't already marinating in domain-specific knowledge.
	6:16pm βrian: When you're congested by an early strain of covid, a legacy cold becomes a legacy code.
	🤖 6:17pm chresti: Oooh fighting!
	6:17pm Jeff Moore: The way she works is also how I get my best photos of people. Just be there, embedded, until you cease to be a novelty.
	6:17pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ dk50b @6:14 Suzi Hotrod dropped the bomb on her show a week ago yesterday. Who said WFMU is all about music?
	🤖 6:17pm Folsom: I assume the company is Tom Tom?
	6:17pm Mark Hurst: ↳ dk50b @6:14 It's the biggest news in the tech industry in over 20 years - except the media 20 years ago wasn't so dependent on Big Tech for survival...
	6:18pm Quinn02: ↳ Mark Hurst @6:17 thank you for introducing me to Hamsterdance
	🤖 6:19pm Will thee SG OCNY: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:13 nice
	6:19pm nick!: A lot of this is very similar to telco culture. As someone working at a US telco, it’s very much a typical office. Not flush with amenities, very 9-to-5. And I think this middle-tech culture you describe is mainly sourced from telco culture…because tech came from telco.
	🤖 6:19pm tim: ↳ Franco Twinkie @6:17 What did Suzy say?
	6:19pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:15 Well said, Jeff! I agree - we need more basic fluency in the public about how these things work. (This way, among other reasons, people know when they're being totally exploited or ripped off.)
	6:20pm nick!: It spans the globe too. Many of the big telcos have big commonalities in their origins, state-owned or state-affiliated and now privatized, trying to keep up with demand and still innovate
	6:20pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Quinn02 @6:18 Glad you enjoyed it. A classic meme song!
	6:21pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ tim @6:19 Just the facts - not an opinion piece.
	6:21pm Dean: I'll repeat my recommendation of a title, Robert Britt Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (1991).
	🤖 6:22pm DjLorraine: Sturgeon Blue Moon tonight, right?
	6:23pm Dean: I thought the Google decision was well-covered. Here's the opinion: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c368725101c/43d7c2a0-full.pdf
	6:23pm Franco Twinkie: ↳ DjLorraine @6:22 Right!
	🤖 6:23pm chresti: ↳ DjLorraine @6:22 Super and Blue Moon!
	6:23pm nick!: The "move fast break things" attitude is especially NOT present in telco. Which has requirements much more similar to a utility company in terms of reliability.
	6:23pm βrian: Ooh, I'd love to hear what Paula thinks about "Best Practice," which is an almost meaningless term, especially re refactoring legacy code.
	6:23pm paddy in matawan: I have been testing refactored code for over a week and it has been driving me nuts. Finally finished today!
	🤖 6:24pm Will thee SG OCNY: the GPS is also dependent on solar flares, bad trajectories, gps reflections off buildings, mountains, and bodies of water... soo many variables to put you on the right level of the bridge...
	6:26pm (Murakami Whywolf))): Life in a small start-up when things are still going well is, I've found, in fact something of an high. There's nothing like being pushed a little beyond your limits of ability routinely, though it's more survivable if it's not all the time. There's also a lot of room for craftsperson-ethical decisions, down to 'Will I document this line better even though Iʼm tired and thereʼs a lot to do?', or 'Can I find the best short name for this variable or method so that what Iʼm doing were clear to the next person who has to deal with it (fix it or change it or generalise it)?'. There's nothing like exercising even a limited mastery and doing the right thing, hour after hour.
	🤖 6:26pm Webhamster Henry: Crowdstrike was where the testing system needed testing.
	6:27pm (((Murakami Whywolf): ↳ paddy in matawan @6:23 How much automated unit-testing is in place for it?
	🤖 6:27pm Webhamster Henry: Ai refactoring and translating to more capable computer languages will help with a lot of these problems.
	6:28pm paddy in matawan: Ha! We have 2 "I'll fix it laters" after tonight's deployment.
	6:28pm (Murakami Whywolf))): ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:26 Not just a joke: I've found defects in automated testing when valid stuff I've written's failed.
	6:29pm paddy in matawan: ↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:27 I am a happy (mostly) E2E manual tester. We have some automation and I know the devs talk about unit testing but I am not so familiar.
	6:29pm βrian: Unit testing is an interesting idea. So far, that is.
	6:29pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski" In addition to the actual information being shared... I'm very much enjoying listening to and appreciating the subtle facets of accents in Dr. Bialski's speaking voice, which carry all sorts of little flavors which I assume tell the tale of all the places she's spent time in.
	6:30pm Mark Hurst: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26 Good perspective, thanks
	🤖 6:31pm Webhamster Henry: They tried to make me a manager, and I said "Why? that's not my skill set!"
	6:31pm Jeff Moore: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26 Yes! It's a really compelling ride, one I miss even though it was exhausting. Because it was both exhausting and exhilarating.
	6:32pm morphe': ↳ βrian @6:29 [Gilda Radna voice] What's All This I Hear About Eunuch Testing ????
	🤖 6:33pm Webhamster Henry: Mamgers love all the stats that come out of the "Agile process"
	6:33pm (((Murakami Whywolf): I once nearly ruined a release by fixing—not in inverted commas, actually fixing—a bug. …because the bug short-circuited a clean-up routine that resulted, eventually, in the damned thing running out of memory…but in the short-term it prevented another bug from getting reached. The fix exposed the underlying bug and killed one part of the demo.
	6:33pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33 The book does go into Agile processes a bit (daily standups etc.)
	6:33pm βrian: ↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33 Agile? Oh, I remember the early oughts, too!
	6:35pm nick!: Management's flowery language is always so fun to hear. At least where I am, there is a realism and a settling for what's possible. Or good attempts to remove roadblocks and make something happen. Squeezing people for the impossible is limited thankfully.
	🤖 6:35pm chresti: In around 2012 someone messed with the location of the Hollywood sign on GPS so that all these visitors were showing up at the tennis courts in Griffith Park asking where the Hollywood sign was and could they walk there, (it's about 3 miles away).
	6:35pm Dean: Huh. I don't hear management genuinely promoting perfection. It's just marketing puffery. Management tends to demand good-enoughness: get it done so that it works in time for the release.
	6:35pm nick!: ↳ Dean @6:35 Yes I agree. It's a lot of hype and then a settling for something reasonable.
	6:36pm (Murakami Whywolf))): In my experience the developers strove for perfection and we fought the managers not to make it 'just good enough'. This was both pride on our part—we wanted to 'do it right'—but also because we didn't want to create spaghetti and leave time-bombs in place in the code.
	6:38pm Dean: That comports with my experience on the sideline, @(Murakami Whywolf))). My career as a developer culminated in 1977, when in high school I wrote a program to calculate the volume of a function revolved around an axis. It wasn't just good enough; it was perfect.
	6:39pm Jeff Moore: ↳ Mark Hurst @6:33 I... must not really understand this "Agile" thing. Because I remember getting the impression that it meant something like "Instead of actually designing something thoroughly and correctly, just throw some shit against the wall and fix it later, you'll learn what you meant to design through that iterative process." Which is an approach I hate absolutely everything about. So... I must not actually understand what they mean?
	6:39pm Dean: The perfect, they say is the enemy of the good. I reply, it's also the enemy of the bad.
	🤖 6:39pm tim: Thanks for covering for us, Mark! ;)
	6:40pm Dean: The program, by the way, produced a visual depiction, too.
	6:41pm (((Murakami Whywolf): There's nothing like social negotiation between literally aspergic people and managers who remind them of their middle-school bullies. That was a big difference between my small start-ups and medium-sized post–start-ups and the large firm in which I ended my working days—no bros in the former.
	6:41pm Mark Hurst: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 I see that as a potential drawback of Agile for sure... my impression of Agile practitioners is that they believe the method has other advantages, if practiced properly...
	6:41pm Mark Hurst: ↳ tim @6:39 Thanks, Tim
	🤖 6:41pm Webhamster Henry: ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 Agile is differently interpreted in every shop, in my experience. Lots and lots of Agile lip-service! I suspect that when it was done with actual post-it notes, it worked a little better.
	🤖 6:42pm PaulRobeson1924: ↳ Fredericks @6:07 egg and ham Sandwich with a beer, please
	🤖 6:42pm tim: New premium t-shirt: Techtonic - Good Enough Since 2017.
	6:43pm Mark Hurst: ↳ tim @6:42 Heh!
	6:43pm nick!: Paula said The C Word! The source of it all Hahaha
	6:43pm Marie in Chicago: I don't think silicon valley really cares about perfection. It's like perfection as PR;it it serves thier purposes to saddle people into working 60-80 hours a week
	6:44pm Dean: You're looking at the wrong outcomes, Mark. Look a the 10-Ks. This is why "lean" companies are not by virtue of that characteristic beneficial. "Lean" tends to mean fewer workers, more productivity from each remaining worker.
	6:45pm Wild Neil\|\|Peace All: There was a book put out by Air Force Thunderbird pilot talking about perfect execution. The idea of such a thing kinda pissed me off. I dropped out of Cooper Union because I got a C in my 20's. Glad I am not an architect, but my 14 year old needs to learn about good enough ness.
	6:46pm morphe': From Good to Great => there was a period in the NYC Dept of Education [= 2000s???] where there were constant mandatory workshops ="From Good to Great " which could be inspirational yet the workshop leaders were so uninspiring ... we would trundle towards the library mumbling "staff infection..."
	🤖 6:47pm chresti: You get what you pay for?
	🤖 6:48pm Deano de los Muertos: Good interview, thanks Mark and Paula
	6:48pm Wild Neil\|\|Peace All: I used to spend 8am to midnight 7 days a week at Cooper Union thinking I was accomplishing. I should have listened to the students that said "don't you ever go home??".
	🤖 6:49pm Will thee SG OCNY: Thank you Mark and Paula!
	6:49pm Dean: St. Gall is a site of rich musical history and lore. Not "indie" by any stretch, but damn fine melisma.
	6:50pm morphe': Great Vibrant Interview !!!! Intelligence, Wit and Enthusiasm ... amazing blend...
	6:50pm (((Murakami Whywolf): ↳ Jeff Moore @6:39 As far as I understand it, the notion is that believing that you have a perfect design is always illusory, and even if it _were_ perfect you would find-out as you implenented that the requirements, resources, and limitations weren't what you thought ab initio, so you strive to have a reasonably good design and then evolve it from there. For the evolution to work, the selection-mechanism must be right…otherwise you get software with antlers that cost a lot of calories to grow and are heavy enough to hobble it.
	🤖 6:50pm chresti: Thanks Mark and Paula!
	6:50pm ultradamno: Mandl will evidently have something sleeping bunny related mastodon.social...
	🤖 6:50pm tim: Thanks, Paula and Mark! I'm looking forward to reading the book. This conversation gave me a lot to think about.
	🤖 6:51pm Webhamster Henry: ↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:50 And there are also people, borderline Dunning Kruger, who know they have the perfect software idea. These people can Peter Princlple themselves into management...
	🤖 6:52pm tim: I hate to tell you this, guys, but the concept of 'good enough' IS NOT good enough on It's Complicated.
	🤖 6:54pm Webhamster Henry: Maybe our tech is aging, but Kraftwerk's COMPUTER WORLD is timeless and as relevant today as ever.
	6:55pm Dean: There are very narrow avenues that permit stepping away from big tech, e.g., deploying and developing technology in libraries. I work with colleagues who are tech-skilled and who understand the demands of providing reliable information, which go way beyond tech. They contribute a huge amount to their operation's work, and they find the work immensely rewarding.
	6:56pm GC in Bmore: Here’s a question to ponder: what if all this aging code was not complicated by the fact that it is owned by domineering surveillance monopolies? Would things be different if there weren’t so many monopolies?
	6:56pm dk50b: The proprietary software we use at work uses mapping software riddled with errors that shows a lack of familiarity with US cities. The company is in Germany. I wonder....
	🤖 6:56pm Webhamster Henry: Actually the early code is more stable than the newer, because all that surveillance means lots of vulnerable I/O. freeform.wfmu.org
	6:56pm Jeff Moore: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:36 Yes. Telling this anecdote is the tech equivalent of the former High School football star re-telling the story of that great play well past late middle age, but... Once I was working at an outpost of certain Labs largely funded by a telecom monopoly, and our team was doing a port of the X Window System to some different hardware. Several of us were writing code which wrote directly to some addresses controlled by graphics hardware. Simultaneously, Just For Fun, I was reading drafts of the newfangled ANSI C spec whose details were being hammered out. I came across a section where they said that in the future, under ANSI C, the compiler might be allowed to optimize away instructions writing to places which were never seen to be read from anywhere else in the code; but you could apply a special type specification to pointers the compiler should just damned well use as written. So I put declarations like that where appropriate in my code, set off in #ifdef sections such that they'd only be the active code if a special flag was set which should only be set in a future ANSI C compiler. And then I forgot about it. And eventually that gig ended, and I moved on to a different job. And years (5 or 10?) later, a former co-worker from that job reached out to me to say that they had indeed eventually migrated to using an ANSI C compiler; it had become the standard. And the driver code was breaking all over the place. Except for mine. He thought I'd enjoy hearing that, and indeed I was most pleased.
	6:56pm morphe': ↳ Song: "Mark's comments" A not so old John Oliver show said/showed North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) using 7 or 9" Floppy Discs ???
	6:57pm Dean: Earlier today, pre-Techtonic, it struck me that we almost never have to deal with having the wrong hammer. Technology is not "just a tool," as some believe. A device that is "just a tool" works almost 100% of the time, perfectly reliably. Software always demands our vigilance, pretty much on a daily basis.
	🤖 6:57pm Bas NL: Thanks Mark! Thanks Paula!
	🤖 6:57pm Will thee SG OCNY: be well everyone!!!
	6:57pm bleubombersune: Mark excellent discussion Thanks All stay safe and be well
	6:57pm Saltonstall: Has Dave Mandl ever voted a panhandl? Y’know, like Oklahoma or West Virginia?
	🤖 6:58pm tim: Thanks, Mark!!!
	6:58pm morphe': Thanks Mark !!!!
	6:58pm Dean: Nobody holds a candle to Dave Mandl.
	6:58pm The Butterman: Thanks Mark. Don’t get coal-rolled!
	🤖 6:59pm Deano de los Muertos: ↳ Dean @6:58 Place it on the mantle
	7:00pm Mark Hurst: Thanks, everyone! Have a good two weeks.
	🤖 7:00pm Will thee SG OCNY: ↳ Mark Hurst @7:00 enjoy the week off!
	7:12pm shambolic: This show feels very adjacent to Cory Doctrow’s theory of enshitification. Code, platforms, services degrade over time after luring you in and then becoming capital generating machines by being good enough but steadily degrading… in other words, input in, profit out, I guess.
	7:14pm (Murakami Whywolf))): ↳ Jeff Moore @6:56 I didn't have to deal with this, but we had some driver code for an early card used to implement audio-video codecs. It turns-out that the code was designed to create a delay in one thread by doing a gigantic for(){} loop that did _nothing_…and which the optimising compiler we were trying to use to boost efficiency and frame-rates was smart enough to recognise and completely to remove.
	8:10pm joe_rosevear: ↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @7:14 That's a problem, right?
	8:12pm joe_rosevear: Hello, and Goodbye to all. Sorry I didn't chime in sooner--I was listening while eating a late lunch. Great show!

Techtonic with Mark Hurst: Playlist from August 19, 2024

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