There is an emerging field of research that reframes addiction as a reasonable reaction to traumatic conditions. This doesn’t explain all addiction, but it seems to explain a large amount of it. We are learning how complex a condition addiction can be and that makes it easier to feel compassion for these folks.

A hopeful path towards peace for people who struggle with stress at their job.

Alternatively, use fc 371 to open the command in an editor and take your time figuring out how you might want to change it.

I think you’re using the word “work” here to mean what I’m intentionally calling “job”. Maybe not, but if you are, then I agree with you.

Most people want to produce things of value (for some personally held meaning of value) and to do things that matter to others or to be of service. It’s this sense of “work” that I mean. If we stripped away all the conditioning that I infer you mean, I believe this sense of wanting to work would remain for those who aren’t already burned out or depressed.

But yes, there is certainly some religious and irreligious indoctrination to believe in toil as a virtue. I don’t buy it.

Most people like to work. Few want a job. This is not hard.

Maybe it’s the best they know how to do.

Disrespectful or not, if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. You might just email them about your experience and tell them what you want to have happen. Give them a chance to do that for you.

And ultimately, which do you value more: the season tickets or your preferred way of buying them? As far as I can tell, there’s no wrong answer, but merely your preference.

Good luck.

I was tired of Windows, so I tried Linux for a month, then switched to Mac OS for a decade.

When Mac OS started to become iOS, I started leaning towards Linux.

When my MacBook keyboard caps started falling off and Apple told me to replace the entire keyboard, I left them indefinitely.

And now I’ve been here for a few years. So far, so good.

This reminds me of my first week running Mac OS and searching increasingly frantically for an uninstall script for an application I’d installed.

Oh.

Drag to trash. Really? OK.

I find that I prefer a graphical environment to understand what’s going on, then a keyboard-focused environment (usually text based) once I reach the point that I know what to do and want to increase speed and repeatability.

I don’t ruthlessly reduce mouse use, but I prefer to stick the keyboard for a handful of reasons: speed, comfort, reducing the likelihood of repetitive stress injury as I age, and flexibility. If my trackpad fails and I can’t find a mouse, I can still do what I need to do.

I suppose it depends how you think of being an adult.

No-one is going to save me. I am huddling with my family for warmth and hoping we all make it to death without disaster striking. If disaster strikes, our survival depends on us and people will be looking to me to take charge.

That sounds like adulthood to me.

I don’t think I’ll forget.

This is true Customer empathy.

Yes, any programmer who doesn’t care will do damage, but when I see durationInMilliseconds, I think more about what the int means than when I see merely “duration”. I don’t know how to help the people who read that and ignore it.

The story of the 125 mph knuckleball might help.

Indeed, this is a time for naming conventions that communicate the details that the type system can’t clarify. This leads to the long names that senior programmers make fun of. Don’t listen to them; let them laugh then make this kind of mistake.

Yikes! That’s also a great cautionary tale for Primitive Obsession/Whole Value as well as a bunch of other design principles.

I’m thinking about how I’d have done that refactoring and now I wish I had the code base to try it on. It sounds like it would make a really good real-life exercise in a workshop. “Remember folks, you have to get this right. There’s not really a way to check this with the real hardware, and if you get it wrong, someone’s going to get hurt.”

Thanks again.

Wow. I love that story and I’m glad nobody was hurt.

I wonder whether that happened as a result of unexpected behavior by the pitching machine or an incorrect assumption about the pitching machine in that coworker’s tests.

I find this story compelling because it illustrates the points about managing risk and the limits of testing, but it doesn’t sound like the typical story that’s obviously hyperbole and could never happen to me.

Thank you for sharing it.

This seems to happen quite often when programmers try to save time when writing tests, instead of writing very simple tests and allowing the duplication to accumulate before removing it. I understand how they feel: they see the pattern and want to skip the boring parts.

No worries. If you skip the boring parts, then much of the time you’ll be less bored, but sometimes this will happen. If you want to avoid this, then you’ll have to accept some boredom then refactor the tests later. Maybe never, if your pattern ends up with only two or three instances. If you want to know which path is shorter before you start, then so would I. I can sometimes guess correctly. I mostly never know, because I pick one path and stick with it, so I can never compare.

This also tends to happen when the code they’re testing has painful hardwired dependencies on expensive external resources. The “bug” in the test is a symptom of the design of the production code. Yay! You learned something! Time to roll up your sleeves and start breaking things apart… assuming that you need to change it at all. Worst case, leave a warning for the next person.

If you’d like a simple rule to follow, here’s one: no branching in your tests. If you think you want a branch, then split the tests into two or more tests, then write them individually, then maybe refactor to remove the duplication. It’s not a perfect rule, but it’ll take you far…

It is literally a foreign concept to the vast majority of them (only other countries use it widely in everyday life) and the military is one of the very few contexts in which they will experience it.

“what is (generally/widely/typically/often) known as” comes to mind. Any variation of that would do the job.

It can also work not to use any term, but rather to introduce the name without fanfare. This implies a neutrality of judgment. “Western countries belonging to the ‘Paris Club’.” Even in speech one can often hear the introduction of a term by subtle changes in tone of voice.

Yes.

Your house is burning. You should be replacing the building materials with something much less flammable, but in the meantime, maybe you might be wise to pour some water on the fire.