I think it’s also think it’s interesting to consider from the perspective of side-channel attacks/information leaks. For the most part, I think text notes are well just text. But I shutter to think what other metadata, fingerprinting, or background conversations/information could be extracted from a bunch of audio. But maybe I’m just being overly paranoid.
For a while, I was using PC-BASIC to generate audio files for the IBM PCjr cassette interface to do some more diagnostics, for a machine that I had that didn’t have a working disk drive. I don’t even know if there is anything else out there to generate those at this point. PC-BASIC is great!
I’d take it one step further: if `git log`—a hierarchical view of the connection of commits—is the only way you (and your team) interact with commit messages, then yea it’s probably fine.
But, I think the value of commit messages become really apparent once you (or your team) are relying on other visualizations of commit messages like `blame` and `bisect`
Tracking down the introduction of a bug with bisect and resolving to a commit whose message in “minor”, because the person in the past didn’t think this change was important enough to describe intent can quite the temporal foot-gun.
This is the epitome of the sentiment: those interested in the pursuit of “hard truths” are only extrinsically motivated to find fault in others and gleefully “correct” another’s “faulty” self perception. Never intrinsically motivated to better themselves…
Tell me more about how everyone else in the “modern world” is the problem…
Everything in this thread converges on generalizations and platitudes.
I've lived long enough to have learned to present feedback to others diplomatically and inasmuch as possible kindly.
But when it comes to me, dear Lorde, just get to a constructive point quickly and directly. Takes me a while to coach my mentors :) but life is easier for all once they believe me.
The point being, there's all sorts, including those who genuinely want "hard truths" without looking to only correct others.
Why would you bother giving input when you don't care if or how it is received? Stream of consciousness oversharing isn't required for honesty. You don't have to say everything that comes into your head. Practice giving less of a fuck about everyone else and not evaluating them and telling them how great you are (which is what you achieve when you criticize someone for no reason).
If you had cared about the consequences, it might have served everyone better (yourself included) if you’d found a constructive way to discuss concerns you’d had for months, so everyone involved would have a better chance of success. It’s possible you’d done that, but it sounds very much like you just left a situation in a far from ideal state until you chose to categorically write off a whole person who may not have even known there was an issue to address in the first place.
If full test coverage mattered to you so much, I'd expect at least a part of this anecdote to include some discussion of how it would be handled in light of prior concerns about test coverage up to that point. If I’d been in a leadership role in this scenario I’d probably postpone whatever next thing was on my daily agenda to sit down with you and convey that waiting months to raise known problems is exactly what I expect you not to do. I would indicate that it’s actively harmful to the success of whatever everyone is working on and to everyone working on it, and since you seem to appreciate bluntness I’d add that I expect it not to happen again.
> It was a frustrated outburst regarding something about which I had repeated (and more discretely) commented.
Okay, I’ll grant that my first impression might’ve been wrong.
> And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.
I think maybe there’s something constructive in just separating your assessment of someone’s present skills from your assessment of their person. Have you never found yourself in a position where you didn’t know enough to be proficient and faced a longer and harder climb to meet expectations (your own or external)? How much would it help you improve if you were designated not smart enough, full stop, no path forward?
> Beyond that, just because I can recognise that testing is inadequate, does not mean that I can guide how to do it.
> (Just because I can point when a builder puts a hammer through the glass, does not mean that I can fix the window myself.)
I’m sorry but here I have to call bullshit. You have more informed criteria as a dev about testing than a layperson about construction. You probably have enough familiarity with the system under test to do an adequate job testing it even if you’re not well versed in the broader role of dedicated testing. I’m not saying you were in a position to mentor the tester, or that it was your job to do so. But you were definitely in a position to make more constructive recommendations than blurting out that a person is inadequate.
If I might be more constructive myself, it sounds like you might benefit from becoming more familiar with the testing role you’re evaluating individual competency for. If nothing else it’ll make you a better dev. Maybe you and everyone else will be lucky and you’ll be a little more able to help your teammates succeed, and know how to fill in gaps so you can succeed too.
You're literally telling us about an incident where you were not proficient and don't even recognize the skills you would need to develop to have handled it better. The other version of this story is "yea I had this dev, did fine as a developer so long as you just babysat him through every interaction with someone else. Like, one time he just told this other engineering manager that he would have to do the testing on a project because this dev guy didn't know how to test stuff and he didn't think the assigned tester was any good at his job - and he'd just been sitting on this clusterfuck for months! I learned I had to just coax him into actually telling me about anything that wasn't literally written in an IDE. God, talk about exhausting. He didn't need a manager, he needed a social skills teacher."
And you're using this incident as an example of why social skills don't matter....
> And there was no constructive way to address the situation where someone simply is not smart enough to learn their required tasks.
Of course there is man. Nobody is smart or dumb, they are just curious or incurious. You could have pointed out what was lacking in their knowledge base, pointed to documentation, pointed to inadequacies in the process etc. Just shouting at someone's face that they are good enough was the worst way to tell this truth.
Well, I wasn't there, but I'm more inclined to believe that he wasn't given the support and mentorship he needed to learn than that he was simply "bad" and incapable of growing into the role. Maybe your organization wasn't in a position to provide that and it was a bad match, it happens.
If you decide this dude isn't gunnuh make it and start cutting him off projects rather than getting him more support, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. And it's pretty messed up to trash him that way.
If I'm being perfectly frank, this doesn't so much sound like a case where brutal honesty saved a project than a case where you lacked the tact and emotional intelligence to navigate a delicate situation (or perhaps were frazzled by a complex project with deadlines where you felt your colleague wasn't carrying their weight), and so you just took a sledge hammer to it.
That's such a brutal way to treat a colleague, it must have been devastating for their moral. Like, what was your relationship to this person like after that? Did they stay on? Were your team lead and manager really okay with how you handled that?
An emotional response is part of the consequences. That’s the objective reality that everyone else knows. Either you do know and are kidding yourself, or you don’t know and people have worked around you or sidelined you, or maaaaaaybe you’re that one brilliant jerk everyone believes themselves to be.
In this example you’re basically just dodging the question, because talking to someone is different than talking about them to someone else. I can’t tell if you genuinely don’t understand this.
For the latter I use often use `git stash` for that; stashing off the test case/data, then at each step of the bisect, you can do `git stash apply` (rather than `git stash pop`) to reapply the same changes multiple times.
Before moving on, a quick `git reset —-hard` will get back to a clean flip
Something that took me an embarrassing long time to realize was that North American electrical outlet binding terminals are a combination slotted/Robertson screw head. The Robertson is great.
Klein tools makes combination head tools that engage both, which is fantastic if you are upgrading a bunch of outlets.
If I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?
This makes more sense for text message auto complete: you just take the suggested next word after a one word start deed, it might reproduce a Wikipedia entry. But what did tub expect? The same would be true with grammarly if you somehow got it to produce a bunch of new text. You expected garbage, but somehow infringed on copyright instead. But I guess think the user deserves some responsibility in realizing their expected garbage output isn’t for some reason.
If you pay a shady character to get you a modern laptop for $100 you can't claim that you were unaware that it was most likely stolen and the fact that you paid for it something doesn't absolve you morally.
When, exactly, was this period of unbiased/opinion-free event coverage in UK journalism you apparently long for? You rail against “modern journalism” like it’s some kind of recent downhill slide, a by-product of modern political biases, but when was this not the case?
You're choosing to fixate on a characterization of the past you believe I implied - which isn't an important aspect of my comment.
Being unbiased, and offering multiple points of views is something mature readers value - both in the past and today. It is something a journalist's should aspire to as a matter of professionalism.
Can you make the honest argument that you want a news outlet to not even try to be unbiased when reporting to YOU? My experience with people who advocate biased journalism is that they want others to consume biased journalism that they agree with - because they believe they are immune to the bias.
If you are not paying for news, you are the product and not the consumer. And I specifically choose my news outlets based upon my perception of their quality of journalism, which heavily includes their degree of bias and the depth of their coverage.
I get the impression you want me to name a specific publication so you can argue that it is just as biased as The Guardian. ...which isn't the point of this conversation.
Can we simply agree that being less biased is better than being more biased, as a fundamental principle?
Or are you honestly making the argument that you prefer more bias in news you read?
Prior to modern journalism, newspapers were directly funded by political interests. Now that advertising dollars no longer provide a somewhat unbiassed source of income, publications like the guardian are relying on direct donations from their readers and I suspect that introduces some bias as well.
Just wanted to also drop a recommendation for soulver, but I have been split between it and Calca (http://calca.io/) which I think is _also_ worth checking out, if you like this kind of hybrid notes/calculator like interface.
The ultimate interface _for me_ would be somewhere in between Calca (which I think has superior support for functions/graphing/logical calculations) and Soulver (which I think has better usability/readability) and a graph-based note-taking system like Obsidian/Zettlr. I'm sure somebody will say "there is a Vim plugin that'll do that" but… yea.
Love Soulver and Calca looks great too, thanks for pointing that out! Personally I would love a tool like one of those but with built in unit handling/dimensional analysis capabilities equal or better to the Google search bar...
Calca does look like a really nice mix of note-taking and calculations. The screenshots made me realise I was missing variables in Soulver... until I looked at the Soulver docs and realised that it does have variables, I just hadn't thought to look. Thanks for the prompt!
A big plus for Calca is the mobile app and automatic syncing via iCloud on Apple devices.
Not sure if Soulver is newer or less “complete” than Calca, but it is being updated at lot more often. The updates for Calca are very sparse and leads me to think it’s more in a maintenance mode.
