The Red-Green-Refactor pattern is a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that if we want a change to work and the build process tells us we didn't break anything, we bowl right past any subtle hints that we are in the wrong, and our whole code change is a house of cards standing on a bad assumption that will immediately collapse when breathed on.
I have a love-hate relationship with negative tests because of this, and I wonder if there's some way with static analysis or maybe AI to validate that the test that is green because nothing happened isn't green now because I broke the API and the test is now testing nothing in, nothing out instead of something in, nothing out.
Sooner or later in some refactor someone finds a way to break the code without CI catching it.
But we are just people. And if you squint you can see how our relationship to green builds is the same drive that management, sales, and marketing, and scientists get with charts that Make the Numbers Go Up even when the data is just correlated and the proximate cause they were looking for is a hallucination.
Mark Twain knew. Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
I believe this because Facebook continues to send spam to an e-mail address that was only used by me for my cat, and only once; and the cat has been dead for 15 years. The dead cat address received three spams from Facebook just yesterday.
There is also bad data out there about another cat that died ten years ago. He keeps getting snail mail from political candidates trying to convince him that they're deeply interested in the cares and concerns of people like him. A dead cat.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2026/08/13/my-experience-buyi...
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
The second part goes into internet advertising.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
There are transcripts of the episodes on the page if you want to read instead of listen.
brudgers•1d ago
If it makes your clients happy, it's good data.
Business data is for business purposes, not for science purposes.
rtkwe•38m ago
I mean isn't the business purpose for the company running the ad campaign to actually increase revenue? Sure for an outside ad company just making the client happy is sufficient but for internal teams and the customer themselves the data is still bad.