#metrics

I JUST CHECKED ALL OF TUMBLR’S MOST RECENT SHIP WEEK POSTS AND POLYTRIX (which is pink) WASN’T IN #21-100 WHICH MEANS:

Polytrix, a polyamorous ship, a THREE WOMAN ship, is in Tumblr’s top 20 ships of 2025.

I'm at the end of my tour for my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification. My last two stops are CCC in Hamburg, Dec 27-30 and the Tattered Cover in Denver (Jan 22). Hope to see you!

I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.

IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/

The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."

After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies.

This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more.

Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share than information with your competitors!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loathe to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy.

Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved.

That's pretty big for us, not gonna lie.

Poetic Language is organized into rhythmical units which appear in print as lines.

In Europe, the traditional study of versification, or prosody, was based on the rules of Latin scansion.

Poetic lines would be analysed into combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables known as feet.

Five types were formerly prominent in English verse, as shown above.

Lines would then be classified in terms of the number of stressed syllables they contained, as shown above.

In theory, there is no limit; in practice, most English metrical lines are found to be 5 feet or less; when they exceed 6 feet, there is a strong intuitive tendency to break them into 2 parts.

Combinations of foot-type and line length produced such designations as iambic pentameter – the heartbeat of much English poetry – and analyses in these terms were the staple of traditional metrical studies, which traced the norms of English poetic rhythm and evaluated the way poets deviated from these norms.

As a system of description, it worked quite well in giving an account of the regular lines of traditional poetry.

But it came to be criticized on several counts:

It was often mechanically applied, with students being taught to identify the form of metrical patterns at the expense of their function, or role, in a poem.

It was unable to cope well with lines containing unusual rhythm sequences.

With the bulk of modern poetry no longer using such metrical patterns, but working instead with ‘free’ kinds of verse, the traditional system of description came to be viewed as largely irrelevant.

Today, metrists work in several alternative ways, not restricting themselves to the notion of stress, but bringing in other prosodic systems, such as tempo and intonation, and a general concept of rhythmical weight.

So I know follower count sharing on Tumblr is gauche but like... I want to say thank you to everyone that made this happen. Ngl, I was pretty split on deleting my twitter because I was worried my art wouldn't be seen and it wouldn't be possible to viably get commissions when I opened for them. But that just hasn't been true. Tumblr is a massively active and awesome community. Fuck the fascist website. We got the blue hair pronouns website and it RULES. And although the porn purge did hurt my metrics, it's nice to see so many people still around and enjoying the dumb shit I draw. Special thanks to @were--ralph also who A LOT of my art would not have visibility without. AND THANK YOU ALL MY LONG TIME FOLLOWERS WHO HAVE BEEEN WITH ME SINCE I DREW LIKE THIS AND LITEREALLY WAS A DIFFERENT GENDER. LOVE YOU GUYS <3