Giving fast feedback is extremely useful, because the feedback recipient can still both remember the behavior, and even recreate some of their internal state.
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit th... See more
Through bottom-up assessments, ratification proposals and open discussion, this process helps create openness and transparency in determining compensation, unlike traditional human resources departments, which are opaque and more prone to bias.
Refactoring is the process by which developers pay down technical debt: rewriting, simplifying, and otherwise cleaning up the codebase without changing its functionality. Much like editing a book versus writing it for the first time, refactoring code is often dreaded and unrewarding work. Since open source developers tend toward work that they find... See more
We’ll have to answer two key questions. First, at what point does human agency give way to financial obligation? And second, at what point does a relationship become a transaction? There’s a fine line between investment and speculation, and between speculation and gambling. What happens when someone loses money on $ALEX or $SWIFT? Financializing li... See more
If these patterns sound familiar it is because they are the patterns of a failed response to a disruptive change. The idea that everything stays the same except for a few changes around the edges caused every incumbent to lose in the face of step-function change. The ideas in this essay might not be the best experiments to run and the suggestions m... See more