Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.

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  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Honestly sometimes just making a show of it not getting to you can get people like that to leave you be. Just start looking get dead in the eye and saying “thanks for the tip. I’ll take it under advisement”, every time she starts doing that to you. Every time. Same inflection. Even if you have to do it 20 times in a row. Even if she gets angry. Don’t say anything else to her unless it’s required to do your job.

    Eventually she’ll get annoyed or bored enough to leave you alone and try to bother someone else she can get a reaction out of.








  • A lot (all) nuclear accidents also occurred with older reactor designs.

    Traditional nuclear reactors were designed in such a way that they required management to keep the reaction from running away. The reaction itself was self-sustaining and therefore the had to be actively moderated to stay inside safe conditions. If something broke, or was mis-managed, the reaction had a chance of continuing to grow out of control. That’s called a melt-down.

    As an imperfect analogy, older reactors were water towers. The machinery is keeping the water in an unstable state, and a failure means it comes crashing down to earth

    Newer reactrs are designed so they they require active management to keep the reaction going. The reaction isn’t self-sustaining, and requires outside power to maintain. If something breaks or is mismanaged, the reaction stops and the whole thing shuts down. That means they can’t melt down.

    As an imperfect analogy, newer reactors are water pumps. If power is interrupted nothing breaks catastrophically, water just stops moving.


  • Theory in science generally means something much more stringent than it does in vernacular. From Wikipedia:

    A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.[1][2] In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

    A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory explains “why” or “how”: a fact is a simple, basic observation, whereas a law is a statement (often a mathematical equation) about a relationship between facts and/or other laws.

    So when something is being put forward as “A Scientific Theory” it is meant to be taken as the best possible explanation we can make of why the universe is the way it is, backed by exhaustive tests using the best methods currently available to us.

    In science, when something is just a theory in the way you mean, it’s called a hypothesis.






  • The dirty secret is that many problems inside of engineering are that way too. There’s a million equally valid solutions to any given problem and the one that gets chosen is all human factors.

    Like: Greenfield REST CRUD App. What language do you choose?

    Sure, you can make a million technical arguments for any given language, but there’s no real right choice. I’d choose Elixir because I like Phoenix/Ecto for that particular problem. I’m likely in the minority. The answer for most apps will be more borne of social politics than engineering.


  • I’ve seen variations of this opinion a lot in tech, but you don’t have to sacrifice frank feedback to be a little more polite. Like sure “this code is dumb” is better than “you are dumb”, but not as good as “this could be more efficient if we did y instead”

    The latter is more helpful and less confrontational. The best devs I’ve worked with have been excited about code, and that came through in review. When they saw something that was wrong their feedback came across as excited to share rather than affronted by ignorance.

    The thing devs don’t like to admit is that a ton of stuff we argue about is more taste than science. There’s no right answer to the classic performance vs readability thing, or where exactly the line is for effort vs payoff. Couching feedback around things like that a opinion often makes people way more receptive to it. “Hey I’d prefer if we did it this way” often goes a long way, IMO.