It makes me deeply happy to hear success stories like this for a project that's moving in the correctly opposite direction to that of the rest of the world.
Engildification. Of which there should be more!
My soul was also satisfied by the Sleeping At Night post which, along with the recent "Lie Still in Bed" article, makes for very simple options to attempt to fix sleep (discipline) issues.
It's a function of scale: the larger the team/company behind the product, the greater its enshittification factor/potential.
The author recently went full time on their Marginalia search engine, AFAIK it's a team size of 1, so it's the farthest away from any enshittification risk. Au contraire, like you say: it's at these sizes where you make jewels. Where creativity, ingenuity and vision shines.
This comment is sponsored by the "quit your desk job and go work for yourself" gang.
This is something I tried doing 10-15 years ago, and while talent, and drive, and a good message is all absolutely necessary, there's also some kinda catalyst to get the idea in front of an audience I was never able to crack. So yeah, small teams bring a greater possibility of a good product, but there's a little bit of lottery ticket to the exercise, too.
Capital structure may be more important than size.
A bootstraped company can resist enshitification indefinitely, but if it gets any investment, resisting it becomes harder and harder up to the point where a publicly traded one can't resist it at all.
The only issue is motivation. With a team size of 1, people don't realize how much they depend on having just one other person there. Some people can do it. I think a lot are in for a surprise.
I would wonder if there wouldn’t be inherent survivorship bias that would only make it seem like most smaller projects are as you call them “jewels”. The small bad ones don’t make it to you, but the big ones are too big to fail that sort of thing. Could extend that to big good ones being less surprising and normal because “it just works”.
Elon is running a company, not working a desk job for someone else. The point is following YOUR vision, either by yourself on your project, or by running your OWN company. The goal is intellectual and creative freedom.
Or don't, I guess the world needs its mindless drones, that discourage everybody else from taking the leap and following their dreams.
Fortunately, he's running multiple companies and he can't focus on all of them, so SpaceX can work fine, unlike the company formerly known as Twitter which he is right now focused on running and ruining it.
My impression is (i) Musk has a great team doing the work at SpaceX and (ii) those people have a clear, compelling mission they believe in. SpaceX may not need a lot of his attention.
I joke, but a lot of people just want to show up and do the bare minimal until quitting time. Disturbingly, many seem employed in customer facing positions.
To be fair, if they’re paying minimum wage, the employer has the same attitude towards the employees.
Or you're working in companies that basically stop you from being productive.
Managers questioning the developer's decisions, focus on the sales topics instead of fixing the existing product and colleagues taking shortcuts and exponentially increasing the technical debt is something I basically have to work with every day.
I now have worked on multiple projects on the side, both alone and with others who know their stuff and I've never had any of those issues there.
That's why I'm currently in the process of starting a company with a few of those "good guys" to get out of this madness.
I believe we all suffer, in technology and society at large, from excess resources.
Too much processing power, too much memory and storage. Too many data centers, bandwidth. We lost all sense of traction and we're running wild trying to fill up all the extra space and burn up all the extra resources. Software is currently way more complicated than it needs to be, and it makes it overall excessively insecure as well.
I've said this before, and it's becoming official this fall. I'm getting out of the wheel. I wish I had the competence of Marginalia's author to brave this storm. But my vessel is making water fast and I need to make landfall. Next month I embark on a new stint in academia hoping to change direction for good.
Good luck! I went back to university research after building websites for 5 years and then being a lawyer for 10 years. It was 100% the right choice for me. I hope it is for you, too.
Best of luck to you. I moved in the opposite direction: the enshitification of higher ed hurt my heart too much.
There might be an argument that education has never been the primary responsibility of the academy; that it's institutional responsibility is on "learning" not "education." If your goals are primarily research oriented there's still room to do that, especially in STEM.
It's shitty everywhere. My mistake was aiming primarily at a field, as when I entered IT. I'm not aiming to enter or stay in academia. I'm seeking knowledge and networking and I'll keep my mind open to opportunities.
I can totally relate to the screen post. Mine is even 24" (after having messed around with 27" and 32"). I think it's something not talked about enough (ie manufacturers mostly producing crap monitors when it cones to small diameters, with the exception of LG/Apple and Dell AFAICT), and deserves an extra post.
Do you just use a single screen? I've noticed a trend that people seem to be moving to one giant screen (and now apparently one small one), instead of dual monitors. I don't think it should be forgotten what an enormous productivity boost multiple monitors are, whatever the resolution.
> I don't think it should be forgotten what an enormous productivity boost multiple monitors are, whatever the resolution.
Or tiling window managers with virtual workspaces. When most applications I use are two keystrokes away, the need for more than one screen seriously lessens. Besides, looking at a screen on the side hurts my neck.
I'm using a 24" (4K, I wanted the DPI). I don't even use the laptop screen (either clamshell mode or I just turn it off). It's enough for having two windows side by side (docs + code). Anything else is a context switch, so I don't mind Alt|Command+tab or using virtual desktop (when I need to preserve the context).
>"I've noticed a trend that people seem to be moving to one giant screen"
I've had 3 monitors at one point on my main dev box of which 2 were 32" 4K. It became tiring very fast. I went to a single one. First it was 40" 4K but it proved to be too much neck bending to look at. So I've finally settled to a single 32" 4K and am happy (I use it at 100% scaling). Smaller monitors - no thanks, not my cup of tea. I know it is possible and I used to program on tiny ones in my young days but fuck it. Do not want to go back.
I tried multiple screens but realized I always tend to use just one of them and the others can be replaced by virtual desktops.
In terms of size I use 28" and that works well for me, 14" on the laptop is fine too but feels a bit limited now and then. In the long term I'll probably go for something inbetween with a size ratio closer to 4:3.
MBP + 24", where the monitor is from Apple/LG and a pretty good match to the MBP's screen in terms of color, dot pitch, and glare. I've tried but a giant screen doesn't cut it for me; I'm just messing it up with hundreds of windows, have to move the mouse and the head a lot, etc.
Yeah, I'm not arguing for humungous screens. It just seems like window managers aren't up to scratch for that much real-estate, and the traditional "two full screen windows side-by-side" setup enabled by dual monitors is simpler. I am just skeptical that a single (especially 1080p as in the article) screen could possibly be the most productive environment for a programmer - that goes against what everyone experienced when multiple monitors started to become the norm, albeit with worse resolutions back then I guess.
They do, and PowerToys also has some additional functionality in FancyZones, but it's still not perfect. It's hard to express "I want exactly this window alongside exactly this other window" purely via the keyboard, it's hard to cycle between multiple layouts, it's hard to launch a new window and have it appear exactly where you want etc. I'm not very interested in VR personally, but I am hopeful in the long term that eye tracking, gestures, and voice control make interacting with computers spatially a lot easier, just with the already-quite-good 2D paradigm we've already got.
I've never really seen it as multi-tasking, just that a lot of knowledge work involves inputs and outputs (edit web page/ previous web page, edit code/view test results, read requirements/write spec etc). Those can often be separate windows and being able to focus on either at will works well for me.
I guess that’s where the ergonomics kick in and break it for me. I gotta mention that I wear glasses, so everything not in the center of my vision is basically blurred. Which means lots of head turning with dual or wide screens.
I found something with an effective resolution of about 2560x1440 to be a sweet spot, where I can fit windows needed for a single task in one screen. Provided those windows don’t waste too much space with unnecessary stuff of course.
Gotcha. I must admit on Linux especially where I just have Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3 mapped to virtual desktops, I'm not unhappy on a single screen. I'm just aware that 20 years ago when it started to become more common, it was one of the few completely black and white productivity gains you could get as a programmer (alongside solid state disks). Seems odd if that doesn't hold in general today.
I quickly realized I absolutely hate setups with multiple monitors, when I was given one at work. I quickly gave back my second monitor, because it just made it worse for me, and additionally wasted space on my desk. If you want to improve my circumstances at work, give me a bigger monitor, not more of them.
I've never used multiple monitors. I've also never talked about that fact, because why would I? Only people who use multiple monitors have reason to talk about them, so discussion is biased in favor of seeming like people use them.
(I've never even tried multiple monitors. I could immediately think of several reasons why they would not be an improvement for me, so made a quick decision in 1998 and moved on.)
It's interesting because traditionally "gold plating" can have connotations of overdoing something, making something slow and expensive that could have been simpler.
That would be how outsiders see those who don't shirk the extra work that goes into building their own infrastructure to escape the merchants of convenience.
When I stay up late and go on a walk after morning coffee I just walk like a zombie then fall asleep for the rest of the day. I think it is rationalization, maybe something else changed for the better and then you'd both want to go for a walk and also sleep better.
It makes me deeply happy to hear success stories like this for a project that's moving in the correctly opposite direction to that of the rest of the world.
Engildification. Of which there should be more!
My soul was also satisfied by the Sleeping At Night post which, along with the recent "Lie Still in Bed" article, makes for very simple options to attempt to fix sleep (discipline) issues.