Rules for Alpha Men
(This blog post originally started life as an answer on Quora.)
With men like Andrew Tate and his little Tater Tots making noise about the proper role of Alpha Men™ in modern society, I thought it might be useful to recap the rules for Alpha Men™ in today’s complex world.
An alpha male waits for the train. Image by Shekai.
Like all pre-release products, alpha men are likely to be unstable and are typically lacking essential features. It’s important, therefore, to keep alpha men in the proper environment, to prevent unwanted problems. Some things to keep in mind:
- Alpha men are not suitable for public release. They should be used only by production teams and QA, and should not be introduced to the general public.
- Alpha men may not be secure and may have multiple vulnerabilities. Keep them away from any internet-facing system, because they may be easy to exploit.
- Alpha men should be assumed to be unstable. When presenting an alpha man in public, please verify the commands and processes you will be demonstrating in a controlled environment to avoid embarrassing crashes or lack of functionality in front of an audience.
- Alpha men do not have all the features you expect from a man who is ready for release. Expect to find significant areas where basic features have not yet been implemented.
- Document all crashes or unexpected behavior so that the developers can address it.
- Do not expect your alpha man to be resilient or to be able to process unexpected input. Provide only properly formatted input that the alpha man expects. The alpha man may not be able to respond to unexpected or ambiguous data gracefully.
- Alpha men are quite fragile and may not have error handling implemented. Expect hard crashes and/or complete shutdown if an error condition is encountered.
- Under no circumstances whatsoever should any alpha man be used in any mission critical environment where reliability or proper behavior are crucial, including any environment where failure of the alpha man may result in loss of life, significant damage to equipment, or corruption of important business data.
- Alpha men are not certified for access to internal networks without sandboxing and firewalling.
- Log all defects you observe in your alpha man so they may be addressed before release.