Thudfactor link roundup #1

In this first link roundup, I share posts about metrics, AI psychology, and accessibility that caught my attention this last week.

We all need better ways to keep track of our bookmarks. Here are the things I read I continued to think about long afterwards.

These link roundups are likely to be somewhat scattershot and themes will no doubt change from installment to installment. I’m going to try not to link to paywalled stuff unless I can also provide a gift link.

Cool

1980s computer books from Usborne

Usborne has several fun-looking computer programming books geared towards the children of the 1980s, including general programming education & game listings. None of these books look familiar specifically, but I would have loved to have some of these when I was a kid.

Politics

The Lie of ‘Self-Reliance’ in Appalachia: How It’s Used to Keep Us Down

Propaganda is alive and well, and one of the best ways to deny people help is to convince them that asking for help is failure. While this is deeply ingrained in the culture here in Appalachia, it’s by no means unique to the region nor limited to a specific economic class. You can see echoes of this on “Why Employees Work While Sick,” linked further below.

Accessibility

Making Scannable Web Pages for Assistive Technology

We’ve had quite a few tools released recently that promise automatic code generation, but they often fail when it comes to semantic markup. Unfortunately, so do we humans. Jarad Cunha’s deep dive into how to make web pages scannable in screen readers is a big help, and I’ll be applying many of these suggestions to personal and professional projects currently under my hand.

Paid Course: Sara Soueidan’s Practical Accessibility

I’ve been working my way through Sara’s accessibility course over the last week or so and learning a lot. Much of it is stuff I should have known before. Sara’s course is paid but well worth the price. (This is an unsolicited recommendation and not an affiliate link.)

Working with AI

Generative AI Runs on Gambling Addiction

This isn’t precisely the metaphor I’ve been using. In my experience, generative AI feels a lot like Civilization VI and other 4X games. “Just one more turn!” But I’m not a gambler, and David Gerard’s metaphor is probably more relatable.

After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain

Alberto Fortin, an experienced developer who’s been using generative AI for a long time, explains how he over-extended AI’s usefulness as a coding partner, and how to better think of using the tool. There’s also a companion webcast with Zed Industries.

Business Topics

Gift Link: Why Employees Work While Sick—and How Leaders Can Stop It

Perhaps your reaction was like mine: “people are told to work sick, just stop telling them.” But this investigates why people who are allowed to take sick leave often don’t. Or worse, take the sick leave but continue to push through it. This is a more subtle problem.

Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What to Do About It)

I’ve had good managers and bad managers, and most of the ones in-between at least were struggling with unreasonable expectations and arbitrary constraints out of their control — and were just bad at communicating those things. Matheus Lima’s post is a plea for empathy on both sides.

How Tech Loses Out

A transcript of Bert Hubert’s talk about companies hollowing out their innovation capabilities by outsourcing all of the production efforts. “I used to sell software, and now I sell services, because no one can buy my software anymore, because none of these telecommunications companies are technical companies anymore.”

MTTR: Bullshit Masquerading as Operational Efficiency

Andrew Hatch’s deep dive into why “Mean Time to Recovery,” a common metric for measuring incidence response effectiveness, is not particularly useful. This specific topic is a bit out of my wheelhouse, but it’s a good discussion of why “throw a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet and get a pretty chart” is of dubious value.