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fifticon 10 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11.
I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was..
Case in point:
Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around.
And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too..
It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...]
Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ...
Is it because we are out of space? I don't know,
every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ]
(because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.)
Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by
a spyglass.
So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for.
Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need,
apart from maybe the single spyglass icon?
Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have,
has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
andai 6 hours ago [-]
A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10.
I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.
I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.
Fully rendered. After a single video frame.
On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.
Twenty years of progress.
madhato 3 hours ago [-]
Windows Explorer taking multiple seconds to load and often a bright flash of a white background during the load was exactly what pushed me over the edge to Linux.
hunter2_ 4 hours ago [-]
Presumably that's to keep hardware sales up, e-waste be damned. You won't notice it taking 8 times longer when you have 8 times as many cores, or whatever.
solid_fuel 2 hours ago [-]
No I think it's a consequence of so much of the industry abandoning caring about the craft in favor of just shipping whatever garbage checks off their Jira tickets. This is the same attitude that leads to vibe coding. It's the idea that the code doesn't matter and the only thing of any importance is the business attached to the product.
It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.
sunaookami 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
elevation 9 hours ago [-]
> Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
iknowstuff 4 hours ago [-]
tbh all tabs seem like a deficiency in the window management paradigm to me. Instead of tabs our WMs should just allow us to easily list and transition between all windows of an app.
Hammershaft 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely agree. Recently learning emacs with vertico/consult/orderless/embark has had me thinking constantly about how needlessly crippled most OS windowing system workflows are.
fsckboy 7 hours ago [-]
>Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer
jessetemp 6 hours ago [-]
That would actually be a great feature. Opening two file browsers to move stuff around is a really common workflow. Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”
Romario77 6 hours ago [-]
welcome to Norton Commander! Or Far Manager for more modern version.
pjc50 9 hours ago [-]
The tabs are fine. Tabs in "cmd" are also good.
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
bigbuppo 7 hours ago [-]
Oh man. the complete lack of definition or contrast from window to window is terrible. Which window are you clicking on? Nobody knows. It's especially painful when you have like three or four nested RDP sessions going on.
marcosdumay 6 hours ago [-]
The tabs and address bar on Explorer seem to actually be a copy of the default behavior of Dolphin.
If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.
The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.
1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.
8 hours ago [-]
Legend2440 9 hours ago [-]
>Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs
Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.
RaftPeople 7 hours ago [-]
Ya, I just started using them in File Explorer recently and I really like them because I frequently had multiple windows open within the same tree, this is much cleaner. I can't believe it took me so long to actually click the "+" and try it.
6 hours ago [-]
zamadatix 9 hours ago [-]
You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
contextfree 1 hours ago [-]
What in file explorer is still web tech based?
CagedCoder 5 hours ago [-]
I was really excited when I saw tabs were coming to the file explorer, but I can't tell now if I don't like tabs in file explorer or if I don't like all the other things that made file explorer worse when tabs got added
ryukoposting 8 hours ago [-]
Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
Night_Thastus 3 hours ago [-]
Join those of us using File Pilot.
It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)
Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.
fidotron 4 hours ago [-]
Aside from the other problems the emergent trend of shoehorning window level tabs into apps kind of indicates a failure of OS level window management.
If people really want tabs in everything then have the windows enable tabbing between multiple contained apps.
contextfree 1 hours ago [-]
This was a feature in Windows 10 preview builds for a while (2018-2019ish iirc) but it never shipped to retail.
ubercow13 6 hours ago [-]
Tabs and breadcrumbs are both useful features though, that almost every other OS/DE file manager has supported since forever
devmor 5 hours ago [-]
As someone forced to use MacOS Finder regular, and who hates Dolphin/Nautilus/etc, I agree with the OP on this one. I don't need tabs or breadcrumbs in my file explorer.
I need clear, well defined data in the windows and a path.
2cheeze4u 5 hours ago [-]
Tabs on file explorer is one of the most useful feature updates in Win 11.
jollyllama 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe "don't ruin stuff" should be a KPI
p-t 9 hours ago [-]
every day i am more glad i cannot update to 11 because windows 10 seems to be better in every way
giancarlostoro 3 hours ago [-]
> so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\..."
This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.
Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.
sunaookami 3 hours ago [-]
They fired their QA team 10 years ago and thought the Windows Insider Program could replace them.
justinclift 35 minutes ago [-]
They'd have to list to the feedback from the insiders though, and that doesn't seem like a MS thing to do.
bionsystem 6 hours ago [-]
I tried win 11 for 11 minutes and switched to Linux and never looked back.
Forgeties79 6 hours ago [-]
I've been on bazzite for a little over a year and nothing is as satisfying as turning on my computer, getting to the desktop...and silence. No alerts. No sounds. No popups. It's just a blank slate every time.
You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.
Aperocky 6 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile I've been happily using ls, find, grep like it is 1980s.
They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.
Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.
ShadowOfThePit 9 hours ago [-]
Of the things that you could complain about modern Explorer and Notepad, you choose tabs? Really? A handy QoL feature that many have been requesting?
osjdiwnfiwjfi 7 hours ago [-]
Gotta keep the “I’m such a greybeard, I do things more clumsily than others but look how techy and old school I am” act somehow, right?
mft_ 8 hours ago [-]
In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment".
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
ryandrake 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure when it happened, but there was a definite inflection point some time in my software career, where we all stopped asking "What does the user want to do with their computer?" and moved over to "What do we want the user to do with our software? And, it's been downhill since then. We stopped treating the user as the driver of the car, and pushed him into the passenger seat. Now users are just along for the ride and they're going where tech companies are driving, whether they want to or not. User need is no longer a driver in product decisions. Users are just the denominator in all the metrics everyone is chasing.
munificent 7 hours ago [-]
> I'm not sure when it happened
I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.
When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).
That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.
Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.
But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.
Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.
priorcod 6 hours ago [-]
This is it. When software was built to provide legitimate, tangible value to the user.
Yeask 4 hours ago [-]
And today many programers have only used that kind of software, so when they design one, they use the same dark patterns, even when getting paid.
vitally3643 7 hours ago [-]
We stopped considering the user as a human being and started thinking of them as a spherical wallet in a vacuum. The user exists purely as a source of revinue and absolutely no other consideration is given.
rapnie 7 hours ago [-]
> We stopped considering the user as a human being
Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.
jknoepfler 6 hours ago [-]
Try starting your user stories "As a human being fully endowed with creative and critical faculties who yearns for purposeful, reciprocal engagement within my Lebenswelt..." and see how it goes?
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
So you choose "user" then? If you don't have more information than "user" in your user stories you are already on the wrong path. How about "As a person" for a general case, "As a buyer" in your webshop app, "As a solution developer" in your low-code design studio. Etcetera. (You did not add the /s so I'll answer seriously).
jknoepfler 4 hours ago [-]
I agree that personification has value, and there's a happy medium to be struck. I don't know that we need to recite a compassion sutra at the head of every story, although I guess it couldn't hurt?
wertgghtdh 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thewebguyd 3 hours ago [-]
That's not unique to tech either. Before my career in tech, I went through school doing retail jobs. The verbiage then was "how do we capture our share of their (the customer's) wallet?" Not how do we provide what they need, a good experience, or whatever else. As if the company was entitled to a portion of the shopper's income.
I found it completely disgusting, and this wasn't unique to one retail chain either. It's how the capital class views people, as a resource to be extracted.
carlosjobim 7 hours ago [-]
I wish! Most companies try to make it extremely difficult for visitors to actually purchase their product online.
austinthetaco 7 hours ago [-]
Thats because the user stopped becoming the customer from the point of view of the development team. The customer is now people who deal in data collection and analytics and gates and funnels.
marcosdumay 6 hours ago [-]
It's when Apple made an image editor with less functionality than everything else, and it became popular because it could do less.
osjdiwnfiwjfi 7 hours ago [-]
It started when computers (and the Internet) became more affordable and widespread.
No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.
drfloyd51 6 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of ads where you are “empowered” to choose between provided choices.
“Manage your privacy your way! Simply sign in to choose what is right for you!”
Nah, I am going to use something else.
dijksterhuis 11 hours ago [-]
> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
FinnLobsien 10 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on what exactly happened.
If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.
But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
JohnFen 10 hours ago [-]
> But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say
Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.
b112 10 hours ago [-]
Yes. Definitely there's a sweet spot here, in terms of how locked in you are, tied into the ecosystem. A company may have time to course correct, if there is some pain for customers leaving.
At least, more room than if not.
I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
hemogloben 7 hours ago [-]
An example of this was JetBrains' initial subscription plan.
Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).
b112 10 hours ago [-]
Getting funding for meatspace projects is beyond what most VCs will do, and I'm sure this is adjacent to that. I literally have about 10 different hardware projects that are all viable, all leading edge, all minor to develop, along with a strong software component (which is where the juice is).
Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.
Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
naravara 11 hours ago [-]
I go back and forth on this. Maybe it is the right inclination with software development where there is a strong drive to keep pushing more features and trade offs in terms of “technical debt” or footprint can get pretty abstract at scale. But then I think of an operation like the Disney Parks and it really seems like the delight comes from constant, sustained effort. They’ve got people around attending to everything and fussing over every little detail around the park. They can emergency dispatch characters to an area if they see kids who seem like they might start to have a bad time. They have secret stashes of diaper changing kits and first aid materials so Mickey Mouse can show up and save the day if someone has an accident. There’s ways they’re not ruining it I guess, but the main impression I get is that they just never take their foot off the gas when it comes to making sure everyone is having a good time.
fydorm 8 hours ago [-]
All of the things you described ARE "it". They're part of the Disney Parks "product". If they were to remove or change that active effort, that could be considered "ruining it". But continuing to operate in a way they've found delights their customers is exactly what Seth is arguing for, not a violation of it.
Hugsbox 11 hours ago [-]
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
graemep 9 hours ago [-]
Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
Except for targeted online ads based on browsing/search history or other spying, most advertising is just brand/product awareness, hoping to create a memorable impression.
vitally3643 7 hours ago [-]
What really baffles me is that among people my age in the sorts of circles I interact with, that memorable impression is overwhelmingly negative. Seeing an ad at all creates an immediate negative association. "This brand/company feels they have the inviolable right to assert themselves on me and forcibly take up my attention and time". It's wild that this sentiment either hasn't percolated up to advertisers, or (more likely) they just don't care.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
General, non-obtrusive and non-targeted ads don't really bother me. Maybe because I grew up with ads in newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio and TV. The latter two were most annoying because they interrupt the programming, but I understood that's how broadcasters make money so that they could operate.
Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.
nick486 6 hours ago [-]
for me, some ads also utterly ruin the brand of the ad host.
For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.
i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.
so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.
processing 5 hours ago [-]
looking at running sneakers yesterday of a new brand I've never come across before - looked pretty interesting and bookmarked for later...within minutes of visiting the site I was seeing retargeting ads for the brand. Instant turn-off - no longer interested.
tardedmeme 10 hours ago [-]
According to Cory Doctorow, P&G (Proctor&Gamble) canceled $200m of ad spend and saw no change in sales
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
hootz 10 hours ago [-]
I guess they can work when no one knows about you. After a certain point, there must be diminishing returns in comparison to just your current customers recommending your product to their friends.
Hugsbox 9 hours ago [-]
I'd imagine so, yeah. Like, I can't imagine what value French's gets out of running mustard advertisements as an example. Feels like some of these companies have entire marketing teams whose main job is to justify their own existence because upper management hasn't yet figured out that they're not going to reach anybody who's never heard of mustard before.
doctoboggan 8 hours ago [-]
> Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses?
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.
soupspaces 7 hours ago [-]
What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?
andsoitis 7 hours ago [-]
> What if ads weren't about money in the first place and that was the excuse used for surveillance?
Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?
munificent 9 hours ago [-]
Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight.
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
Syzygies 9 hours ago [-]
There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role.
In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
munificent 7 hours ago [-]
Beautiful metaphor.
I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.
tacostakohashi 8 hours ago [-]
I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
sumtechguy 5 hours ago [-]
Start simple add the rest later when you needed it. How will you know you need it later? At 3AM. If it makes you feel better add a comment what will be needed when it breaks.
I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to?
Boring wins almost every time.
rootlocus 6 hours ago [-]
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
smcg 5 hours ago [-]
Unless Seth gets the ear of some high-up executives, I don't think this article will change anything. The workers "ruining" products have to do their job, and often don't have much input into these decisions.
sumtechguy 4 hours ago [-]
those story points do not earn themselves!
jp57 6 hours ago [-]
Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.
profsummergig 4 hours ago [-]
The bias to action. Buffett and Taleb write about it. People feel like they have to "earn" their time. If something is good, or good enough, they still have to do some sort of "improvement" because they want to feel like they earned their salary.
FinnLobsien 10 hours ago [-]
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
munificent 9 hours ago [-]
> a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
ryandrake 7 hours ago [-]
> I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to.
When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.
JackFr 10 hours ago [-]
Path to X happiness:
- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.
- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".
pjc50 9 hours ago [-]
X is itself a massive cash-in of trust by the new owner.
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
stackghost 9 hours ago [-]
>Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn
... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?
taikahessu 7 hours ago [-]
I just started posting on LinkedIn. It is a more niche audience, Finns, only 5 million of us. I know my posts aren't fake and the people there are one I know. What do you mean by fake? Do you mean fake as in "I am here to sell you my product, which is myself" kind of fake? Is that a feature of LinkedIn or the harsh reality of the "adult world" business? Like sitting in a bunch of meetings trying to figure which of the parties are trying to screw you the least when you're about to buy something. There's levels of fake and you just need to figure out the rest. In a sense yes, of course it's fake, but I'm not sure that the platform is to blame. Same as IG I guess, but I can't say I don't use it.
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
I've never seen a single LinkedIn post that wasn't overinflated horseshit like "I was late for a job interview and stopped to feed a starving dog. I missed the job interview. The next day I got a call from the CEO of the company offering me a management position. Turns out he was the dog. Never compromise who you are. #grindset"
These days it's all just that, or else people flinging AI slop past each other.
I have never seen a single piece of content on LinkedIn that I felt was genuine, or that wasn't obvious engagement bait.
blt 7 hours ago [-]
Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
IAmBroom 5 hours ago [-]
But MP3 players have proven that adding another weak link can still enshittify more.
kazinator 7 hours ago [-]
Paul McGowan makes bullshit:
"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"
Yikes; run the other way ...
djkoolaide 4 hours ago [-]
On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore.
No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform.
The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.
I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)
Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.
2 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
justinsaccount 9 hours ago [-]
Wait, the example held up for "Stop ruining it" is a company that sells snake oil audiophile bullshit?
kennyadam 9 hours ago [-]
The product descriptions on audiophile equipment are always gold!
"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."
The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.
wow that's actually insane, the fact that they would have an "improvement" dial is ridiculous by itself, but also the picture looks extremely fake? is this a scam website? leaves me wondering what the product actually looks like
btw it costs $9,999 according to google
edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
It would be funny if the "improvement dial" measured amplifier gain in a linear scale.
Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.
wl 3 hours ago [-]
From the manual:
> The Improvement Factor is an average of the Voltage Output and the THD output. It gives you a factor of how much the AC power is improved by the P20.
Which also doesn't make much sense to me. So the lower the THD, the less improvement? And averaging that with the 120 V output? So the 230 V European version has a higher improvement factor?
Eric_WVGG 9 hours ago [-]
with blue LEDs, an instant demerit on any consumer electronic
SpikedCola 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
samcgraw 7 hours ago [-]
Aha, once you start seeing via negativa[0] you’ll likely see it everywhere.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
luxuryballs 7 hours ago [-]
The education quote is great, I wish selecting text on iPhone was not ruined by the Facebook icon popup.
epsteingpt 10 hours ago [-]
The irony that the packages system looks so obviously and clearly 'baseline claude' designed is a sign of the moment itself.
aerodexis 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like subsidiarity to me
doctorpangloss 6 hours ago [-]
On the one hand, you complain about software changing.
On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.
nathan_compton 9 hours ago [-]
It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.
mweb 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iLoveOncall 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
zaphar 11 hours ago [-]
Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
stavros 10 hours ago [-]
I think it was hyperbole, and that the GP does not literally believe this was written by GPT-1, which did not produce coherent sentences.
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.
I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.
Fully rendered. After a single video frame.
On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.
Twenty years of progress.
It's stupid and shortsighted, but the entire industry seems pretty damned nearsighted these days.
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.
The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.
1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.
Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)
Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.
If people really want tabs in everything then have the windows enable tabbing between multiple contained apps.
I need clear, well defined data in the windows and a path.
This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.
Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.
You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.
They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.
Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.
When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).
That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.
Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.
But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.
Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.
Imho once you say "user" you are already halfway on that path. Look how impersonal your sentence is. Users are an abstract concept that belongs to the app, which in turn is created by the developer who has all kinds of dreams for that app. Just keep calling them people, persons, or specific stakeholder names that correspond to the role they have, and their identified needs. The app serves people, and not the other way around. Not calling people users is a step towards avoiding their disempowerment.
I found it completely disgusting, and this wasn't unique to one retail chain either. It's how the capital class views people, as a resource to be extracted.
No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.
“Manage your privacy your way! Simply sign in to choose what is right for you!”
Nah, I am going to use something else.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.
But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.
Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.
At least, more room than if not.
I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.
Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).
Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.
Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
Deliberately annoying pop-ups, nags, auto-playing media, distracting animation, etc. in online ads does provoke the sort of negative reaction you describe. I block as much of that as I can. I would not really mind a website that had reasonable number of static, inline ads that didn't slow down scrolling or page loads and were relevant to the content of the site. But that's pretty rare.
For example: here in France we have this one company whose business model is "get a 18.xx€ refund on your order (20€/mo subscription)". its rather obvious how this kind of system makes money.
i had some elderly family members get scammed this way, and I absolutely refuse to ever return to any webside that displays this "offer from our partner". after checkout ofc.
so i get my train tickets on trainline, and amazon gets what businesses fnac and darty should have gotten. manomano must've lost a couple thousand euros of purchases from me already, hope it was worth it to them.
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.
Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view their role as not screwing up God's work.
I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to?
Boring wins almost every time.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.
- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.
- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?
These days it's all just that, or else people flinging AI slop past each other.
I have never seen a single piece of content on LinkedIn that I felt was genuine, or that wasn't obvious engagement bait.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"
Yikes; run the other way ...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc
The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.
I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)
Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.
"Designed as the foundation of every great music system, our Power Plant AC regenerators embody an uncompromising commitment to excellence. By rebuilding power from the ground up with state-of-the-art engineering and meticulous precision, they deliver the stable, pure energy essential for revealing music in its truest form."
The product image for this "Power Plant" that no doubt costs tens of thousands has what appears to be a poorly Photoshopped "Improvement" factor meter on the front that goes from 1x to 1000x lol.
https://www.psaudio.com/cdn/shop/products/P20-Black-front.pn...
btw it costs $9,999 according to google
edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.
Except just being bogus, what could it show that "improves" the signal? It can't lower the noise.
> The Improvement Factor is an average of the Voltage Output and the THD output. It gives you a factor of how much the AC power is improved by the P20.
Which also doesn't make much sense to me. So the lower the THD, the less improvement? And averaging that with the 120 V output? So the 230 V European version has a higher improvement factor?
[0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)
Don't make a bad situation worse.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?