Crying

Podcast 2 — In conversation

Speaker A: It's a crying shame that the old mill has been left to decay — it's a beautiful building, historically significant, and the whole site has just been abandoned for twenty years.

Speaker B: Crying shame in its clearest use — the combination of something genuinely valuable being wasted or lost and the implied moral demand that it shouldn't be happening. The crying shame phrase does more than express sadness; it implies that someone or something is responsible for allowing it to happen and that the situation is not merely unfortunate but unjust.

Speaker A: There's a crying need for affordable housing in this city — the waiting lists are extraordinary, the private rents are unsustainable, and yet nothing of significant scale has been built in years.

Speaker B: Crying need as the adjective that amplifies urgency — the need is not being met and the scale of it is obvious enough to demand attention. Crying need implies not just that a need exists but that it is undeniably present, clearly visible, and not being addressed in proportion to its scale. It has a slightly accusatory quality — those with the power to address it should be doing more.

Speaker A: She was crying during the whole of the farewell party — happy tears, she insisted, not sad ones. Hard to tell from the outside.

Speaker B: Crying as the present participle — the ongoing act — and the phenomenon of happy tears. The distinction between happy and sad crying from the outside is genuinely difficult because the facial and vocal signs are similar. Research suggests that happy tears are associated with a different pattern of autonomic arousal than sad tears, but the visible output is often indistinguishable.

Speaker A: People sometimes confuse crying shame and crying wolf.

Speaker B: Crying shame describes something genuinely wrong or wasteful that deserves to be called out. Crying wolf — from the Aesop fable — describes a false alarm, raising a cry of danger when no danger exists. Crying shame is legitimate moral expression about a real problem; crying wolf is illegitimate alarm about a non-existent or exaggerated one. Confusing them muddles the crucial distinction between genuine moral urgency and false alarm.

Podcast 3 — Prompt engineering

Speaker B: Scenario one — a neglected issue detection prompt.

Design a public service gap analysis tool for a local government platform that surfaces crying needs — gaps in provision so large and obvious that they demand immediate attention. The tool: analyses service utilisation data, waiting list lengths, complaint volumes, and demographic need assessments across housing, social care, mental health, transport, and education, identifies service areas where the gap between need and provision exceeds 40 percent of the estimated need population, classifies each gap as a crying need based on: the scale of unmet need, the length of time the gap has persisted without adequate response, and the severity of the consequences of the unmet need, and generates a crying needs report ranked by urgency.

Speaker B: Length of time the gap has persisted without adequate response as a crying need criterion captures the moral urgency dimension — a need that has been visible and unaddressed for years has a stronger claim to the crying need label than a newly identified gap.

Speaker A: Scale of unmet need combined with severity of consequences gives the compound urgency assessment that distinguishes a crying need from a merely unmet need.

Speaker B: Next — a code quality crying need prompt.

Build a code quality auditor for a software platform that identifies crying needs in a codebase — problems so obvious and impactful that they cannot be justified as acceptable technical debt. Crying need code issues include: functions with cyclomatic complexity above 30 (incomprehensible without major refactoring), zero test coverage on business-critical payment or authentication paths, hardcoded credentials in source code, SQL queries vulnerable to injection in user-facing inputs, API endpoints with no rate limiting, and dependencies with known critical vulnerabilities more than 90 days after the vulnerability was published. Each crying need is flagged with its severity, estimated remediation effort, and the business risk of continued non-remediation.

Speaker A: Known critical vulnerabilities more than 90 days after publication as a crying need threshold is the security negligence marker — 90 days is sufficient time to remediate; continuing to expose a known vulnerability after 90 days is a policy choice, not a resourcing constraint.

Speaker B: Right. Now a journalism prioritisation prompt.

Design a public interest journalism story prioritisation tool for an investigative newsroom. The tool helps editors identify which potential stories are crying shames or crying needs that have the strongest public interest case for investigation. The assessment scores each potential story on: the scale of the problem or injustice (how many people are affected?), the obviousness of the issue (is this visible to anyone paying attention?), the longevity of the neglect (how long has this been allowed to persist?), the accountability gap (is someone with responsibility failing to act?), and the public benefit of exposure. Stories that score highly across all five dimensions are classified as crying needs or crying shames that the newsroom has the strongest obligation to investigate.

Speaker B: Accountability gap as a scoring dimension captures the moral urgency that distinguishes a tragedy from a crying shame — a natural disaster is terrible but no one is responsible; a crying shame requires that someone has the responsibility and capacity to remedy the situation but is not doing so.

Speaker B: Fourth — a product backlog prioritisation prompt.

Build a product backlog crying need detector for a product management platform. A crying need in a product backlog is a user problem so obvious, widespread, and impactful that continuing to not address it is a failure of product stewardship. The detector: analyses user feedback, support ticket volumes, NPS driver themes, and user research findings, identifies problems that appear repeatedly across multiple feedback channels (the multi-channel presence indicates the problem is truly widespread rather than a vocal minority issue), calculates a crying need score based on frequency, user impact severity, and duration since first reported, and promotes crying need items to the top of the backlog with a flagged status that requires explicit senior sign-off to deprioritise.

Speaker A: Requiring explicit senior sign-off to deprioritise a crying need item is the governance mechanism — it creates accountability for the decision to continue not addressing an obvious widespread problem.

Speaker B: Fifth — an environmental monitoring prompt.

Design an environmental compliance monitoring system that identifies crying violations — breaches so obvious and persistent that they demand immediate regulatory action. The system monitors: air quality sensor data identifying persistent exceedances of legal limits at specified locations, water quality parameters in monitored watercourses identifying persistent exceedances of permitted discharge levels, noise monitoring data identifying locations persistently exceeding planning conditions, and waste site monitoring identifying unlicensed disposal activity. A crying violation is defined as a breach that has persisted for more than 30 days or has been identified in more than 10 consecutive monitoring cycles, generating an automatic mandatory referral to enforcement with all supporting data compiled.

Speaker B: Automatic mandatory referral for crying violations removes the discretion that allows persistent violations to continue without enforcement — when a breach has been visible and unaddressed for 30 days, the decision to act should be automatic rather than discretionary.

Speaker B: Sixth — a full small app.

Build a single-page web app called Crying Shame Log — a public issue tracker where users record local problems they consider crying shames. The user logs: problem title, location description, what makes it a crying shame (the specific waste, neglect, or injustice), how long it has persisted, who is responsible for addressing it, and evidence links. Each logged problem can be marked as resolved with a resolution description when fixed. The app shows: all active crying shames, a most-neglected list sorted by age of problem, a resolved list celebrating problems fixed, and a simple share link for each entry so users can point others to a specific crying shame. All data in localStorage.

Speaker A: Resolved list celebrating problems fixed is the positive outcome tracker that makes the log more than a complaint repository — seeing that crying shames do get resolved is the evidence that logging and sharing them has value.

Speaker B: That's the lesson — crying means not just weeping, it means calling out so urgently that it cannot be ignored. The crying shame, the crying need, the crying injustice: all share the quality of being so obvious, so clearly wrong, and so clearly unaddressed that they demand attention the way a cry demands to be heard.

Speaker B: Prompt example: