>After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992 Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats in terms of a “cultural war”, columnist Molly Ivins wrote that it “probably sounded better in the original German”. She did not live to cover a Donald Trump rally.
To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
>Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions
Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others).
Christopher Browning in his book about Reserve Battalion 101, mentioned in the comment right above yours, emphasizes this point about a lack of severe punishment for not participating, repeatedly about the members of that death squad.
The ugly black magic of the Nazi system was specifically that it often made previously, otherwise ordinary people internally normalize mass murder into something they could do.
The above aside, image too the kind of empty shell of fundamental human morality you'd need to be to continue sending innocent people, including women and children to their deaths in gas chambers, just so you can avoid looking bad on the social scene around you.
> Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others).
Totally agreed. I can see how Eichmann, and many other government functionaries committing evil acts willingly (historical and modern) are perfectly able to believe the lie wholeheartedly. That is all that really matters. The state supports the lie, the culture supports the lie, and the person believes it, despite proof otherwise.
That is the banality of evil. Just follow orders, and you will be fine. There are monsters (historical and modern) who do not see the issue with separating children from parents (or whatever evil you choose) over trivial paperwork, but the ugly reality is that most of the people doing the work know that what they are doing is wrong on some level, but feel shielded by the authority of the institution issuing the orders.
> Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law
It's not "illegal", it's just illegal. The US does not have open borders. It's illegal to cross without a visa or some other authorization. That's a fact, and in fact the law is a very reasonable one, because people who are knowledgeable about how humans work generally understand that open borders are a bad idea.
> There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing [...] and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries.
Is this meant to make it sound like it's somehow bad? If someone breaks the law, they deserve to be punished. In the case of people who entered the country illegally, the sane and rational thing to do is remove them from the country. This is, in fact, one of the most logical punishments imaginable, up there with being forced to leave while trespassing and being required to return stolen property.
Your comment is real "Hitler breathed air, and this other guy breathed air, therefore this other guy is bad because he's like Hitler" levels of manipulative suggestion that's completely devoid of any sort of points or content whatsoever.
Category error to think there's a strategy. Trump doesn't even know what a tariff is. People try to project a strategy because it's probably too discomfiting to believe that the greatest superpower the world has ever known elected a complete nimrod king.
Yeah you are right about this, psychological safety is a key ingredient in what “good” looks like. Blameless culture stuff is a bit of another ball of wax, so I didn’t get into it too much.
In an extended chapter of Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks described his practice of screening candidates for number-form synesthesia by asking “where is November?”
I have number form so when I was young and originally read this I thought it was pretty neat. But as evidenced in the rest of this thread, it’s an absolutely crazy practice since the majority of great programmers don’t have it. And I assume it’d be illegal these days anyway.
When I read your question of "where is November" I immediately had a floating number line in my head and November was "somewhere on the right side" and I instinctively wanted to point to my right and say "over there!".
I don't really see things in a very clear way though. I can't specifically examine things. When I try the "image" tends to slip. I can't get details. It's more a general idea in my mind. So I'm really not good at visualizing a UI and whether it would look good to place a button in a specific place for example. But if I think of our app for example I do immediately have a "picture" of what it looks like in my head.
Great to see this course material public. It's a real missed opportunity though to not mention that Galois wrote a lot of it down staying up all night before being shot.
That's a common myth. See this paper referenced in the wikipedia article:
Rothman, Tony (1982). "Genius and Biographers: The Fictionalization of Evariste Galois". The American Mathematical Monthly. 89 (2): 84–106. doi:10.2307/2320923. JSTOR 2320923
Quite the clickbait. You can only access it from the pay site, or unless you can get a school library to access it, which I will do. Only the first page is available free.
Author here. The main thing that inspired this happened a few years before I wrote it down. Etsy had gotten a new CEO, and they spent one of their first few weeks in long hours at my desk, iterating on the homepage design in what could only be described as a radically fast iteration loop. We'd ship a tweak, look at statsd for ten minutes, then change something else. This would have been a bad idea for all of the reasons of statistical validity listed, even if we hadn't built statsd to use UDP.
Emphasizing working on the homepage was also analytically dumb in a more meta way, since item/shop/search were really nearly all of traffic and sales back then. Anyway, I felt motivated to get that person to think first and fire the code missiles second.
At the end of the day, I think back on it fondly even though it was ludicrous. Shipping that much stuff to production that quickly and that safely was a real high water mark in my engineering career and I've been chasing the high ever since.
Isn’t that last sentence sort of a reason to prefer real-time analytics? If you can make development a fast paced game, no doubt you’ll keep your team more productive and engaged. Granted, it needs to be engineered in a way to ensure that productivity is aimed correctly (“how we decide which things we do”) as you point out in your great article.
There is a good chance the OP shipped changes that would have positively impacted the bottom line, but after 10 minutes of real time analytics it was replaced with something else because it performed poorly in a single 10 minute period.
You can ship A/B tests quickly and many websites do, but decisions are made after a statistically relevant time period.
Good question, though what you have in mind might be real time metrics, not analytics. Even then you might not need real time metrics to know whether your rapid changes are breaking things. An already established dev culture built on CI/CD, actionable health checks, feature flags/toggles, easy release rollbacks in emergencies are what you’d want. This way, your deploys are boring and you can focus on introducing new regressions, uh I mean features, fearlessly. :)
I worked on a feed reader back in 2006. The worst feed discovery kluge I can recall needing to special case was that certainly the most popular blog at the time (Cute Overload) was a frameset around blogger. That was typical though, people’s sites are a mess.
