Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202402251450 Drift to low performance

Also known as "eroding goals" or "boiled frog syndrome", this systems trap is a gradual process of letting standards and goals get worse and worse over time. It is often caused by feedback from weighing previous negative results more highly than positive ones.¹

In order to fix this, we should weigh previous positive results more highly than negative results. This will use the same gradual drift mechanism but push us upwards to better results, higher performance, or more ambitious goals. If this is not possible, we should keep standards at absolute levels instead of relative ones so that they can't drift (downward or upward) over time.

Meadows, D. H., & Wright, D. (2011). Thinking in systems: A primer (Nachdr.) (pp. 121–123). Chelsea Green Pub. ↩

Links to this note

202401291411 Thinking in Systems