Completely agree! It’s SO much easier to lighten the mood and keep things upbeat and productive in an actual conversation vs. just text-based feedback. For example it makes it easy to throw in self-deprecating anecdotes of your own when discussing mistakes / needed changes, which can really help put juniors at ease. It’s just worlds better in >90% of scenarios.

Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.

OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).

Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.

That’s true and a great example of what my industry needs.

To make an analogy, in the software industry we call 7 different knee-like things “knees”. Not to be confused with the product, Knee, which is also knee-like, but due to its name either pollutes the search results for other knees OR can literally not be searched, and is only a very specific case of knee anyway!

I do plenty of technical writing just documenting software I write, and that’s definitely what has me pining for something a little more prescriptive. Even just reordering some words can suggest different meanings and it’s very difficult to step outside my own understanding of what I’m writing about to see it with “fresh eyes”, how someone else may interpret it.

I have to acknowledge that legalese does meet the criteria! Someone else mentioned that too. It feels very far off from what I had in mind though. Maybe just because I don’t speak it fluently!

I completely agree that Git has some great use cases outside software, and I like the one you suggested. If git is a bidet, random untracked edits (by anyone with access!) to documents are the TP we should have left behind as a society by now.

Yeah that’s fair, and it was clear to me from the jump that it’s an unrealistic desire.

Holy shit. My life is a lie?!

Thank you for fighting the good fight.

I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we’d do such a thing, and it’d never be adopted (and probably it’s been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can’t be misinterpreted can be a real chore.

My pedantic hill to die on is the word “jealous”. For example:

“I’m going on vacation!” “Ugh, I’m so jealous!”

No, that’s envy. Jealousy is a weird way of behaving about things you already have, it’s not wishing you had what someone else does! Weirdly, explaining this does not cause people to use the correct word. At this point the battle is probably lost and the meaning has officially shifted.

I write myself little lists of tasks, even when I’m entirely clear on what needs to be done. It may not feel like a hack, but it sure works like one for me - it’s a simple habit that makes a dramatic impact on the flow of my day.

Advantages I notice:

• mental shift in the perceived effort - instead of a full day of indeterminate stuff, instead it feels like a list of small things
• provides clear places for breaks (which also provides an easy way to say “I’d like to do X to relax a bit, but I need to get Y small thing done first”)
• helps me avoid getting distracted and working on something low priority
• makes it clear what’s getting done (one less cognitive task, also harder to miss items) and kinda fosters a sense of satisfaction as I go

I dunno, really feels silly that it makes such a big difference, but here we are. I don’t do it every day by any means (overdoing it “roboticizes” life to an unpleasant degree), but I use it most work days at least, and sometimes to keep up with chores and personal life stuff when I get real busy.

Analog Zettelkasten! You’re rad.

Ohhh. I see. Using the Aeropress to make concentrated coffee, letting it cool overnight, and then deciding how you want to serve it by what you add to it in the morning. Makes sense to me.

Interesting! I definitely see the advantages you mention. I’m curious about the strength, though, my understanding was that the cold brew just needs much more extraction time (which makes sense intuitively from a physics and energy standpoint). And you’re not using a particularly strong ratio, I actually use 1:8 for my overnight “steep”, slightly stronger than your 1:10.

With that said, you seem experienced. Works out to pretty “normal” strength coffee (whatever that means)? I guess something I’m vaguely remembering about the Aeropress is that the pressure itself helps it extract efficiently even with lower heat, but I’m not even sure how much pressure there would be with the metal filter.

Cool! For the cold, are you just saying you put water and grounds together in a mason jar overnight, then use the Aeropress with the metal filter in the morning to strain? Cuz that’s pretty close to what I do. Mesh strainer (like for rinsing fruit), then through Aeropress with paper. Maybe I should try the metal instead, paper gets pretty gummed up and impermeable.

FWIW cold brew coffee is extremely easy to make, gives a different flavor profile than brewing with the same beans hot, and I find it super refreshing in hot weather. My only complaint is the extraction is inefficient so you go through a lot more beans for the same amount of beverage, which irks me. But then again, sounds like you’ve got the situation sorted, that tea sounds great.

I like it, very succinct way to get the point across.

That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.

I’m not ready to recommend others become gun owners, that’s too personal a decision, but I do think it’s unwise for only one side of a major political rift (manufactured / artificially maintained as it may be) to be well armed. Especially when law enforcement is also overwhelmingly on that same political side that’s already well armed. Especially when that same political side is the source of the folks who said “we better storm the capital to make sure elections turn out how we think they should”.

I’m okay with brief compulsory service, in favor of “sensible gun laws”, and firmly against any approach to full disarmament at present - that solution could only be remotely feasible after maybe a full generation where firearm ownership was not a hot button issue. Any approach to disarmament in the US without a long quiet period would be received as hostile action by ~half of the country and rejected categorically, along with any good will on other issues. We need to drop that and find people to elect who will cooperate on issues of broad popularity.

Ah, those are reasonable points of view to me. I think responsible gun ownership is fairly straightforward and the statistics look that way because of the extremely irresponsible folks who don’t take it seriously, and because suicide is usually included. Proper gun safety really only requires diligently following a few simple rules, make those consistently followed - habitual - and the additional risk drops to pretty close to zero.

But I concede that owning a gun does - at again just a definitional level - create a path of escalation which is almost always inappropriate to pursue, which is not available without that gun, and that’s inherently risky too. It’s not a decision to be taken lightheartedly, but we all face risk at varying degrees and have to make our own decisions about what are good and bad tradeoffs there.

There are a lot of folks (of all political persuasion, which is not to say it’s evenly distributed at all) who are definitely LARPing, and I think their idiot rhetoric is foolish and potentially harmful. I just think the quiet gun-owning left shouldn’t be automatically associated with that group, and if I remember the original comment right, I don’t think the poster indicated any hidden desire for violence.

I agree that we should be discussing and insisting on action for way more substantive and impactful stuff, guns are a ridiculous wedge issue that will never be “resolved”, and our limited time is definitely better spent trying to force improvements that would benefit and be popular with a majority of people.