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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I’ve had to explain this to more executives than I wish to remember. Computer code is a recipe, not a cake. When you see a recipe that’s super long, and requires two kitchens worth of bakeware and tools, you probably think it’s a bad recipe. Short, elegant, easy to follow recipes with a little note in the margin from your grandmother about what to do when the dough is too sticky are the best recipes.

    Unfortunately, one learned the exact wrong lesson from this, and started measuring lower lines of code produced as better… Which worked for a while, but lead to a lot of weirdness around new features for no particular reason.






  • I (and my siblings) had a total of 6 hamsters. 4 died of old age, 1 suddenly bled out overnight, and 1 died pretty young, but nothing was obviously wrong, so I dunno.

    My neighbors had more than a dozen rodents (including 5 guinea pigs). They all died horrifically, including 4 that were killed by mouse traps. Because of course you should have mouse traps, and also keep small rodents that you allow to escape constantly. As an adult, I think the parents were seriously negligent in teaching their children, and then also negligent in buying more rodents for the grinder after the first two or three met horrible fates.


  • I get a similar vibe from psychology. There’s a number of “experts” that are out in the field, doing the hard work day after day, putting in those hours… And hopelessly blinded by their own confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Clinical therapists in surveys prove very willing to overlook strong research in support of certain methods because they believe they see results in their clinical work that can’t be reproduced in a lab.

    Then each field also has a research wing, slowly carving a path towards useful ideas, expending tremendous effort for each new finding, method, and result (even negative results!).





  • If it’s all if statements and if it uses well nested logic and if it’s written in a modern language and if the number of if statements doesn’t exceed 57, it could be good. Otherwise it is overly verbose. Otherwise it is dated. Otherwise it is spaghetti code. Otherwise it should go to the regular code check routine function.



  • It makes a lot more sense if you know about chains. A chain is 22 yards, and there are 80 chains in a mile. There are also rods (a quarter of a chain) and furlongs (10 chains)

    So: 3 Barleycorn in an inch 4 inches in a hand 3 hands in a foot 3 feet in a yard 5.5 yards in a rod 4 rods in a chain 10 chains in a furlong 8 furlongs in a mile

    … And of course there’s the overlapping systems of length for manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, and horse racing, which have their own, separate subdivisions and largest units, but usually you can get away with just the nail, the fathom, the nautical mile, and the span.