I treat it like housekeeping and treat features like hosting a party. Guests/stakeholders are people who want what you can make. The party is the feature they want.

They don't care whether it was difficult or easy for you to clean the house. They just assume keep your own house tidy ... and they know you don't when you only host once a quarter instead of once a month.

They assume you're a functional adult who manages his own space.

Tech debt is like that.

Thus - the business folk don't get a say in whether it's in the sprint - cuz it's not "the party". Instead it's your Scrum Master or whatever saying "hey kids - clean the mirrors and Jane this time you're sanitizing the toilet."

I read it though thinking "I'll bulwark myself against manipulators by understanding their tactics" whilst the "Influencing People" book just sounded like manipulative self-interest.

You've changed my mind; I'm going to read it right away.

Instead imagine that "GO EAST" takes you onto a winding road.

The road arcs southward and to go back you'd have to "GO NORTH".

Further... some travels in Zork even drop you through a hole (though I forget if it tells you so).

So going East might put you in the basement and there's no way to climb back up.

Context and tone tell the reader whether it's used "normally", tongue-in-cheek, or neutrally. ~\_O_/~

To ESL folk out there - the "F" definitely never means "fine". It's a cute and crass ... just like America. ;^)

e.g. "TFA covers this already."

Your keyboard may be chin-height but hey, your monitor height is no longer a problem. ;)

If I sell a Monitor With Really Tall Monitor Stand and then you lightly bump your desk and break your monitor, you might want a replacement and call my stand "an unstable PoS".

If I sell you a Monitor and you stack books under it and your monitor falls... well... dummy, tall stuff falls over. Time to buy a new monitor.

   "the meaning of life is to continue living."

We certainly do suddenly live in "interesting times".

You'll still come here, read the comments, see something engaging and want to reply and... feel sad because shakes fist at [datacenter] clouds it's all just bots talking to each other anyway.

Seems lame. Keep talking anyway.

We went from overwhelming color chaos of pink and green toilets, carpeted bathroom floors, and kaleidoscope wallpapers to calm, clean, and inoffensive shades of whites and "agreeable gray"s.

Soon enough people will stop thinking of those whites/grays as a fresh, low-chaos decoration decision and switch to thinking of it as oppressively boring and break out with fantastic ideas like ... green toilets and kaleidoscope wallpaper.

The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it.

They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it.

I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.

The people you'd want to be wary of would be the ones that'd look legit.

e.g. "yes i guess i will send my son $400,000 in cash tonight because he's been kidnapped, and i know it's real because there's no AI watermark that all the nice US/EU companies use."

I kid, ;) but I see your point. The idea that you might, say, struggle to resist candy and sweets and it's because some population of your gut biome is fighting for its life if you don't eat sugar... makes sense.

The idea that "I just cut sugar out for six weeks and my willpower to resist sugar went through the roof" ... not because your willpower changed, but because you killed that part of your gut biome.