What does it mean to have respect for someone? To demand respect? To object that someone is not being respectful towards you?

Unfortunately, this is another case of multiple meanings.

Respect can be:

1. Mutual. Treating others with dignity, trying to understand their viewpoint even when you disagree.
2. Earned. People see how you act, and decide how to treat you in response.
3. Hierarchical. Obedience, deferring to someone because of their position.

For the most part in your life, you’re dealing with mutual and earned respect. You treat your spouse, your friends, and random strangers with respect. If you “demand respect” you’re asking that they treat you how they’d like to be treated. You tell them what you want, and if they think it’s the right thing to do then they’ll do it. You “earn” respect by acting and showing that you can be relied upon.

It’s when power comes into the situation that the meaning of “respect” shifts. It’s now about obedience and deference. You have to obey your boss, or a police officer, or your parent, regardless of whether you think they’re in the right. If you disagree with them you have to weigh whether they’ll even allow you to express that, or whether there will be consequences.

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things”

— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

Putting my thumb on the scale here, I think hierarchical respect is the worst form of respect.

This isn’t to say that hierarchical respect is inherently bad. I’m not an anarchist; hierarchies exist for a reason, and in the best case they result in the ability to efficiently accomplish large scale goals for the overall good of everyone involved. You do what the person above you says because you trust that they know more than you, and that results in rapidly accomplishing things without a need to persuade everyone of the merits of, say, reorganizing your division to launch a new product line.

When done right, the hierarchy operates with mutual respect between leaders and those at the bottom, and earns respect from the lower ranks by proving that it has their interests in mind and can succeed at its goals. You aren’t using the implicit coercion of the hierarchy, because you (or the position you’re in) have earned respect.

The failure mode comes when you rely on hierarchy without bothering with mutual or earned respect to back it up. It’s really easy to sacrifice the accumulated hierarchical trust: made a bad choice, dismiss feedback, force underlings to push it through or lose their jobs, and deflect blame once it all goes wrong.

Strip all the pretty varnish away and what’s left is the backstop of hierarchical authority: “do what I say or I will harm you”. Depending on the form of authority the harm varies, from minor monetary consequences, to losing your chance to ascend the hierarchy yourself, to losing your job, all the way to losing your life. It’s coercion nonetheless.

It’s a one-way door, because once someone has forced you to obey because of their position, you’re going to stop considering whether they’re right in the future. It’s now very hard for them to win you over through competence and good deeds, because the underlying truth of power that they’re willing to resort to has been made clear, particularly if they were shown to be wrong about the thing they wanted you to do. All future orders will carry the implicit threat.

Note that this is bad for those at the top of the hierarchy as well. They get obedience, but they lose out on honest advice. Since nobody can be right all the time this results in mistakes, which are then amplified by nobody feeling they’re in a position to intervene.

You’ve probably seen someone high up in power make a decision that you think is obviously not going to work. Maybe they start a war, maybe they direct a company’s resources into immersive VR, maybe they thought everything would be on the blockchain, whatever. It fails, and you were right. Sometimes this is just misaligned incentives, and they’re doing it because they don’t care about whether it works but instead because they personally will be rewarded for it. I think it’s more common for it to be hierarchical insulation, though. If it’s obvious to you as a lowly employee that something is a bad idea, that knowledge has to travel up through 5 layers of “respectful” feedback to reach your CEO. It only takes one of those layers having sabotaged mutual respect to stop this knowledge going any further.

So remember, if your boss says you need to “be more respectful”, they might mean “stop swearing at people”, but it’s more likely that they mean “stop pushing back against things you think are a bad idea, and especially stop saying you told me so”.

What to do about this? Being aware of the different types of respect helps. Don’t get caught up in the trap of the hierarchy, and when you find yourself holding power over others don’t resort to it. You might not ever be a CEO or a President, but you’re relatively likely to be an adult in a child’s life at some point, and modeling mutual respect within a hierarchy in your own life can set people on the right track.

You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start.

— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

There’s an art to speaking without meaning. To talking for minutes at a time, without ever communicating a position. Giving the impression that you’re agreeing, you’re sympathizing, you’re on the listener’s side… without ever committing to that, or giving any details.

Someone’s asking a question, and the honest answer is going to upset them. So you talk around it and, even if ultimately the dodge is plain, they’re not left with a direct quote from you saying that. They’ll have to paraphrase you, and you can always quibble with that.

Congratulations, you’re talking like an executive. A corpo, if you will.

“Can you rule out cutting your prices for other non-Creative Cloud products?” journalist David Ramli asked.

Narayen said: “You know we’re always looking at pricing around the world and I think the meeting today is all about sharing where we’re heading as a company with the Creative Cloud and the Marketing Cloud.

— Adobe chief dodges questions over pricing

This is a skill people cultivate because it’s surprisingly effective. Some people won’t notice you’re doing it, and will be happily brushed aside without realizing they’ve been misled. Others will realize, but won’t be able to push back against you, because of politeness, format constraints, or structural imbalances. If you’re in an interview or Q&A of some sort, signalling that any question want to dodge is going to cost the questioner a big chunk of their question-asking time and require follow-up questions to see if they can pin you down is often enough to make them decide it’s not worth it.

(Insofar as executives are a specialized form of politician, you can see the parallels with political communication. Politicians are often better at it, because they tend to know to couch their initial communication in more normal-sounding speech, and just fall back on the media-training for questions, tending more towards repeating practiced talking-points rather than obscuring through circuitous language.)

The problem with this is twofold.

1. Once people are sensitized to this, it becomes incredibly grating to listen to.
2. Many executives spend so much time immersed in this type of communication that they think it’s normal. It’s just how they talk now. They misdirect even when there’s no point to it, when plain speech would serve them better.

If you want people to trust you, you should probably work out how to talk to them in a way that doesn’t inherently read as insincere.

There are two popular definitions of strength, of what it means to be a strong person. Unfortunately, to someone who values one of these definitions, someone who values the other is probably going to look weak.

When you see someone described as “showing strength” or “being strong”, consider that this says much about the person saying it and what they value, and relatively little about some objective “strength” possessed by another.

The two types of strength are external and internal.

External strength is the ability to impose your will upon others. It is aggression, dominance, lacking constraints. The externally strong person does what they want, and others have to react to that.

Internal strength is the ability to impose your will upon yourself. It is self-control, composure, and restraint. The internally stong person knows what they want, and others cannot move them from that.

If you value external strength, someone who possesses internal strength may look like they’re weak because they aren’t pushing at others. They may take provocations and turn the other cheek, rather than striking back. Who could be strong if others do not fear them?

If you value internal strength, someone who possesses external strength may look like they’re weak because they don’t control themself. They may seem transparently insecure, lashing out at others because they fear their own weaknesses. Who could be strong if they’re controlled by their own fears?

This is a false choice, of course. The external strength and internal strength aren’t mutually exclusive. Someone with self-confidence and control can turn that outwards, and this strength of purpose can let them move others and accomplish great things.

So isn’t it a shame when someone so unbalanced has so much power over us all?

I’m perplexed by one particular piece of user interaction design: the subscribe-to-my-newsletter popup.

Not that it exists, but rather the timing with which people choose to deploy it. Substack is the worst example here, because they show it pretty much as soon as you start scrolling. This is (a) deliberately interrupting me in the middle of a task, so my motivation is to just close the box and return to the task, and (b) I will never want to subscribe to someone’s newletter before I’ve finished reading what they wrote.

I imagine that this is something that has been a/b tested to death, and “wait until the end to show the subscribe popup” presumably converts readers at a lower rate. It’s wild to imagine such a person existing, though.

That said, given that it’s Substack, maybe it’s a mismanaged nazi thing?

LLM powered chatbots are pretty big, these days. There’s constant speculation about the big LLM companies putting these chatbots into devices that’ll just let you talk out loud to them, and they’ll chat back to you and do your bidding. Recreating “Her”, as Sam Altman unsubtly yearns to do.

I hate it.

Putting aside any qualms one might have about the underlying technology, of which I have a few, the interface paradigm is unbearable to me. I cannot fathom wanting to have a verbal back and forth with my computer. I particularly can’t see it being something I’d ever want to do in public, in an open office or a coffee shop or whatever.

I’d think this might be a programmer thing, craving specificity and precise control over what’s happening, but “vibe coding” is a notable part of this trend so that’s presumably not it.

The appeal of “AI companions” also doesn’t register to me. If we had AI, and not spicy autocomplete, I could understand it… but the fundamental knowledge that you’re talking to a predictive model ruins any appeal I could see.

Am I so out of touch? No. It’s the children who are wrong.

(That said, I’m amused that my previous use of the “opinion” tag on this site turns out to have been me complaining about a similar issue with disliking everything switching from text to video.)

Forget the myths the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

– All The President’s Men (1976)

The only time I’ve ever been pulled over by the police was when I was driving from California to Missouri back in my mid 20s. It was a long, straight freeway in the middle of Kansas, and I was definitely speeding. The police officer wrote me a ticket, and then told me that it could go away without any moving-violation associated with my license if I mailed a check to the “Sherrif’s benevolent association” for around the amount of the fine.

I was surprised, because I’d only heard that kind of phrasing used as a punchline in jokes about corruption before. I didn’t think it actually happened in real life, or at least not in such an up-front manner.

I paid the bribe – morally, if not necessarily strictly legally. The ticket went away.

It’s what comes to mind. America has never been better than this. It has, sometimes, been less blatant about it.

There’s been a lot of drama with WordPress lately, and the way Matt has been behaving has left me less than confident about having this blog using WordPress. Particularly not with automatic updates turned on. As such, I decided to move this back to Jekyll.

My original reason for returning to WordPress was that the workflow for updating jekyll was much less user-friendly. But these days, particularly with Gutenberg being so awkward to use, I don’t really feel there’s much of a practical difference. I won’t be able to update this when I’m away from a real computer… but I wasn’t doing that anway.

Who knows, maybe I’ll post more than once a year again?

…or procrastinate about that until we get a “migrating to Hugo” post. 🤔

The Battle.net client has a very irritating bug that only really affects people who’re actively developing World of Warcraft addons on Windows: it can get stuck checking whether the game client needs to be updated, stopping you from launching the game. If you’ve ever seen it stick on “Updating” with its status message just saying “Initializing…” for minutes at a time, followed by it asking for you to approve admin permissions for the client so it can try again (regardless of whether it already has them), then you’ve been bitten by this bug.

I’m told it’s because of some sort of interaction with the (hidden) .git folders (and the vast number of files contained within them) in addons that’ve been checked out for development. Fortunately, there’s a way to keep your source-controlled addon development practices while also stopping the Battle.net client from getting stuck, and that is: Windows symlinks.

What’s a symlink? It’s short for “symbolic link”, and it’s a way to tell your operating system that file or directory should pretend to be in multiple places at once. In practice, it’s a useful tool to either organize files that other programs need to look at, or to avoid having to manually synchronize changes between files.

In the case of World of Warcraft, for whatever reason – presumably some specifics of the exact choice of file-monitoring APIs Blizzard chose to use – if you make your addon directories into symbolic links to another place that you’ve checked them out, it’ll stop the Battle.net client from getting confused.

You may want to read a longer explanation of all the details about symbolic links and what you might need to do to enable them, but as a quick summary:

1. Create a new directory for your development checkouts of addons to live. I’ll use c:\src\wow\ for these examples.
2. Move all your existing checked out addons there. You can leave other addons that aren’t a git checkout where they’ve always lived. (I think it’s handy for getting a quick overview of what’s yours, honestly.)
3. Create the symbolic links, by opening a command prompt and typing something like this for each of your addons: mklink /D "C:\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\Addons\MyAddon" "C:\src\wow\MyAddon"

Automating that

Now, I found myself with a classic programmer problem of wanting to avoid a very tedious task: typing almost the same mklink command 41 times in a row. As such, I spent longer than the tedious option would have taken to write a script that’ll do it for me. Fortunately, it’ll also serve as documentation for me on what to do next time I need a new addon checked out. 🤩

Personally, I use WSL to run Linux tools on my Windows machine for development purposes, and so I naturally went for a bash script. I could totally have kept it all inside pure Windows and written a batch script or similar, but that sounds quite awful and so I didn’t.

A lot of the time writing this stemmed from the important complication: the WSL / Linux ln command will not create a Windows symbolic link. As such, I had to learn how to call out to cmd.exe and also to convert WSL file paths into Windows file paths. I’d never had to do this before, so it was time well spend.

The result is this link.sh script. When run from inside your development addons folder, it’ll make a symbolic link in the main WoW addons folder to every addon you have checked out there. Feel free to use it if you want, just note that you may need to change the WoW install location that’s hardcoded at the top of the script.

Last year, after almost a decade of using them as my host, WebFaction started shutting down. They’d been sold to GoDaddy back in 2018 and had mysteriously stopped working on any feature-development about then, so it wasn’t a huge surprise.

So, I bit the bullet, and switched to Linode.

This isn’t entirely something I’d recommend to everyone who’s used to using a service like WebFaction. WebFaction, despite being more fiddly than many hosts, still handled a lot of things for you. It ran servers and managed their configuration; you just told it that you wanted an app of type X to run, and it did.

Linode, by contrast, is a VPS host. That means you get a virtual server, and have to manage it yourself. So I’m spending $5/month for their shared 1GB plan, and it gets me a virtual machine (I picked Debian) that I have to ssh into and cope with.

Now, Linode does offer a lot of guides to setting up servers, which I found very helpful. It’s still a fiddly learning experience – tuning the software to work on your VPS is a pain, and I wound up with Apache using slightly too many resources that led to a CPU spiral over a few days.

Still, if you’re willing to put the work in, or just have more complex needs than “HTML is here”, it’s a good hosting option.