March 3, 2022

s11e07: Three and a Half Short Pieces

s11e07: Three and a Half Short Pieces

0.0 Context setting

It's Thursday, March 3rd in Portland, Oregon and the sun is shining and for the first time this week, it is not as if we are living in an atmospheric river where our kids decide to make water angels in large puddles.

Today is the seventh day of my fifteen minute newsletter writing challenge. There's a sand timer in front of me with orange sand, the whole point -- according to my ADHD coach -- is that I'm not using the timer on my phone because we want to redefine my relationship with time. Which, to be honest, sounds like a Star Trek episode, but I get what they mean.

Yesterday was a bit long, so some shorter bits today.

1.0 Some more things that caught my attention

Associations

Semantle is a game in the rapidly burgeoning Wordle genre¹ which might be catnip or a horrific time-sink for word/semantic/language-oriented ADHD people where you have to guess a word based on how far away your guess is in a semantic vector space based on the word2vec model (spoilers: based on a corpus of Google News). In other words: guess the word based on how close your guess is to the target word, based on meaning. I'm sorry if I've destroyed your concentration.

Snow Crash Was Not A Manual Oh Forget It

Two entries in my burgeoning SNOW CRASH WAS NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL folder, the first of which is the news that "hackers stole nVidia data, posted it online after breach" which is just your usual cyberpunk worldbuilding² "lore", but for the fact that the hackers pulled of this theft to demand nVidia remove software-enforced cryptocurrency mining limits on nVidia consumer videogame graphics cards, which is cyberpunk.

The other "okay, that's allowed" cyberpunk that hit his week was when gas stations in the Moscow area were reportedly breached by pro-Ukranian, anti-Russian activists and made unusable. How? By displaying "Glory to Ukraine! Fuck Putin! Death to the enemy!" on the connected pumps. Because putting computers in everything was a good idea, never mind computers that can talk to other things.

An Obvious Point About Technology Strategy, The Devil Is Always In The Detail And Implementation of Course

An alternate title for this bit is "well, if you could do it you'd be doing it".

Nik Silver wrote about how you can make technology strategy relevant which is relevant to my interests! Silver outlines two patterns that work: one where, bluntly, the non-technologist executive leader (or leadership) actually understand that a technology strategy is supposed to make their organization more effective, which I would also call "doing their job properly". The other pattern he outlines is where the technology teams actually pay attention to what it is the business or organization is supposed to be achieving and then develop a technology that supports it, realizing that the whole point of technology existing in the organization is to... help the organization do things well. Which I also call "doing their job properly". These days, much of my job, whether in the private sector with startups or more established companies, or in the public sector with small-to-unfeasibly-large-bureaucracies, involves working on both patterns because the way I see it, you can't really have success without both of them working well.

More Excel

After I wrote about Excel, Twitter User Donkey Patrol (really, it could be worse" pointed out:

Why is editing grids of data in a manual but repeated way (eg drag handle sequences) so badly implemented literally everywhere else but Excel. Even MS Access doesn't understand why it's not loved.

To which my only really reasonable response is, well it's not that everyone else can be completely incompetent, so my first thought is that Microsoft must have patented the shit out of it.

---

And that's fifteen minutes!

The sun's still shining. Robyn and Royksopp are telling me that we should do this again, in quite a cheery manner.

How are you?

Best,

Dan