"the perfect is the enemy of the good" keeps being a phrase meaning shut up and accept the bad

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

"the perfect is the enemy of the good" keeps being a phrase meaning shut up and accept the bad

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

i could contrive other use cases, but

[pkraus@berlin.social]

@davidgerard as a supervisor of PhD students, trust me, there's such a thing as "it's good enough, just write the thing already"

[rogerbw@discordian.social]

@davidgerard Particularly when "this works to the absolute minimum extent that our lawyers can win the court cases" is the target quality level and time to move on to the next project.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@pkraus i must ask: did you seriously think that's anything like what i'm talking about?

[jripley@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard The replies in that thread, and its spinoff threads, are like someone is crowdsourcing “Give examples of bad faith calls-to-inaction”

[Edit: More generally, it’s like the “But you live in society” guy popping out in everyone’s mentions]

[theonedoc@tech.lgbt]

@davidgerard good enough is when a 20 bucks bottle of wine gets you 95% to where that 110 bucks bottle gets you.

With technology especially code 90% solutions aren't good enough.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@jripley i had about ten threads in mind and mostly on bluesky lol

[decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com]

@davidgerard "Don't let the good be the enemy of the literally the second worst possible situation"

[pkraus@berlin.social]

@davidgerard well, I'm not a mind reader (or have blue sky or whatnot to see what you refer to), but no, I can imagine plenty of cases where you're technically right on this one.

It's just that I really like the phrase and find it useful to get things "out of committee" so to speak. You should come and join a #FAIRdata @NFDI conference some time to find how traumatizing endless looking for perfection perfected to a T can be

[sharpcheddargoblin@reclusive.blog]

@davidgerard It also implies that someone is looking for perfection, framing them as entirely unreasonable. I'm not looking for perfection. I'd settle for a lot of things that weren't overrun by fucking fascists. But no, some asshole has to try and shut down the conversation before we even get to addressing that.

[theorangetheme@en.osm.town]

@davidgerard My response is usually "but this isn't even good".

[arcadiagt5@mstdn.social]

@davidgerard Which is an unfortunate perversion of how it SHOULD be used, but alas only to be expected in the tech bro slop era…

[tobinbaker@discuss.systems]

@davidgerard ditto "Chesterton's fence", thought-terminating cliche

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@tobinbaker "perhaps it's *load bearing* obvious fuckery, did you think of *that* huh"

[zygmyd@toot.cat]

@davidgerard @tobinbaker

This is Sunday evening, stop making me think about work.

[krans@mastodon.me.uk]

@tobinbaker In what way is Chesterton's Fence “thought-terminating”? @davidgerard

[jannem@fosstodon.org]

@pkraus @davidgerard @NFDI
Exactly. It doesn't have to be perfect. It does have to be done.