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.

You seem to be taking an “either / or” approach here. In my opinion the left should do everything possible to avoid violence, and also own guns in case these efforts are unsuccessful. It doesn’t need to be one or the other.

It’s really kind of a matter of definitions to me. In my view, there exist situations where a firearm is about the only way to prevent super bad outcomes for myself. Those situations are uncommon, there are many good ways to avoid them usually, and I hope to never find myself in one. But by definition, if I find myself in a situation like that, having a firearm available is the difference between having agency and having none.

Some people feel that the likelihood of such a scenario is so small that it’s a bad idea to prepare for it. Maybe this is how you feel? I do understand that point of view, I simply disagree. I don’t really understand points of view that seem to argue there is no scenario where firearms are useful, or that we’re magically “past that” as a society (and to be clear, I’m not sure you’re taking that stance). To take one example, just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example of how flimsy our law and order really is. Once a situation is bad enough to overwhelm the existing structures we have in place, all bets are off and rules for behavior evaporate. We’ve seen this happen, in our country, in our lifetimes, more than once. I don’t understand the derision - why eye roll?