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.

Just make sure you’re getting some outside feedback on that, I’ve known folks so used to their own “brand” that they just couldn’t tell. Smelled utterly rank and couldn’t be convinced of it.

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.

Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.

Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.

Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.

I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.

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.

Completely agree, and I have watched a ton. The quantity of ads is outrageous, and the “ongoing coverage” streams make you watch a pile of ads before you even find out what’s playing.

The video was always stuttering and just shy of unwatchable on the “live” streams, the ads were out of hand, commentary audio was super inconsistent, even the camera work was pretty shit overall. Like, missing critical moments when that was the only thing going on.

I thought NBC / Peacock did a pretty bad job.