This is why I built out a Shadow Sessions program for our internal tooling teams at my BigCo.
The users are right there, go make friends. Learn what they're doing day to day. And how it fits into the larger picture.
These sessions are lightweight, and auto schedule every three weeks with no required action items and people come out of it amazed every time, lots of little bugs have been fixed, and connections are being made.
The culture of not engaging with the end users when they're so readily available is an odd one to me. And you can really get to say 80% of macro picture understanding and user experience design fundamentals with a fairly low lift.
To do this I created a sign up form and an auto scheduler that interacts with the Slack API. The scheduling and getting folk on board is the hardest part. Also finding time if you do things outside the product road map.
100% this. Go and spend time with the people using your software. Even better, use it yourself.
One of the companies I’ve worked for did food delivery, and in food delivery during Christmas week everybody works operations - either you’re out in a van with one of the regular drivers helping them carry orders that are three times larger than any other week, or you’re handling phone calls and emails to fix whatever problems arise. Either way without fail January every year would see a flurry of low effort/high value updates to the software those parts of the business used. Anything from changing the order of some interactions to fit the flow of dropping a delivery to putting our phone number in the header of every admin page.
Absolutely nothing beats going out there and doing the job to discover where the tools you’re responsible for fall over. Bonus points if you can do it at the most stressful time of year when if anything is going to fail it probably will.
Not using it themselves is why my managment at various companies wouldn't let anyone do sensible things.
Companies that sell to other companies .... don't care about the users. It's one bunch of managers sleezing up to another to make a sale. Whether the product is good to use doesn't matter to them because none of them use it.
A "good" company wouldn't allow this to happen but it happens often enough.
Another bad smell is when developers themselves never use the whole product and simply work on their little bit.
Eat ones own dog-food, or in other words, get the company cooking something great together and sharing the results.
A great company basically opens on its first day and 48 hours later there are a ton of well fed customers who come back, not incidentally, again and again for what they perceive, is great.
But apropos feeding customers, if you can't 'eat your own food' dog or otherwise, why expect the user to want to do it ..
And it's such a blind spot in the industry that the people most able to build and estimate features and software are left to be the least equipped to see through the end user's eyes.
As such, when you encourage user oriented engineers, these common and often low effort issues can be avoided at the outset which improves velocity organizationally and results in better software and user experiences for projects now and in the future.
I once worked at a company where I couldn't a single person who would have used our product even if they could. "Well, I guess I am not in the target group for our product..." was the most often used excuse. It was very frustrating.
A bit more heavyweight, but we implemented a rotation program when I was managing an internal tools team at a previous company. We'd trade an engineer from our team with an engineer from a feature team for a quarter.
The amount of improvements to our collective understandings was super valuable. Feature devs got to help fix problems with their tools more directly (while also learning that it's not always as straightforward as it may seem), and we brought back much stronger insights into the experience of actually using our tools day-to-day.
This is evidence that there is a prior element to this 'problem', which is that - in order for Technology to exist, Ethics have to be aligned well enough to deliver, effectively, the result of the technology: a product.
The user, ethically, is another piece of evidence - especially in real time and at huge scale.
So you are so right about the user. The user comes first, the technology second, and when the service of the latter benefits the former, greatly, at scale, the people problems become, well, people solutions - i.e., the user.
Managing upwards beats being managed in my experience. Seems to work with most managers, and reduces surprises which reduces stress all around and causes course corrections and course alignments earlier.
I tend to do status updates in public channels before anyone can ask me but I've been the fortunate loner for the last couple years where I get to work with a lot of people but outside a lot of process.
I think citation would be needed on this. Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
And many content creators might benefit from an expanded public domain, or they might not... There's already tons of creators, they seem to be getting by? Well, actually, some are getting by and most are probably hobbyists or underwater much like most arts. I'm not sure expanded quantities of available characters would necessarily change much.
> Obviously any artist producing fully original music or art doesn't.
I would suggest that artists who say they're producing fully original works are just poorly educated in art history. Making something that has no prior influences would be extraordinary in the modern world.
Also, the entities most capable of exploiting long copyright terms are corporations. Individuals simply don't have the resources to keep something relevant decade after decade save for a very small handful of exceptions like J.R.R. Tolkien.
I'm not even really advocating for or against the copyright position.
I also think you're missing my point a bit. Just cause you study lots of works and create an original creation which borrows influences isn't the same thing as requiring use of a copyrighted piece of work.
It's pretty silly to suggest I was implying artists have no influences cause I classified works without any copyrighted material as original.
My point was more... just cause a bunch of copyrighted work becomes available does not necessarily imply creators and artists lives will be substantially different or better off.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for the last... decade or so. And it still seems to return fairly relevant documentation towards the top.
To be fair, that's most of what I use search for these days is "<<Programming Language | Tool | Library | or whatever>> <<keyword | function | package>>" then navigate to the documentation, double check the versions align with what I'm writing software in, read... move on.
Sometimes I also search for "movie showtimes nyc" or for a specific venue or something.
So maybe my use cases are too specific to screw up, who knows. If not, maybe DDG is worth a try.
Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman who occasionally bring a load of drugs from point A to point B.
I'm sure the complete lack of effectiveness will be worth the condemnation and lost intelligence by our allies, and further erosion of our separation of powers.
Not saying this is called for or legal or anything of the sort, but you can find pictures of some of the boats being destroyed. These aren't fishing boats:
Again, I don't support these actions, just pointing out that at least some of these boats are very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only.
> very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only
Can you explain this? I agree they are not fishing boats but I don't understand how anything beyond that is obvious. Is smuggling the only possible use for that boat? Are drugs the only thing that can be smuggled?
Great, then track them to their destination and make arrests. I can't conceive of any capital crime they've committed, can you? Plus, then there's a chance to disrupt someone other than the lowest-level operators.
If these drugs aren't coming into the United States then what in the fuck are we even doing? Murdering people just to create minor disruptions in foreign supply chains?
> “These aren't fishing boats…these boats are very obviously being used for one thing and one thing only.”
It looks like a deep sea panga boat used for fishing. I’m not a sailor so it’s not obvious to me why the destroyed boat pictured is a …well… for one thing only.
Here’s a video of YouTuber ItchyBoots taking a boat around the Darien Gap. [1] What does this look like? (start from “Entrada” sign on the beach).
If the destroyed boat is different, it’s because it has three outboard motors and not just one. Still has the same open design.
I mean, it’s not a “cigar boat” [2].
Adding two more outboards seems same to me as my neighbor who drives a Dodge 3500.
And the bombs are relatively expensive, when bullets are cheap. Even if you don't mind eroding the rights of drug traffickers, it's a wasteful way to do the enforcement action.
The great tragedy is that bullets are also more accurate.
I don't mean to be "that guy", but how do we even know the sailors on these boats aren't just some fishermen working for the cartels because they have a guy at his shack with a gun on his mother and siblings or kids? Or, even worse, what if they aren't working for cartels at all? Just went out to try to fish.
I'm not sure what our endgame is here, but just eyeballing this from the outside it looks like we're doing surgery with chainsaws instead of scalpels.
And all that assumes that our government is actually trying to help. Our end goal could be something else entirely? It's all just mystifying right now? I'm not sure anyone could give a coherent explanation of the why's, and I'm just about certain that no one could give a rational explanation of the how.
I feel like we could do better, quite easily. People are very gung-ho (jing-go?) on this and it seems clear to me that we can use our significant technological advantages and investigatory prowess to target these bad actors just like any other day at the office.
This is quite the departure and it is quite troubling to me. The ESA launch site is down there iirc, seems like we have natural allies who would join a push, but instead we sent a carrier group.
At least one of the "why"s is very simple. Trump likes to act in ways which make him look powerful, and which make others respect and fear him.
I think another "why" is ratcheting up the pressure on Venezuela, because Trump has decided or been persuaded to embark on a program of regime change for Venezuela.
I don't actually understand why regime change in Venezuela is important to Trump & MAGA though.
> Isn't the historical answer to why regime change usually Oil
Its usually corporate/capital interests; oil has been popular for a while, but, its hardly exclusive. We didn’t get the name “banana republic” from US interventions over oil, after all.
If I'm considering becoming a drug runner, and I hear "sometimes they arrest you" I'd say "so what?" If I hear "sometimes you get shot at", I'd take my chances and shoot back. But if I keep hearing about missiles obliterating drug runners with no warning... maybe I just stay home.
> If I hear "sometimes you get shot at", I'd take my chances and shoot back. But if I keep hearing about missiles obliterating drug runners with no warning... maybe I just stay home.
Given some of the things competing cartels do to each other, getting instantaneously killed by a bomb is probably a relief compared to what some of your 'competitors' may do.
> compared to what some of your 'competitors' may do.
Or your boss. Once you're working for a drug cartel, I don't think you have a whole lot of autonomy when it comes to determining your specific role. If your boss tells you to get in a fishing boat and you refuse, you risk getting killed on the spot.
Drug cartels don't necessarily work like tech companies, where you consider the job postings, apply, sign a contract, and then do the job. It might even be that they need a drug runner and just say "do it or we kill your family".
Plus neither point is anywhere close to US territory and alleged drug markets, because the little boats the administration has been bombing can't race their way across 1000+ (terrestrial) miles from Aruba to Florida.
OK, Puerto Rico is a bit closer, but yknowwhatimean.
I don't think this Administration/Executive Branch recognizes Puerto Rico (populace) to be American or part of the U.S. except only in as much as it can do whatever it wants there.
Maybe so, but the administration claims that these people are not just drug smugglers, but narco-terrorists.
Normally, suspected drug smugglers should be interdicted, boarded, and inspected. The Coast Guard and U.S. Navy train for this. It's standard operating procedure.
It's not normal to destroy boats which don't pose any immediate threat. It would be acceptable to fire on a boat which refuses to permit boarding and inspection, assuming the interdiction itself is legal under maritime law.
Unless there is an imminent threat, you've got to give people a course of action which they can take to avoid their vessel being fired upon: turn back, change course, submit to boarding and inspection, etc.
> Normally, suspected drug smugglers should be interdicted, boarded, and inspected.
Wouldn't any smuggler have drugs in a case weighted by stones ready to dump the second they think they're being interdicted? You wouldn't find anything and possible smugglers would have both liberty and equipment try again.
I suspect there's no easier deterence without boots on ground regime change (ie. Police yourself + develop the region economically) other than essentially shooting at suspiciously behaving craft. I also suspect all the various solutions have been game theorized to death in millitary thinktanks and war colleges and have been known for decades - they just decided to bite the bullet now.
Piracy on the east coast of Africa was a huge problem problem until countries sent navies to shoot the boats out of water if they were behaving suspiciously. I believe some countries were ready to bomb ports towns but it thankfully it didn't get that far before local strongmen got the message.
If they are indeed accused of being narco-terrorists, then they are enemy combatants, and there are no such requirements in either international or US law.
Narcoterrorism isn’t a real thing in this context. Repurposing the term “terrorism” to refer to people who aren’t seeking to enact political aims by doing violence against civilians is ridiculous.
Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to
gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families. People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers, who in no way extend the kind of empathy to us that we're expected to show them.
It does get very complicated when you consider they're probably under a lot of "carrot AND stick" from the cartels... but the damage they do is real.
I don't see how killing a lot of fishermen and destroying their families alleviates this pain.
There might have been drugs on the boats, but maybe not. No one bothered to check first.
The fishermen might have been part-time drug smugglers, maybe not. How do we know? What investigation was done?
And if we really believe that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
then taking away people's lives without due process is murder. Cold blooded, premeditated murder. That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them.
Friend, don't let your pain blind you to causing more pain. Ethics is hard.
I mean it is noble to act like you are some being of infinite sympathy and forgiveness. The reality of being alive though is that many people will 100% hurt you for their personal gain.
> That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them
I am pretty sure the 14 people who died weren't smuggling in 14 doses of fentanyl, is killing someone a worse crime than selling 100,000 people a drug that might kill them, and will guaranteed fuck up their lives, their families lives, and their community?
The USA (and many countries) decided long ago to allow the sale of alcohol, a drug that ends many lives and ruins many, many more. I hope that once these fentanyl smugglers are dealt with, we can do something about the drug sellers that are operating out in the open with impunity.
> People who have lost someone (either through death or just throwing their life away) to drugs will tell you these "poor fishermen" are murderers
Just to be clear-- we're talking about a hypothetical family member of a potential future victim of drug overdose who was unwittingly saved based on fully trusting the federal government's claim that their extra-judicial killing stopped the international trade of illicit drugs as opposed to killing innocent fishermen.
Did I correctly label all the global mutable state in your example?
I get and agree with your non-sequitur that there's a clear difference between drug mules and fishermen, I just don't see the relevance of that to the danger of leveraging these post-9/11 counterterrorism laws (and secret interpretations of them) to carry out extra-judicial killings.
Edit: to be extra clear-- the whole point of meaningful democratic oversight in this case is to be able to meaningfully care, measure and review the difference between drug mules and fishermen. The entire modern history of secret interpretations of counterterrorism laws tells us that without this basic oversight, the government will always claim they only target the murderers. Worse, they'll use the veil of national security to hide the fact that innocent victims are jailed, tortured, and killed through the same counterterrorism programs.
This is not a useful conversation because there is no way to know that any drugs have been destroyed. The issue at hand is that the government is blowing up unidentified boats full of unidentified people. Talking about the harmful effects of drugs is a complete non-sequitur until there is some convincing reason to believe that drugs are involved.
Beyond this administration, the US government has a documented history of lying about the justification for military action. When people are being killed it is irresponsible to assume, with no evidence, that they are telling the truth this time.
I am not assuming the strikes are baseless, I am stating that there is no evidence for any basis, so discussing if they might be justified if some hypothetical evidence existed is pointless.
We've actually had multiple high profile intelligence leaks by the current admin because it's full of absolute idiots, and the leaks would indicate that they're about as smart as your average user on Twitter. Frankly if anyone believes their strikes have any sort of valid basis with all the leaks that have gone out then I would question their critical thinking ability.
> If you are smuggling large amounts of fentanyl or weapons into another country and they shoot you that seems pretty ok.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Also, there's great reasons to have punishments for crimes that are not just summary executions. Even if you have a warped morality where all criminals of any sort should die, there's _still_ great reasons to not allow that to be chosen by the closest person with a gun. That way lies chaos and corruption.
So if China CLAIMS without evidence that Americans smuggle large amounts of fentanyl or weapons on international water then you are OK with them killing Americans? Would it include your family if it was claimed they are smugglers?
If other countries were bombing US boats in the Gulf of Mexico, closer to the US and hundreds or thousands of miles away from the country doing the bombing, would you be okay with that?
Why limit it to boats? Maybe he would support shooting down American civilian planes if claimed they had drugs on board. I’m sure he would support that.
How do you know that already doesn’t happen? Not necessarily blowing up but I’m sure there’s a gulf of dead people with US citizenship who have been killed by various states for participating in drug activities and illegal activity at large.
Singapore has given many foreigners the death penalty for drug smuggling and I couldnt care less actually
If youre implying the people being killed are innocent countrymen of the real criminals then of course I object. Everything I have said applies to people actually comitting crimes
"Penalty" is the key word here. Like, issued by a judge, after proper judgement according to the law of the land. Not random shooting people without any due process.
This will definitely get lost in the conversation but like I said right up front, I dont actually agree with killing them. It seems that we ought to be able to intercept these boats and process them as suspects of a crime. It just rubs me the wrong way how every issue gets written up as a one-sided narrative of good vs evil depending on who you support politically.
I'd argue a missing social safety net combined with grossly inadequate public education, no job opportunities, unaffordable healthcare and housing, and a prison system designed to punish all drive people to take drugs. Drug addiction is just the symptom. Let's focus on giving people real hope and value and meaning in their lives, from birth to death, instead of killing people, without trial, a world away.
> Im not actually in support of killing these people but I have to say, people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families.
So does alcohol. (And a whole bunch of other domestically-produced stuff.)
How much effort is being put into the demand-side of the equation?
> people seem to gloss over that each boatload of these drugs literally destroys multiple American families
They also gloss over the fact that alcohol does the same. But I don't think it's bizarre to allow people to make their own decisions.
When alcohol was criminalized, many people would go blind from impurities in their own homebrews. Legalization and regulation are good things to prevent some of the unintended consequences, like deaths from adulteration with fentanyl, hotspots, and so on.
Many (possibly all) of the boats in question were not capable of making it to the U.S. from where they were hit without refueling multiple times. It is not possible that they were headed directly to the U.S..
If your barometer is 'thing destroying American families' does this mean you'd also be willing to excuse blowing up health insurers or does your logic only apply to things that aren't directly under the thumb of American businesses?
The pragmatic approach is that we're spending far too much money blowing up small boats which could be better invested in actually fixing our healthcare system and other domestic issues, with decent odds of going to war and spending even more money because of it. The empathetic side is that these are just fishermen that aren't even involved in this whole shitshow getting killed for political points by a bloodthirsty and stupid admin.
Even if you just assume guilt it doesn't make sense. You send the coast guard to capture the boat and then you have a person with knowledge and drugs and a boat which can be traced & used as evidence...
You mean the casual sense of "innocence", but they are literally innocent in they they've not been convicted of the crime they were killed for allegedly committing.
"The only real drug problem is scoring real good drugs. Haven't we learned our lesson? The corner store sells finer scotch. But who's got uncut powder?" - NOFX
Why are you making the assumption that they are poverty stricken fishermen. That kind of boat and engines is not something a poor fisherman would use or own.
>Seems like we're bombing a bunch of low level, poverty stricken fisherman who occasionally bring a load of drugs from point A to point B.
If I understand things correctly, no one's denying that this is what they're doing. Furthermore, not only are they denying it, in many people's minds, this is justification. I'm sure that many carjackers had awful childhoods, but when one has a gun to your head you're not really in a mood to pray that no one hurts him.
My conspiracy theory is that the administration recognizes the current media climate (a flood of frantic but ephemeral media/social media coverage of everything he does) and are leveraging it to combat things like immigration and drug-smuggling down.
The ICE deportation shit seemed nuts at first. Sure deport undocumented immigrants, but have some compassion and sympathy. Things like deporting a mom and dad at their kids birthday party seemed psychotic and bad for everyone.
Then I read that 80% of the deportations are a result immigrants turning themselves in out of fear. Whether intentional or not the most effective thing ICE did was creating a media frenzy that resulted in people turning themselves in out of fear. Ironically the people trying to "hold ICE accountable" by blowing them up on social media have caused way more deportations than ICE themselves.
Maybe this is the same thing? If all of a sudden a few smugglers getting blown up goes viral the next fisherman who wants to make some extra money might take a pass.
The alternative is Trump is just crazy and evil and power hungry (could be easily true based on his past), but I tend to get suspicious whenever we attribute a humans motivations to: "yeah they are crazy/evil/bad" because people are much more nuanced.
Also I know I am gonna get downvoted to oblivion lol
The Senate
- Give the territories 2 Senators, the tribes in the reservations 2 Senators, and DC 2 Senators
- Find some minimum number of citizens to get a Senator and lump certain states like the Dakotas together
The House
- Same thing, add a rep per reservation, add reps for the territories, add reps for DC
- All maps drawn in a non partisan manner to encourage competitive races between the parties as opposed to unlosable districts which can never boot these representatives who literally do nothing (won't even _come to the table_ during this recent shutdown, literally left DC for 7 weeks, wtf is that shit)
- Abolish Citizens United, politics needs to be boring conversations about policy handled by decent representatives of various constituencies, not a constant never ending shit cycle where single individuals can pump tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their own agendas
- Ranked choice voting everywhere
Maybe the territories get less representation.
The Senate has actually been a decent bulwark against the more extreme positions some of these House members espouse, presumably because of the sufficiently large samples you need to get to win a Senate seat compared to some of the extremely gerrymandered unlosable House seats.
There should be repurcussions for these Senators and House members... congressional approval is famously less popular then things like cockroaches, and it's been this way for decades. Constant gridlock, totally toxic.
Time for change. Time for real representation. Time to get back to boring. Time for choice. The time is now. Cause this race to the bottom with unfettered dark money is doing nothing good for anyone.
As much as there's a lot of reasonable arguments for ending the minting of the penny, the method in which this president waves his hands and fundamentally changes things such as our White House, our currency, our trade policies, our universities leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and it's hard to support even sensible decisions this authoritarian regime makes.
The users are right there, go make friends. Learn what they're doing day to day. And how it fits into the larger picture.
These sessions are lightweight, and auto schedule every three weeks with no required action items and people come out of it amazed every time, lots of little bugs have been fixed, and connections are being made.
The culture of not engaging with the end users when they're so readily available is an odd one to me. And you can really get to say 80% of macro picture understanding and user experience design fundamentals with a fairly low lift.
To do this I created a sign up form and an auto scheduler that interacts with the Slack API. The scheduling and getting folk on board is the hardest part. Also finding time if you do things outside the product road map.
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