Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

But if you piss him off, he’ll turn right back into Windows95man and send you into DLL-hell.

To add to what others have already answered, if Ukraine accepted such a “deal”, more war would be coming to Europe.

• When Russia still falsely assumed they could destroy Ukraine in just weeks, they were already prepared to march right through into Moldova (there’s ample reporting from mainstream and non-mainstream publications an internet search will reveal)
• Intense propaganda is currently aimed at Europe’s right wingers to seed distrust and destabilize Europe and to form positive opinions on Russia
• Hungary is controlled by a pro-Russian far-right dictator, Poland just barely teetered back from the brink
• Germany’s fascist party wants “Dexit,” (and “Brexit” was a Russian undertaking, too). Yes, pro-Russian far-right parties again, both. Same old.
• Russia is working with Republicans to pull the US out of NATO and destroy America from the inside out (surprise, another pro-Russian far-right party)
• A heavily Russian-influenced billionaire bought Twitter and allowed unchecked government propaganda from Russia under the guise of free speech to aid in the previous undertaking.

I have every reason to believe that Russia will just move on to the next target and that things would be far worse in Europe already if Ukraine wasn’t keeping a large portion of Russian resources aimed at them.

Also consider that any time Russia offered a ceasefire (such agreements were accepted several times), they always used it to safely rush supplies to the front lines and broke the ceasefire immediately after, often just hours after it was instated.

It’s like when YouTube influencers get invited, all expenses covered plus pocket money, to a sweatshop in China, given a guided tour showing all the utterly happy workers and absolutely fantastic work conditions.

And said influencers then return home and gush over said sweatshop, don’t disclose the paid expenses and perhaps even dunk on real journalists that infiltrated the company and collected evidence for months (the real case I’m referring to: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1184974003/shein-influencers-china-factory-trip-backlash).

I’m happy when actual investigative journalists report from Russia, but those tend to live dangerously and won’t get interviews with the regime’s higher-ups or the tyrant himself. Media in Russia are under complete government control, so Tucker even getting that interview is a clear tell.

…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.

The problem I have with the “hypocrisy” argument is that, here, it’s used as a cheap attack on the messenger.

As in the old meme:

(poor peasant doing labor: “we should improve society somewhat”, grinning contemporary person: “yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.”)

I can accept it when influential people, even those that cause a whole lot of emissions themselves, advocate for climate programs. We won’t get anywhere if, whoever wants to talk about the environment, first has to become a cave dweller and give up their reach before they’re allowed to speak up.

On the other hand, when Fox News, a channel that generally panders to the coal lobby, car industry and oil barons, suddenly becomes concerned about someone’s CO2 emissions just to serve up another smear, that is hypocrisy, plain and simple.

That has been Russia’s game for more than a decade now: stoke existing tensions. Brexit, political polarization in the USA and internal division in nearly all European countries.

Bringing the already uneasy situation between Israel/Palestine to a boiling point in order to distract from Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a big stretch.