I have a coworker that makes every branch into a story about wizards, elfs, or whatever. There's a whole arc that explains the story of the commit in a fun way. I have no idea how he comes up with it all for the past 10 years.
I’m working on a new type of database. There are parts I can use an LLM to help with, because they are common with other databases or software. Then there are parts it can’t help with, if I try, it just totally fails in subtle ways. I’ve provided it with the algorithm, but it can’t understand that it is a close variation of another algorithm and it shouldn’t implement the other algorithm. A practical example, is a variation of Paxos that only exists in a paper, but it consistently it will implement Paxos instead of this variation, no matter what you tell it.
Even if you point out that it implemented vanilla Paxos, it will just go “oh, you’re right, but the paper is wrong; so I did it like this instead”… the paper isn’t wrong, and instead of discussing the deviation before writing, it just writes the wrong thing.
“The right socket” can only be implied one way when talking about a body just like you only have one right hand despite the fact that it is on my left when looking at you.
If you are facing a wall-plate with two power sockets on it side by side and you are telling someone to plug something in, which one would be "the right socket", and which would be "the left socket"?
If above the wall-plate is a photo of a person and you are someone to draw a tattoo on the photo, which is "the right arm" and which is "the left arm"?
ETA: and if I were telling someone which socket to plug something into, it would absolutely be from the prospective of the person doing the plugging, not from inside the wall.
"Right hand" is practically a bigram that has more meaning, since handedness is such a common topic.
Also context matters, if you're talking to someone you would say "right shoulder" for _their_ right since you know it's an observer with different vantage point. Talking about a scene in a photo "the right shoulder" to me would more often mean right portion of the photo even if it was the person's left shoulder.
I personally prefer to just memorize the data and recite it really quickly on-demand.
Only half-joking. When something grossly underperforms, I do often legitimately just pull up calc.exe and compare the throughput to the number of employees we have × 8 kbit/sec [0], see who would win. It is uniquely depressing yet entertaining to see this outperform some applications.
[0] spherical cow type back of the envelope estimate, don't take it too seriously; assumes a very fast 200 wpm speech, 5 bytes per word, and everyone being able to independently progress
I once had a banking app that reported the wrong transaction amounts (downloading the statements resulted in a different balance than what was shown in my account -- this isn't the US, so it should show the correct amount). When I reported the bug, they changed the values on my statements instead of fixing the app -- so now, it didn't reflect my receipts.
It was a fun time. They eventually fixed it in the app to show my true balance and fixed my statements back to what it was. But holy shit, the fact that an engineer would think that would be the proper fix is wild... this is pre-llms, otherwise, I'd think they'd been vibe-coding.
I tend to avoid auto-cashiers. It's mostly because I find they don't save any time, and just exist to fire cashiers.
One place that they basically force you to use it, is my local drug store (big chain, that I won't call out by name).
Their auto-cashier absolutely sucks. It's almost impossible to avoid having an issue that requires you waiting around for the poor schulb to come over and fix.
They recently set up touchscreens, at the prescription counter.
I have not once had success with the touchscreen. It can never find me, or my wife. They always have to just take my information manually.
I suspect that the backend (the algorithm and main engine) is good. I think almost all the problems are with shoddy frontend stuff. For example, I think the touchscreen issue is capitalization, and the old system cut off our surnames, so I actually have to type in about half my name, in all caps, to have it find my prescription.
I feel personally offended, when I encounter stuff like that.
I have never used these auto-cashiers or whatever they are called. It might be due to anxiety, which is weird because social encounters should be more anxiety-inducing. I just feel like I would mess something up.
Oh, and here real cashiers usually scam you by scanning the items twice and so forth (not sure if intentionally or not), it happened a couple of times to my parents (not considered elderly yet) in the past few months I would say.
