That hasn't been my experience. I know plenty of very capable developers who will advocate for improvements in their processes and tools. I've seen recommendations made for small improvements that would make someone's life a bit easier. I've seen recommendations made -- and sometimes successfully adopted -- for much more radical changes of the overall development process or for moving the entire team to some new tool because the old one wasn't working well enough. I've just never seen any developer in real life, as far as I can recall, arguing positively for adopting Scrum or a Scrum-like process.

[citation needed]

Some people seem to think that if you aren't having daily standups and performing all the other Scrum rituals then your team can't be communicating. I don't really understand how anyone would come to that conclusion, but there you go.

Where exactly are these literally millions of developers it's working just fine for every single day? I don't recall ever meeting a developer in real life who is a strong advocate of Scrum. People with Scrum-related management roles, sure, but developers, never. At best developers' opinions on it seem to be "meh" and many are openly critical or outright hostile towards it. IME developer opinions also skew more negative the more experienced and senior the developer is.

But let's not rely on one person's own anecdotal experience and personal network. We can look at public evidence as well. It's known that few if any of the successful big tech firms use it. Are there any documented examples of successful small firms using it? How about a single robust, peer-reviewed study that shows Scrum is better in any relevant way than anything else? Or that it's "the most popular software delivery methodology across the globe"?

I think if you're going to write a long comment about how everyone else's experience is wrong and we're all just incompetent and there are literally millions of people doing better than us -- despite all our own experiences and quite a bit of verifiable public evidence suggesting otherwise -- then the onus is really on you to back up the claims if you want to convince anyone.

Enough people noticed and cared to reverse the position of the politicians and stop the law. QED.

CEOs can recognise when governments are trying to eat their cake and have it.

Not so long ago, the web "went dark" in protest at the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws. People noticed. The proposals were dropped and politicians distanced themselves.

Canada made a law that said sites with news content sourced elsewhere would pay those sources for it. Sites stopped allowing their users to share external news content that they'd have to pay for. Then something bad happened and the Canadian government complained that those sites aren't allowing external news sources to be shared. Well, duh.

There has to be some common sense and mutual understanding in these situations. Big tech can't be allowed to set the rules and force democratically elected governments to bend to their will. But big tech is also running businesses, and if governments impose unreasonable rules and disproportionate penalties then they will take those businesses elsewhere. They know very well that many of their users are also voters.

You must be a miracle worker! Surely in this modern, Agile world no-one ever knows any requirements before development starts. Even if they did, those requirements would have changed five minutes before they were written down. So it's clearly completely impossible to make any kind of plan and instead we need a modern development process where we throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Love,
Every Agile specialist working at these big consultancies, probably

That's true but I'm not sure Goodhart's Law even matters here. Just look at their penetrating insights about test coverage:

Great, they discovered coverage tools! Well done. A few decades behind the curve, but better late than never. With a bit more experience they'll discover that programs include conditional logic and so tools that track which code has been executed during a test run are not necessarily tracking which important code paths have been exercised during the test run. Then they'll figure out that just because a code path has executed during a test run, that doesn't necessarily mean it has been adequately tested. And at some point, this titan of corporate consulting will have collectively acquired the wisdom shared by every senior software engineer on the planet and thus be able to contribute advice slightly more qualified than a newbie who just started their first job.

Thanks for the link. That might be just what I've been looking for!

Discovery is one good example, yes. There was a particular scene when they introduced a non-binary character and I think the two gay characters used to make the introduction must have said "they" and "them" at least 50 times in about 2 minutes. Non-binary people prefer different pronouns, do you see? The irony is that actually advocating for non-traditional sexual or gender identities being normalised in the future would have looked more like three people turning up for work and doing their jobs without anyone noticing or mentioning how they identify in any non-professional context at all.

Another example of recent unwatchably bad writing is the CBS crime dramas. I don't know what kind of over-woke 20-somethings they've been filling the writers' rooms with since COVID but oh lordy have they hit every cliche in the book on some of those shows. Again the irony is that they could have written all kinds of interesting and creative stories where some of these social issues were a factor in what happened at the start of the episode and/or how things worked out in the end and explored them from different and possibly conflicting perspectives. But mostly it's just regular character X reaching the awkward part in the script where the actor spontaneously gives a 45-second monologue about the injustice of something as regular character Y sagely shakes their head and responds at the end with an affirmation that the bad thing is bad. Yawn.

I'm a Brit so maybe my reaction to a lot of the Americanised gung-ho and identity politics stuff is different, but if I'm watching an action movie or a buddy cop show or a sci-fi or fantasy series, I'm probably doing it to let off some steam and relax. Some of the writing in these genres over the past maybe 5 years has become so horribly in-your-face-preachy that even long-running franchises that I used to enjoy have become unwatchable. It's not making some profound statement and educating society, it's just tedious, bad writing and plots worthy of a five-year-old. Some of the people making these movies and shows need to remember that they're not priests giving sermons, they're entertainers who need to entertain their audience if they want to stay employed.

I did chuckle when I saw an interview with some A-lister talking about how the unions need to force the streaming services to pay writers and actors what they're worth.

I mean, yes, many of the online content providers don't pay on such favourable terms as some of the older distribution models. And that's probably partly because they're taking advantage of their powerful position to keep their costs down. But guess what? It's also partly because people are paying $10/month subscription fees instead of $10/ticket for a single trip to the theatre. There isn't as much money coming into the industry from its customers any more.

And guess what else? That's because for a lot of people the theatre experience sucked, while getting so-so movies with mediocre writing on disc for almost the same price wasn't worth it. Those people would prefer to wait for stuff to be on broadcast TV, where they got it almost for free, or hoist the ol' Jolly Roger and pay nothing at all.

There are people in the movie business who, even if talented, have also lucked out by being in the right place at the right time and making more money from one successful movie than most of us will make in our lifetimes. I suspect both they and their less famous and lower-paid colleagues are about to learn some harsh lessons in the economics of supply and demand. What exactly is the worth, in an objective commercial/economic sense, of a background actor who really could literally be anyone off the street and really could be replaced by a CGI facsimile without viewers noticing? Close to zero, probably. It sucks for the people whose jobs are going to be devalued or disappear entirely, and I'm sympathetic and hope they find other paths to follow, but such is often the price of progress.

There's also the gaping plot hole that we have some heroes who are exceptional for human beings and others who are intergalactic demigod status or above. And they're in the same movie fighting in the same battle against the same bad guy hordes.

I could suspend my disbelief -- if I really tried -- for the original Avengers group movie. I still think it would have been a better movie if they'd found a way to have characters like Black Widow and Hawkeye not used as front line fighters in the big set pieces but instead contributing in ways that used their other skills. At least they kinda figured that out in the later movies. But then you don't get the camera-orbit-slow-motion-group-action-shot for the trailer, I guess.

But it was getting absurd even by Endgame and since then we have heroes with the power to control time and traverse multiple universes and the aforementioned intergalactic demigods fighting alongside an entire country with technology far beyond anything else on Earth... and a kid who got bitten by a spider. Well, in some universes. Don't worry, we'll just collect all them for the next movie. Between them they'll be able to handle all the different C list baddies who are coming too. Or they could just call one of the near-omnipotent heroes they knew last summer who could wipe out the entire threat with a wave of their hand before grabbing a bite for breakfast. Just like they could have done in the first Avengers group movie, if only they'd noticed the special effects over the big fight that would surely have been visible from space...

Exactly. I enjoy a silly superhero movie as much as the next action movie fan. I could probably tell you every MCU film up to Endgame, mostly in the right order and with some recollection of the plot, even though I haven't seen most of them for years. After that point I'm fairly sure I'd miss a few. And I'm not sure whether I've actually seen them and forgotten or just never realised they existed.

The insane number of mediocre TV show spin-offs that Disney+ seems to have generated in franchises like MCU or Star Wars is getting really annoying now. I don't mind a spin-off show if it has a good premise and fits in with the big pictures. But 27 spin-off shows that are mostly contrived excuses to get one or two big screen stars back on the small screen without the epic context and the rest of the ensemble cast their characters belong with? At first I tried to push through them all in case they were setting up something big I'd want to see but then I realised life is too short and entertainment is supposed to be entertaining.

The sad thing is even the big summer blockbuster type films are starting to feel that way now as well.

Ubuntu might have jumped to Wayland a bit too soon. For a long time it was difficult to get screen sharing working properly because the communications applications and the browsers hosting the web app versions didn't support Wayland fully. However, during that same period, I started getting problems in other areas if I shifted back to X, like track pad configuration not working properly any more. So for some time my Ubuntu laptop was not practical to use for WFH. Fortunately the applications and browsers mostly seem to have caught up now. It's clear that Wayland is the future for Linux desktops and hopefully if those applications now use it properly on my Ubuntu machine that means they also support it on other distros and some of the practical barriers to adoption have fallen.

It's unfortunate that the ideas around swapping out batteries on EVs never seem to have gained much traction. A lot of the fundamental problems -- slow charging times, carrying heavy batteries around when you don't need them, battery performance and therefore vehicle range degrading significantly over time -- just go away if your EVs are designed with standard spaces and connectors for batteries and "filling up" means exchanging one or more of your current batteries that are depleted with as many new ones as you need at the "gas station", which can then be charging up your old batteries for someone else to use them when they're ready but without anyone waiting around in the meantime.

There were a lot of reasonable concerns raised, including the risk of being given a bad/damaged battery that could be dangerous and the difficulty of removing and installing heavy items. But some of these have analogous risks with filling up the fuels that we use today and others could surely be overcome if the necessary infrastructure was standardised and automated on a national or even global scale. I'm a bit sad that we seem to have abandoned the possibility so early in what probably needs to become a radical, once in several generations change in how we power our transport. As far as I know, no-one ever found an obvious, show-stopping problem with the basic idea.