The Seed Beneath the Snow

Great piece, more optimistic than my original comment. It's also interesting to consider the converse scenario where people adamantly refuse to backchannel to help someone else out even at little to no cost to themselves, whether due to fear of reprisals or simply terminal rule-following brain. Anyone who's worked in such a setting knows how demotivating it can be to be forced to jump through hoops to get even the smallest things done. In the software industry this was one of the problems DevOps was meant to address, but of course companies' need for legibility, along with an intrinsic attachment to pre-existing fiefdoms, largely ruined the whole effort.

I enjoyed this very much. But I also loved The Dispossessed, so this shouldn't surprise me 😅

I think the framing and perhaps even the phrasing of 'The seed beneath the snow' is very soothing and hopegiving to me, I'm really happy to see this.

Every software process does the same thing: it converts a rich, multifaceted value into a single metric

This is how I feel about the number that appears after my name in Lobsters (my "karma"), which apparently is a single integer that describes my value to or status within the Lobsters community, or some such thing.