I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny.<p>I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough.<p>The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit. The belt they included was a completely different size than the trouser and I'm still waiting for the shirt to arrive. And now I'm fighting the usual uphill battle to talk to a human and get this mess fixed or get a refund.<p>The core of Stitchfix is personalization, as they say. But that means an individual solution for each individual customer, and not AI for memorizing generic trends in a huge dataset.
I’m sad this is an April fools joke because a lot of the sentiment rings true and I love the slogan “move slow and make things.”<p>Artisans make beautiful things and software artisans make beautiful software, but it’s hard to do it and still be a viable business.<p>And artisans moving slowly isn’t arbitrary. They move slow on the things that matter. The things that shine when attention was paid to the details.
I know it’s an april fools joke. But I’ve recently “discovered” why this is nevertheless very true. If you move slow, you have a higher chance of meeting the right customer, of actually allowing your idea to grow and improve over time. Without being locked into it in one form or another. Moving slow allows you to work on it as a side project first. Which means no financial stress.<p>And then making things. To me this means no paper prototyping. Not selling people on your idea without having anything tangible. Some may call it smart. To me it feels like gambling with your believability / integrity. There are only so many times you can do this before people get tired of you and your stories / dreams / business ideas. Just make something, show it to people when it’s actually useful. And feel good about actually having made something people liked. Instead of selling something people liked and then suffer the feeling of non-stop pressure, constantly _not_ being where you’ve told others you are.<p>Happy april fools :)
"A Mere April Fool's Joke for One, is the Solid Revenue Model for the Other"<p>The 'move slow an make things' movement is a much-needed niche to be explored, and a place where I'd love to be.
I feel suckered, but I do like the idea of moving slow...<p>"slow is smooth and smooth is fast" is something that I'm working to internalize.<p>This is why I believe, at core, in 100% test coverage.
They're on a roll for April fool's, this other one is the geekiest one I've seen in a while! <a href="https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in-our-models/" rel="nofollow">https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in...</a>
"Move slow and make things" seems like a credo for developer-run Open Source software projects. The software ships when it is ready, not when a commercial entity needs it to.<p>For a tech business, "move slow and make things" can only be a joke. But for a developer collective, it can be real.
It's really great to read this article: the contrast of text against the background is optimally low, it lets our eyes take its sweet time to recognize letter forms. Sit back, relax and poke your eyes out in pain. What more do readers want! Illegible, dysfunctional and decorative design is the future!
The fact they think that individual customizations of clothing is a joke, when that's exactly what they advertise, says a lot about the company. You're just cattle, and they think it's hilarious you're actually falling for their marketing wank.<p>I'd _highly_ recommend M-Tailor however as an alternative. It's not a subscription box, but the clothes are extremely well made and the "body scanning" technology actually works (especially for someone of an odd body size like myself: 6'5", 205lbs, athletic build).<p>Another good company, but I don't know much about other than they're based in Southeast Asia is iTailor. They'll build you -exactly- what you want, to a fault in my experience. Get measured professionally by someone with experience if you're going this route.
I have to admit: if they didn't go overboard with hand-printed cards and carrier pigeons, I'd believe the article.<p>As others have mused here and I'll join them: we can use a lot more hand-crafted and "slow" approach. We're chasing our own tails -- ESPECIALLY in programming! -- and progress is nearly non-existent.<p>I mean, in 2021, people are still debugging multithreaded shared state problems. These should belong to the past -- make it impossible on a hardware level as a start, then the programming languages will adapt in a matter of a few months at the maximum.
This is the best April fools joke I've seen this year.<p>The article itself is excellent. But the best part is the title is a so much better real credo than the "real" one it parodies.
This is the way I build cybersecurity opertions centers and ingest data for mining.<p>Every log structure is analyzed by hand.
Every log structure data behaviour is verified with statistics by hand.
Every log data is normalized by hand.
Every parser is done by hand.
Every log is documented and gets unit tests.<p>What has not gone through this process ends up in the "automatic extraction" bucket waiting to get human love.<p>April's fool or not, you may laugh at me.
My L3 security analysts don't.
My thoughts on this were a little too long for a comment, so I posted them on my blog: <a href="https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/" rel="nofollow">https://benovermyer.com/blog/building-things-slowly/</a>
On a more serious tone: what would take to the IT industry to switch from "move fast and get shit done" to "move slow and make things'?<p>Geninuosly asking. If it becomes a thing, it would only be because the developers push it further... and HN is full of devs.
I doubt such a perspective would ever come from "lean" managers and the like.
It's interesting because moving "fast" is very relative to the circumstances you're currently in. If you have an army of engineers, it's very easy to move fast (sometimes, depending on the organization) but moving fast for an individual is objectively slow in comparison.
>our staff of mathematicians who will perform all computations by hand using pencil and paper<p>This part is about when i started dying laughing at every sentence, before i was a bit confused. But only after checking the comments did i realize it was on 1 april.