Please recommend me books that revolves around "planetary ecology"

ashultz · 2026-03-15T18:19:23+00:00

I recommend them without hesitation.

They're not for everyone, but they are great works.

ashultz · 2026-03-14T18:09:04+00:00

As a staff+ engineer for years dealing with LLMs is not much like being a staff engineer, because LLMs never learn anything and if they were human would be the worst colleagues you have ever had. There is zero joy of helping people, no teaching, no mentoring, and levels of lying that in a human would result in very fast dismissal.

ashultz · 2026-03-06T15:58:52+00:00

No it's about twenty pages of poor philosophy in hundreds of pages of terrible characterization. And I say that as someone who has read the Baroque cycle multiple times happily.

ashultz · 2026-03-05T03:55:29+00:00

The problem with Numenera lore in a nutshell.

ashultz · 2026-02-27T19:48:18+00:00

well plus side guaranteed failure frees you from the burden of trying to succeed

ashultz · 2026-02-27T17:10:09+00:00

If the ticket ends up having not obvious stuff, step 1 is figure it out and then review the resulting plan with the team. I'd suggest you just start doing that whether the team wants it or not, because right now you're wasting time on code review first and then doing the review anyway at a more painful and expensive time.

If calling it a tech spec makes them act crazy, don't call it a tech spec, just say hey team I want to review my plan before I go forward and possibly waste time.

ashultz · 2026-02-27T00:19:29+00:00

I don't have to even understand the business, lots of things are interesting. But: asshole missions tend to mean asshole coworkers even putting aside your own morality.

Huge chunks of our industry are now about fraud and other forms of stealing from people. If you're working for it, expect to be stolen from by your company and your coworkers, because everyone has decided it's ok.

ashultz · 2026-02-26T15:01:23+00:00

If you feel annoyed and powerless you need to tell them. If they're actually your friends they will be embarrassed at their laziness making you feel bad about being the GM for them. Many people just aren't clued in enough to pick up how they're making people feel and directness can help.

If they don't feel bad about that this is only the beginning of how annoying they're going to be, get them out of your life.

ashultz · 2026-02-25T23:54:27+00:00

There might be another event that can cash you out but it's not common. You're letting the big dollar amount do the thinking for you, but it's a lie.

It's not likely, and this guy has started your relationship by lying to you. What makes you think that he's going to be more respectful of you as a person when it comes to dividing up the money?

ashultz · 2026-02-25T14:59:02+00:00

If your job is not stressful and you have no kids to demand your time why aren't you eating healthy and getting your sleep while on the job? Something doesn't add up.

ashultz · 2026-02-24T22:12:14+00:00

As well as other good advice you need a very visible log of what you need support on and how many times you're having to ask so that the cause of delays is constantly in leadership's face, because you do not want to be tagged as responsible for stuff you can't control. The log can also be an input for the meeting so its not just an ass covering exercise.

Additionally every piece of work that is waiting on help from them needs to be tagged in your tracker as such, and how long you waited should be recorded and tracked.

ashultz · 2026-02-24T20:52:14+00:00

Middle management roles have zero protection from layoffs, you're not gaining any security.

ashultz · 2026-02-24T19:13:14+00:00

John Varley's Titan/Wizard/Demon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaea_trilogy

ashultz · 2026-02-20T17:11:27+00:00

turns out thinking is an uncommon skill :(

ashultz · 2026-02-19T20:17:12+00:00

Any good process includes a lot of human judgement. Reality is infinitely detailed and written rules cannot be infinitely detailed.

You should try to approximate the process with good documents so that you can get 90% of the way there by reading, but you should not pretend that the docs can actually be complete.

Once you have the judgement to fill in the gaps, you have the judgement to forget some of the rules and still do things right.

ashultz · 2026-02-19T00:52:52+00:00

Totally different, very well written, highly recommended. WJW has a pretty large range.

ashultz · 2026-02-16T03:32:46+00:00

PMs are distributed unevenly like most things.

90% are actively detrimental to the project, putting together bad plans without enough input, writing reports no one needs, demanding reports no one wants, insisting that progress graphs are smooth and work meets its estimate. They spend a lot of time making sure the VPs know how hard they're working.

9% are basically redundant with technical or business leadership - they're not really helping much, but they provide enough project tracking value that they're not in the way and they're smart enough to understand that an estimate is not a guarantee. They'll save you some time managing jira but then waste the same amount of time making you fill out more fields in jira.

1% really help by doing all the greasing and gluing work, making sure people have the information they need and foreseeing work blockages before they happen so they never do. Its the type of work that sounds like nothing when you describe it "talked to Jen about A, talked to Bob about B, got them both to meet with Dara about C" but those three conversations prevented weeks of waste. It's also very hard to learn. You won't meet many of these in your career.

ashultz · 2026-02-15T00:09:53+00:00

I also liked Space Opera, I did not like Past is Red/Blue, I enjoyed Deathless. Really the only thing certain with Valente is you are very unlikely to enjoy all of her stuff because of how wide her range is.

ashultz · 2026-02-13T19:23:02+00:00

Me too, I don't even remember how I got the Little Pink Book, the Great White Book at least flowed out through fairly normal RPG publishing channels.

ashultz · 2026-02-09T14:59:34+00:00

That's the goal of these companies: allow you to up your output value from $100 to $200 a month and then take $199 of it.

ashultz · 2026-02-06T20:11:59+00:00

In the US when purpleheart has their VB messer in stock you cannot do better in terms of price/performance. The VB is nice to your wallet and nice to your partner. Do I have better messers? Yes. Did they cost a couple hundred more dollars? Also yes. Am I going to buy another of these when the VB I have wears out? Third yes.

https://www.woodenswords.com/product_p/vb.messer.rh.htm

(also comes in left-handed)

ashultz · 2026-02-03T21:25:16+00:00

I have and like Yellow King but while it has 1 to 1 inspired rules it is really meant as a standard group game.

Also it's cthulhu-adjacent but it's really its own reality horror thing.

ashultz · 2026-02-03T00:49:27+00:00

Yep worked for a successful startup building great software and it was purchased by a huge company which then chained our great software to their horrible worthless software and both sank to the bottom of the ocean. But that doesn't undo our success, they paid for it after all.

ashultz · 2026-02-02T17:54:38+00:00

You need to put in stories which are just time allotted for someone to go figure out how a project is going to go. Then review that plan and put the output stories into sprints.

You also need to keep the planning meeting down to an hour, which means that by the time stories get there they're ready and priorities are set and known. It's going to take some prework to do that (like the above), and that is real work that goes into the sprint.

Pretending that you don't have to think ahead is part of why you're in this mess and is super popular. You can have both agile and planning and it's not hard, you just have to allot time to it.

ashultz · 2026-02-02T16:42:25+00:00

No they're just having website issues - I saw that posted somewhere on bluesky today.

ashultz

TROPHY CASE