Tangential, but I wonder if the given example might be straying a step too far? Normally we want to keep sensitive data out of logs, but the example includes a user.lifetime_value_cents field. I'd want to have a chat with the rest of the business before sticking something like that in logs.
In some companies, this type of information is often very important and very easily available to everyone at all levels of the business to help prioritize and understand customer value. I would not consider it "sensitive" in the same way that e.g. PII would be.
Good to know! At previous jobs, that information wasn't available to me (and it didn't matter because the customer bases were small enough that every customer was top priority), so I assumed it was considered more sensitive than it perhaps is.
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
Bear in mind, the terminal goal doesn't actually require unbiased numbers; the way most TTRPGs work is that you're trying to roll over or under a target number to get a weighted, unpredictable outcome. The idea is that while players (usually) want any given action to succeed, they some of their actions to fail in order to preserve narrative interest, while having their character be better at some things than others.
As such, while randomness is best, the given method is quite sufficient for having fun, and both players can agree that it's fair: they each have equal influence over the result.
I think it depends on the roll. For two players against each other it’s a bit more fun, but dm/player feels imbalanced, even when it’s character based. Th player winning might feel more fun beating another character with wits but that doesn’t work as well imo for luck, strength, or against something inanimate. It also moves success into a personal skill of the player vs the dm. I don’t agree that it’s necessarily fair.
Perhaps it’s just the feeling of “I took a risk and it didn’t work” vs “I chose badly and was outsmarted by the dm” seem different to me in an important way.
You could reframe this all easily as well for “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 100, guess it within Y distance to succeed”. That’s mathematically equivalent I think, if you allow it rolling around.
This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.
I would be a bit sad if most mega projects (space stations, battle ships, international probes, dams, etc) do not have some kind of honorary tribute to the many people who came together to make it happen. A little plaque costs nothing but would be meaningful.
For many years now, NASA has let random people get their name printed on the Mars missions on a little plaque. Perseverance has 11 million names bolted onto the frame. My buddy boasts that he has been on Mars N times.
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.
[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.
[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)
Hmm. I am tentatively holding to my position, because I think it's useful to have a separate word, but I'll go track down the episode and see if he elaborates on that further. Thanks!
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
I get the impression I hit a sensitive spot with my use of "enshittification" :)
Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).
I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).
But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.
Yep. The irony being that "enshittification," properly deployed, can actually lead a company to even more success. Product people always think "having the best product" wins the day, but there are billions of dollars made through a perfectly baked enshittified pie.
"The Market for Lemons" has always been a thing. If the user can't immediately distinguish between "Looks good at first and is good all the way through" and "Looks good and gets crappier as you go along", then both will be forced by the market to charge the same amount; but the latter one can afford to do it at a price the former can't afford.
It's not "a system". Each company is run by different people, and is under different pressures, and makes different decisions. Monolithing that is silly.
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