The only way I would fund GIMP is if that funding went directly towards a better UI. It's not worth improving the algorithms given how hard it is to use.
I happen to like the UI. It's not for everyone, admittedly, esp. people coming from PS, but it can modified and rearranged. ATM, my Gimp UI is a single window will all the tools nicely arranged on the left side and only containing the most-used tabs. There are only 6 or 7 tabs you'll use 99% of the time anyways.
Same. I am no graphic wizard, i dont want to relearn. I am happy it still looks more or less than i when i learned it years ago, and pretty much similar to the last PS version i've used.
What's so bad about the UI? People often complain about the confusing multi-window mode, bug gimp actually have a single window mode for a while now, which make the layout looks somewhat like photoshop's.
I didn't why they got hung up, but I'm not a mathematician.
Given the information they have, it seems they can, starting with the 2D Julia set, use an evolutionary procedure to fold the object into a 3D shape (potentially not unique) such that each point on the Julia set has the correct MME. i.e., you try a random fold and have a particle follow many random walks, and measure the MME at each point. If the MMEs are closer to their true values, you keep the fold. After this is all done, apply a smoothing algorithm that minimizes the number of folds.
I think that's a neat idea. More specifically, I think they could have used it to replace this step:
> Today, the best strategy is often to make a best guess about where to fold the polygon — and then to get out scissors and tape to see if the estimate is right.
“Kathryn and I spent hours cutting out examples and gluing them ourselves,” DeMarco said.
My understanding is that that was something they did to get some intuition on where these folds occur, which would hopefully aid in spotting a pattern of some sort.
It seems like the critical thing is that there is some underlying pattern to where the folding lines occur, though—otherwise it's not really of theoretical interest. Something like this seems like their end goal:
> “Certain polynomials might have similar bending laminations, and that would tell us all these polynomials have something in common, even if on the surface they don’t look like they have anything in common,” Lindsey said.
And it seems like they have made some headway on understanding the underlying 'pattern':
> “Our working conjecture is that the folding lines, the bending laminations, can be completely described in terms of certain dynamical properties,”
But I bet if they'd taken your approach rather than manually cutting things out of paper, they'd have much better data for thinking about this.
(Although, looking closer at your proposed algorithm, I'm guessing it would need some modification: the folding shouldn't affect the MMEs—they have a curvature distribution derived from the MME already, but:
> If given a two-dimensional polygon, and told exactly how its curvature should be distributed, there’s still no mathematical way to identify exactly where you need to fold the polygon to end up with the right 3-D shape.
So I think the different folding schemes are independent of MME/curvature distribution.
Still, something along the lines of what you described might work...)
Edit: I should point out that I'm also not a mathematician :D
This isn't actually true. During construction of the test they throw out questions that don't categorize you. It has discriminative validity even when it looks close.
The covariance of the Big 5 and MBTI is high. This means that if you give both inventories to the same population you can do a factor rotation of one onto the other with much of the variance being preserved. This has been demonstrated multiple times in the academic literature. I have never read an article against the MBTI that mentioned this, and that's because the people who write these articles do not understand statistics. The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5.
That said, I don't think it's quite true that "The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5". It seems to me that the Big 5 is a strict improvement on the MBTI. First, the discrete nature of the MBTI incorrectly suggests that the distributions are bimodal, when I don't think anyone thinks that's true. Second, I'm willing to bet that even if we just concentrate on the 4 factors of the Big 5 that correlate with the (non-discrete version of the) MBTI factors, we'd find significantly higher validity for the former, if only because there have been many more serious scientists studying and refining it over many years.
They both have strengths and weaknesses. Strengths of the MBTI include the text descriptions, which are very valuable, and that it focuses on positive psychology. Of course, if you rotate the MBTI onto the Big 5, you see that it does in fact measure neuroticism, although not that strongly.
What you have to understand is that statistically the models are very similar (you can compress them both into one unified model that does what both of them do quite well). However, the ways the models are constructed makes them useful for different things. The Big 5 is primarily useful for academics, and the MBTI is primarily useful for the rest of us.
If you are a logical positivist and scientific realist you'll never be able to grok this. As a utilitarian I understand that science is the process of making something that does something you want done.
I think I grok that some simplifications are more useful and teachable than others, and that it's possible to accomplish useful things by simplifying (and also by misleading). But I don't think you have to be a hardcore logical positivist to think these are distinct notions from "validity". My impression is that you have psychological or statistical training, so when you used the word in your original comment I assume you know what it meant.
Interesting. Looks like extroversion is the best correlated (.74) which I suppose makes sense. But nearly as strong (.72) is intuition/sensing to openness to experience, which I would not have predicted. Conscientiousness to judging/perceiving is only .49 and agreeableness to thinking/feeling is only .44. MBTI has no good correlate for neuroticism.
I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be overselling the situation.
0.5 correlation means it is maybe perhaps correlated given Emax view of the statistics. For normal variates you should aim for R=0.95 at least. Both MBTI and Big Five are approximately normal variates.
Also correlation is a linear operator which is not particularly sensitive to anything nonlinear.
Use a good statistical test instead.
I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.
When looking for a job, be careful when leadership says their organization is flat. You will probably find people at the top (C level) who hate being told what to do and hate management. That will poison the structure and coordination of the company. People need some sort of structure so they know where to turn to for help, responsibilities are assigned and there is accountability.
I'm not advocating having rigid, strong management and structure at a company, just that if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge. And that is far, far worse.
> I've worked at a place that had a 'flat' organization, it was a mess. Hidden power structures, informal and outside of office 'meetings' where decisions were made and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.
OTOH, every place I've seen, corporate and government, with a visible and formal hierarchy has also been a mess featuring hidden power structures, informal and outside of office meetings where decisions were made, and arbitrary decisions made at a whim.
(One big feature of California's "public meeting" laws is to try to limit and expose this in the highest levels of certain representative government decision-making bodies, but its pretty much a universal feature of human societies.)
> if you don't have an official structure, an unofficial and hidden power structure will emerge.
That will also happen, pretty invariably, if you have an official structure.
Sure, but if you're not part of the informal power structure, having some influence through an official structure is better than having no influence at all.
In my (somewhat limited) experience, you need a balance to get good work done: too much official structure slows things down and limits good people, but too much informal structure leads to the kind of place described in "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."
It seems like what people forget is that whether you have structure or not, it takes effort to make it work well. You can't just throw someone a job title in leadership and assume they'll do a good job.
Leadership by example, training, adhering to values all matter. It just so happens that use a tried and true system of actual structure gives you a wealth of knowledge and experience to pull from.
Could a flat org work? Maybe? So far, it seems like every company that tries and gets to scale has serious problems. Maybe it makes sense stick to innovating on your core business, and sticking to business best practices in your processes. (A recent post by the former Cofounder/CEO of Brightroll digs into this: https://medium.com/@todsacerdoti/0-to-640m-non-obvious-lesso...)
Sortition is one mechanism that's been used. Among the most fascinating articles I've read in the past 4-5 years was Aeon's article on randomness as a choice option (going beyond just leadership):
I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether).
That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.
Ever lived in a condo with an HOA (Home Owner's Association)? You get the opposite problem. One person, household, or small set of owners wants to be in power so they can make changes that benefit them, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the HOA so they can't be blamed when something goes wrong and because they're too busy with their lives. So a vote is held, most people don't show up, and even if they do, they don't want to do the jobs themselves so they vote for the people who want it, and the result is usually terrible.
This. And really, it's the same problem in elected government too. Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it. People who might actually make great leaders (or at least would not be tyrants) often don't want to get involved with politics.
In the work setting I've never seen management determined by vote, but you see the phenomenon just the same. Most people who want to climb the management ladder are normal, sane people, but the power-hungry are the ones who try the hardest to get to the top. In an organization that doesn't properly evaluate people you end up with the brutes in charge, which makes life miserable for everyone else.
> Often times the people who desire power the most are the last ones that should have it.
The funny thing is that the first democracy which called itself a democracy was perfectly aware of this problem - and the tyranny of informal leaders - and had a simple and effective solution to both problems: filling chairs by lottery.
The full article. Her point seems to really boil down to this:
We cannot decide whether to have a structured or
structureless group, only whether or not to have a
formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be
used any longer except to refer to the idea it
represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups
which have not been deliberately structured in a
particular manner. Structured will refer to those which
have. A Structured group always has formal structure,
and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It
is this informal structure, particularly in
Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.
And she continues on, the next section is particularly, interesting, describing how these elites she refer to create a network of communication which others aren't party to.
I really recommend reading the whole thing. It's a pretty interesting article and, I think, gets at the problems (solvable in some or many cases) in any large organization, structureless or not.
EDIT: And do read the article. It's much more than just the snippet I included. That's just her thesis, the rest explains it better and the consequences of insisting on informal organization.
I think you missed the point of the Wikipedia article. Structurelessness (and that is still what you're describing) leads to a tyranny where there are unspoken leaders who basically bully the rest of the organization. You described exactly that and then asked how to avoid it. Short answer: You probably can't. It's a human problem, not an organizational or process one.
Clear lines of ownership and responsibility do wonders for just letting coders code, and let everyone else decide what they code.
No, I got that. The article also has the person who demonstrated it advocating for democratic control of leadership, and I was commenting on how that might run into its own troubles.
The problem is that the skills required to win votes generally don't have a lot to do with the skills required to be competent in any field other than electioneering. So elections don't end up quickly revealing and demoting the incompetent people so much as they do raising up people who are competent at electioneering, regardless of their competence or lack thereof in other matters.
An example from history. Elections are actually how volunteer units in the early days of the American Civil War selected their officers. Every soldier got one vote, the whole regiment got together and cast their ballots, and the guy who got the most votes got to be the commanding officer. Very democratic!
With just one problem: in almost all cases, soldiers voted overwhelmingly for officers who promised not to make them do all the tedious army stuff they hated, like drilling in formation and practicing their marksmanship... which it turns out are actually very important things for a unit to do, if it wants to actually perform in combat. So these units had a bad habit of dissolving into mobs of terrified amateurs (and therefore getting slaughtered) the moment they entered battle.
Eventually it was decided that it was more important that army units be able to function in combat than that they be democratic organizations, and the elected "soldier's friend" officers were kicked out and replaced with hardasses. The soldiers hated them, and swore under their breath every time they were called out to drill yet again. But they learned how to fight.
Too late. As soon as you have more than three human beings in the same group, there's politics and meetings. You can either participate, or allow others to dictate to you.
Every single member of the team having to keep up with every single other person is unnecessary and impossible past a certain number of people. Certain things don't scale well.
The only thing that works against cliques in democracy as you described is to have sufficient number of people at each level. The large parliaments are there specifically to block too strong unilateral cliques forming. A democracy full of tiny squabbles is a working democracy - a democracy in unilateral ageeement on all matters really is not a democracy anymore.
The biggest problem is that the business owners want management to represent their interests; if they were elected by the workers, they would more naturally represent the interests of the workers. It might work out in a worker's co-op where the workers and owners are the same people.
I'm trying to understand how a "flat org" like this is different from a co-op. Seems like the "flatland" companies give you autonomy without ownership, which seems bad to me. It's only flat so far as the actual owner allows it to be, and you end up with a bunch of people with autonomy with no stake in the outcomes.
Co-ops still have boards and often employees that report to the board (or another employee). There's a structure there, but they also tend to be smaller so the structure has less impact.
I was treasurer of my housing co-op and we had one full-time employee who reported to me and the board. That employee (the coordinator) hired contractors for maintenance, bookkeeping, as well as things like the laundry machines.
Even large co-ops (like clothing stores) have the members vote a board in that sets up the structure.
I have been in those same activist groups. Right now I work for an "engineering run" organization. Maybe my emphasis should have been on _a little_.
Every organization collapses towards high-school. Those that don't are the most successful. Just as the majority of Olympic athletes are freak'n amazing, the contest is rarely not who excels but who doesn't falter.
