Passing the anxiety parcel - “And in organisations there’s a phenomenon I sometimes call anxiety pass the parcel… The higher you are up in the hierarchy, the more likely it is that you are going to be indulged by those below you, in trying to pass on to them your anxiety…. You think you are giving clear and direct leadership, but you’re also in a way, on another level, saying to the people below you here, you, you have my anxiety."

Why they’re smearing Lina Khan - Outcomes based regulation: “There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click. The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!"

Oracle’s revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive • The Register - ’a hypothetical organization with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable for the “Named User Plus” (NUP) license as per the legacy subscription model. That organization is also running Oracle JDK on 5,000 processors, and as such would pay $742,500 for NUP licenses and $900,000 for processor licenses under the legacy deal. The new Universal Subscription model would cost it about $3,118,500, a 90 percent increase in price.’

AlmaLinux discovers working with Red Hat isn’t easy - Some follow-up, “how it’s going” meme-style stuff from the RHEL open source drama.

Nobody cares about your blog. - The post is pro-blogging, obviously. We should try to bring back blogging (or blogs masquerading as newsletters, whatever). With the collapse of Twitter, there’s lots of text based people who need an outlet.

Workin’ for the Man - This is how most all request driven processes (you have to file a ticket) end up being gamed by users: “So I think the winning technique is simply to flood their input queue with issues and eventually one will find a chink in the armour and reach an intelligent human being who Just Fixes It."

Free Lunch - Some strong Amsterdam type vibes here. // “Free Lunch is an all-caps display font that would look comfortable in a butcher shop window. Or a lunch counter menu in 1955. Or printed on the waxed paper that wraps a half-pound of Swiss cheese from your neighborhood deli. A little playful, great for headlines and logos."

The DoD: A Compelling Case for Extreme Programming - Good overview of why/how the practices in Extreme Programming (XP) help the needs of the military, and fit the constraints and challenges they have. For example, spreading knowledge with paired programming manages high turn over in staff.

Change takes a long time - This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time. There’s usually a lack of urgency, but this is a benefit for most of those large companies. The employees, management, and share holders want stability, predictability. Also, they don’t want to spend money unless they really, really…really…have to. Few people like change unless it’s needed.

People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars - “Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls."