It's a week of dealing with thrilling product deprecations for me. Over the weekend I abandoned CodePlex. Over the past couple of evenings I've ripped out Google Custom Search (they've discontinued their Site Search product and I've never liked Custom Search and I'm now worried that it will be next for the chop). I looked at various open source options but after a bit of poking around decided to just write my own search engine. After about two hours the first version is now live.
By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, August 4, 2021.
Microsoft is finally pulling the plug on CodePlex. I've hosted various projects there over the years and have just finished migrating everything over to GitHub which looks like it just might have a future:
blogger2blogml - Migrate blogger format blogs to BlogML.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
CodePlex Shutdown: Shapefile, Orb, StackHash and Blogger2BlogML Migration #code#stackhash#codeplex#github CodePlex is gone. Shapefile, Orb, StackHash and Blogger2BlogML have been migrated to GitHib.)
Every Harvard Business Review article worth it’s salt boils some complex problem down to a two by two grid. Usually something like awesomeness and profitability:
Being non-profitable and not awesome is no fun. Awesomeness without profitability might work for some organizations. Being profitable but not awesome for others. But the place to be is awesome and profitable!
With this bracing insight the authors will cherry pick some companies that match the upper-right hand quadrant and tediously stretch their turpid insight out to book length.
In reality this is a false dilemma (or technically a false tetralemma, but that’s an awkward phrase so I prefer the HBR fallacy instead).
My favorite example is Pascal’s Wager. This is a typical HBR two by two grid based on belief in God and the existence of God.
Don’t believe / No God, you’re fine (meh).
Don’t believe / God, go to Hell (infinite punishment).
Believe / No God, you’re fine (meh).
Believe / God, go to Heaven (infinite reward).
You only have one rational choice here says Pascal.
There is a lot wrong with this argument, but the wrongest thing is the HBR fallacy. There are infinitely many possible Gods with infinitely many good and bad outcomes. You might be living in a universe where the only God is the God of the Thargoids. The one real God might send you to Heaven only if you kill a gopher every Wednesday.
Nobody is going to open any doors and show you any goats.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
The Harvard Business Review Fallacy #etc#hbr#pascal#thargoids What do Pascal's Wager and the typical Harvard Business Review article have in common? And where do Thargoids and goats come into it?)
So I'm not on Facebook any more, but while I was, just one time, I reached the end:
Add Friends to See More Stories: You'll have more stories in News Feed if you add more friends.
Holy shit I just finished Facebook. Didn't think that was possible. It was passably tolerable while it lasted but I guess I need to find something else now...
I imagine a product manager got fired every time that message was shown.
(Published to the Fediverse as:
The end of Facebook #etc#facebook Did you know that back in 2017 it was actually possible to finish Facebook? I managed it one time and this is the screenshot to prove it.)
You know how you're debugging and comment out that return statement that stops book reviews from being posted more than once a month so you can get to the bottom of a problem without constantly deleting posts? And then you get distracted and push a new version of the blog software with that return statement still commented out? Thankfully that task is only scheduled to run every four hours. Sorry.
"OK, yes, there are times when modals make sense (compose new tweet comes to mind), but if the web has a bigger annoyance than this (apart, possibly, from autoplay video), I don't know what it is."
Please enjoy the irony of trying to read this article on a mobile phone while the text shifts crazily around the page to make room for the autoplay video ad.
