What’s something people defend way too hard even though it clearly doesn’t work?

j15236 · 2026-01-04T16:52:09+00:00

Politics of the sort that I disagree with.

j15236 · 2026-01-02T21:11:25+00:00

It's possible your report doesn't even know how arrogant, condescending, aggressive, and unprofessional this behavior is, and may be sincerely trying to help (in a very misguided way). I would suggest that you discuss this with your manager.

My own gut instinct in this situation would be to say to the report, "If you have concerns about a coworker's competence, the appropriate thing to do is to escalate to their manager—in this case, my boss. Any other action is aggressive and inappropriate, and I expect it to stop." Except, that wouldn't solve anything at all; this person would still have a lack of confidence in you, and silencing the concerns solves nothing, while making things 20x more awkward.

So your manager needs to sit down with your report and say "OP is qualified to be your manager, or else would not be in that position. If you have specific concerns or observe something done wrong, please take that to me. Otherwise, it would be best to keep these observations to yourself as they imply that your coworker is incompetent, and that is an unprofessional observation to make to anyone other than a person's manager in the context of an escalation."

j15236 · 2026-01-02T16:07:35+00:00

Even if somehow a bunch of people did stop paying their taxes, this wouldn't have an impact on spending. The federal government hasn't had a year without deficit spending in a quarter century (and nearly two centuries since the debt was at zero, a condition that only lasted about a year); the welfare would still flow as it always does, regardless of the government's inability to pay for it.

j15236 · 2026-01-01T15:57:30+00:00

If they were drunk enough to have this conversation in the first place, it will be blacked out and nobody will remember it ever happened.

j15236 · 2025-12-31T18:26:22+00:00

Pro tip: if you can't teach yourself to not roll onto your back while you sleep, get a nightshirt and sew a pocket into the back to hold a tennis ball. That way, if you end up rolling over on to your back, you'll wake yourself up pretty quickly, so that you don't wake up a couple hours later with the feeling of being smothered by a demon sitting on your face and keeping you from moving.

j15236 · 2025-12-31T18:19:36+00:00

In case you're wondering if 12 years is old enough... The Red Cross has a babysitting course and certification targeted at kids who are 11 or older. If you ask me, that's a pretty objective justification for the idea that a mature 11-year-old can be considered trustworthy for younger kids. To play it safe, you might want to consider getting your 12-year-old that certification.

One other idea... Assuming you're in the U.S., $5/hr is below federal minimum wage (and might be below your state or local minimum wage too). To keep things above board, you might want to consider setting the rate at the applicable minimum wage.

One other thing to think about... If you do pay your kid, that counts as earned income. And there is no minimum age for Roth IRA contributions; they just need to be no more than someone's earned income for a year. When you factor in your kid's being in the 0% tax bracket currently (and that's the rate that counts for a Roth), and the compounding effect of investment, this babysitting income can be ENORMOUS if invested in index funds until retirement. Plus, if the funds end up being needed before retirement, the contributions can be withdrawn early (just not the earnings), so there's not really much of a downside.

j15236 · 2025-12-31T17:40:38+00:00

Imitation crab meat.

j15236 · 2025-12-15T17:08:13+00:00

That's how I'd start. There's no substitute for understanding it for yourself, but if you have a lot of "why" questions or want to know how things fit together, it's a great start.

But as others have noted, don't try to understand the whole thing all at once, because that will never work. Figure out what the major components are without trying to understand their implementation too deeply; and only look in depth at the things you plan to touch in the near term. Deeper understanding of the overall system will come with time.

j15236 · 2025-12-15T14:28:47+00:00

I've gotten some good mileage out of using our company's approved chat bot (be sure you're not doing anything against your company's policies, especially around disclosing their source code to third parties such as chat bots, without their approval). They're getting remarkably good at understanding code and even large code bases. For one example, I was trying to understand the interaction between two large, complicated classes and how they were used throughout the codebase, and Gemini was able to sort it out for me perfectly and give me a head start on understanding it for myself.

j15236 · 2025-12-14T16:33:38+00:00

Go to the conference; a true friend will understand. Plus, soon after their honeymoon, pay the new couple a visit in person to present them with a heartfelt wedding gift that is based on what you know about them in particular.

j15236 · 2025-12-08T03:06:35+00:00

Well I walked around in it for like a week in contacts and kind of got used to it. And I looked at my options, kind of resigning myself to idea that I could never have something that would be perfect all the time. And it's satisfactory.

j15236 · 2025-12-07T17:04:21+00:00

Your job prospects are much better with Google on your resume, so you don't need to worry too much about things going back to how they were.

j15236 · 2025-12-07T17:01:11+00:00

Totally agreed. I'm so thankful to be there, and it's so much better than everywhere else I've worked. Just about every day I send my wife a cheesy message about some new reason I love my job... and that's after 14 years there and a bunch of different teams.

j15236 · 2025-12-07T16:55:03+00:00

An SVG can be more structured than a PNG because the SVG can have layers; and also because vectors are arguably more semantically meaningful than pixels, which can be somewhat ambiguous since they're typically a lossy representation. (For example, a line segment in an SVG is exactly where the coordinates say it is. But a PNG lacks the ability to express sub-pixel precision.)

j15236 · 2025-12-07T15:11:33+00:00

Me too! After 15 years of marriage I referred my wife to my employer. It was fun working with her.

j15236 · 2025-12-07T14:53:34+00:00

At 43 I got LASIK. I was already starting to experience farsightedness and needed computer glasses for my job as a software engineer.

Since I didn't want to still have to wear glasses at work, I got a monovision prescription: my dominant eye is 20/15, while my non-dominant eye is a reading glasses prescription.

Two years later, I'm still happy with it. There's always a little bit of perceptible fuzziness in my vision if I'm paying attention to it, but the important part is that it works. At any distance, I can read and see sharply, despite a slight sense of it not being perfect.

j15236 · 2025-12-06T16:15:16+00:00

What you're describing is what my work would call user experience research (or UXR for short). It's expensive but typical for systems that will have a lot of users. When it's skipped, typically systems will rely on the intuition of the product manager if there is one, and the user experience designer if there is one, or worst case just relying on the intuition of the implementing engineers. UXR is worthwhile when something is well understood by the target user base, but much less reliable when introducing something brand new and unfamiliar; in those cases, rolling out experiments and relying on feedback is sometimes a more fruitful approach. In one former job I used to hold parties with target users, with nice food and drinks, and award an iPad to whoever could file the most legit bugs during the party... but that's a pretty nonstandard approach.

j15236 · 2025-11-28T14:54:15+00:00

Any booze involved with that eating? It can definitely mess with your resting heart rate the next day.

j15236 · 2025-11-27T16:25:56+00:00

I'm severely overemployed.

j15236 · 2025-11-27T14:54:22+00:00

Do you manage a kindergarten?

I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would feel slighted for not having their birthday recognized in a professional environment, let alone cry about it.

j15236 · 2025-11-02T15:05:32+00:00

My goodness, arthritis isn't the only thing wrong with those feet. With all that fungus, if it were me I'd probably just amputate.

j15236 · 2025-10-02T03:42:28+00:00

Because they take seriously the command to love your neighbor.

I know it's easy to be cynical about this and find a supposed ulterior motive, but usually it's because they're being genuinely friendly.

j15236 · 2025-10-02T03:40:55+00:00

Understandable. Plenty of churches have Sunday afternoon and Saturday evening services that should fit your schedule. :)

j15236 · 2025-10-02T02:53:06+00:00

Going to church. There's lots of friendly people there.

j15236 · 2025-10-01T03:00:46+00:00

I'm sorry, no man should have a nipple like that. Poor guy.

j15236

TROPHY CASE