Fun to see animated Portland. Looks like a cool movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POneS8h1jyU

Hey y'all, just reminding you of Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.

The classic parable is that of the Soviet nail factory¹. Measuring how many nails are produced each month was a good metric for productivity, but when given the target to produce as many nails as possible, the nails became so tiny and weak as to be useless.

Measuring the weight of nails was also a good metric, but when given the target to produce the greatest mass of nails, the nails would all be too large and heavy, and again useless.

This feels like it might be relevant if you're working in a business that measures individual success on lines of code are written, or how many times a new technology is used.

—

¹ I've no idea if the parable is apocryphal, but Goodhart's law is very real:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Interesting. It seems like there are way more Linux users here than I expected.

So, let’s do a little roll call:

What are you using?

Linux?
Windows?
macOS?
BSD?
Something beautifully weird?

I’m curious 👀

#Linux #LinuxUser #Fediverse #Mastodon #OpenSource #Tech #OldschoolInternet

Boston PM Tech & Social on-line meeting tomorrow, Tues 7.30 EDT 🇺🇸 (=2330 GMT; soft start 7.00 pm for social and mic checks; JITSI not Zoom because FLOSS)

https://mobilizon.us/events/fd8f4dab-162b-4845-b382-f677ddda4452

#Perl #Perl5

You don't need to be an experienced sewist to start modifying your own clothes. We'll prove it in June.

#PDX #Portland #Sewing #Mending

https://evergreensewing.com/2026/05/11/were-teaching-three-classes-in-june/

My recent post about Linux monoculture being bad for security has now started generating responses from people saying other systems are insecure.

I... yes? Literally the point of the post. In the words of infosec professional Bob Dylan, everything is broken. Diversity is strength.