The New Management

Snowy morning this morning. So much not to write about this week.

At work, my manager abruptly left the company due to [reason redacted by management; as near as I can tell he wasn't technically laid off but maybe something of the sort]. So that's three changes of manager since I changed teams only three years ago, in addition to the engineering headcount dropping by half in the past year.

In the news, the US executive department seems to be trying to do reorg-by-Elon-Musk, specifically having Musk do the equivalent of cutting the power to whatever he doesn't like at first glance. I want to emphasize that Musk is inevitably going to find a bunch of stuff conservatives find dumb / expensive, specially since they take both "helping people" and "raising the reputation of American democracy" as non-goals. So don't get caught up in an eternal Gish gallop about whether this or that program is a good idea, on the premise that it's reasonable to judge that from a title and headline amount.

Musk is a guy who believes he is able to acquire at-a-glance expertise at basically anything, but he's also a dum-dum who uncritically takes up stupid right-wing conspiracy theories. He's become very conspiracy minded, and seems to see smoking-gun evidence of massive fraud in observations adequately explained by "old computer systems are old".

Having the (advisor to the) President line-item manage the whole government regardless of whatever Congress says is also not how our Constitutional system is supposed to work, but all Republicans in Congress seem fully in support of this approach, and that's unlikely to change until they manage to really obviously break something.

Let's see, what else... maybe a little media talk:

I finished playing The Outer Wilds. As I said earlier, I really recommend you check it out spoiler-free. It's a really remarkable example of knowledge-as-progression in a game. As is often the case in such games, key bits of information are eventually obtainable in some explicit form (e.g. writing or diagrams, something that is diegetically explaining the thing). But in this game there are so many instances where you can figure out those key insights just through careful observation and deduction, which is really rewarding

I also finished the second season of Megalobox, which was really very well done. I think the remarkable thing about that is how different it manages to be than the first season, which is a pretty typical sports story, an underdog-to-champion arc. The second season jumps ahead to start in media res a story about being a former champion, struggling with the

Finally, I've returned to playing Dicey Dungeons. Still a very fun and funny game, but some of the challenges are quite tricky.

Laser Pointer Emporium

Yesterday afternoon, we all went out to see Dogman, and if you're looking for a kid's movie to see with your kid, it's a pretty good one. It struck me as the sort of movie that takes its ridiculous premise, plays that seriously, and then plays that for laughs. It had more than an expected share of genuinely heartwarming moments for a story with such simplistic plots and characters. The one thing I found a bit jarring was in some of the more dynamic scenes the depth of field seemed somehow off. It's a bit hard to describe but my guess was that some of the editing done in service of 3D cinema that didn't work in 2D, or to put it another way, if you're constantly hiding jokes in the background, it's a little jarring to have those be out of focus. For some reason, the joke that most stuck with me was a montage midway through of increasingly absurd answers to "places to find a lost cat".