The Fine Art of Minimalist Lessening
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Yesterday I hinted at the subject when I wrote a surprisingly popular piece on artificial downsizing and I barely touched upon the topic of today's piece which is of course The Fine Art of Minimalist Lessening (ML). Some people think that ML stands for machine learning, which since I have never seen any evidence of it I can only imagine is a bunch of programmers who do not know how to program, who are getting paid too much to not know how to program, all sitting on digital telephony calls while someone yells at them to begin learning how to program before another manager comes in and fires them because of lack of productivity. Because as all programmers know, if you are not producing large amounts of code and introducing bugs that need to be fixed then you cannot graduate from machine learner to an actual engineer -- which is the role at most tech companies where they spend all day reading your email as far as I can tell.
But all of that is besides the point of what I was trying to write about. The real ML is Minimalist Lessening. The fine art of this act is the act of throwing something in the trash. Just now I found a moldy top to a container that I used to store leftovers within and I could have kept it and scrubbed it until it was no longer moldy but the top was no good anyway and the other top had already broken for the equivilent dish, so I made the fateful decision.
I threw it in the trash.