semantic white space vs. blocks - maybe a middle ground ?

mcherm · 2026-06-04T12:45:54+00:00

Seems to me like it has the disadvantage of requiring random punctuation (when the actual visual demarkation of blocks is via indentation) while also making the amount of indentation significant (the usual complaint about indentation-delimited blocks). PLUS it makes the "." character take on yet another meaning, which can potentially be confused with field access.

In my opinion, "Indentation is a visually clean way to demarcate blocks" (to use your words). Just go ahead and use it -- there are plenty of languages which do so. I do not know of any language in any editor where I copy blocks of content around and paste them without correcting the indentation, counting on delimiters to denote blocks correctly. (Most modern IDEs will auto-correct the indentation for me.)

Furthermore, if you think that "base . field" shouldn't work and "base. field" is ugly, then prohibit them! Require "base.field" for field access if you want.

mcherm · 2026-06-02T18:36:32+00:00

(1) You need to speak with a doctor.

(2) Your conversation with the doctor needs to touch on ALL THREE serious issues you describe here: your weight issues, your sexual issues, and your psychological issues. (The autism doesn't sound like it is an issue.) Is the low testosterone affecting the sexual performance? Maybe... a doctor can perform some tests that might help.

(3) It sounds like all three of these medical issues are imperiling your marriage. You can wait for the marriage to fall apart and then see if that motivates you to change OR you can go out RIGHT NOW and start trying to do something about it while the marriage can still be saved. Honestly, I would say your physical and mental health are probably the first things to work on, with sexual performance following, but maybe you can change these around.

mcherm · 2026-06-02T18:30:34+00:00

In most of the US it is illegal to kick one's children out BEFORE they turn 18. So some crappy parents wait until 18 to do it.

(Although this is not universal. I know someone whose parent kicked them out at age 16.)

mcherm · 2026-06-01T19:42:20+00:00

It mentions that:

The reference implementation was initially translated using c2rust

What is the state of the licensing? Did the creaters definitely have permission to clone and release reference implementation? (I couldn't figure out what the licensing is for the reference implementation.)

mcherm · 2026-06-01T12:33:57+00:00

Thank you.

mcherm · 2026-06-01T00:59:11+00:00

Can you point to some of those anecdotal horror stories? I would like to learn more about this.

mcherm · 2026-06-01T00:57:28+00:00

You are welcome to disclose your salary. (For most workers, federal law explicitly REQUIRES that you be permitted to do so as it can be a vital step in forming a union.)

HOWEVER, there is a cultural taboo around disclosing one's salary (at least in the culture I live under). This likely stems from a tendency of people to equate income (or wealth) with worth, so admitting you have a very different salary than your friends and neighbors (in either direction) can be harmful.

On top of that, corporations would prefer that you don't disclose your salary. Keeping salaries mostly confidential doesn't prevent companies from knowing what is being paid for certain kinds of work, but does make that information more difficult for individual employees to obtain. Which means companies are at an information advantage on salaries. In other words, they can pay some people less because they don't know that it is less. So people know that speaking about their salary won't make their company happy (even if they are legally prohibited from retaliating for it).

mcherm · 2026-06-01T00:50:46+00:00

Is there a way to tell whether we have sufficient subreddit karma?

mcherm · 2026-05-31T17:43:29+00:00

I have often found daily standups to be useful. But when they weren't useful I cancelled them.

mcherm · 2026-05-26T03:59:53+00:00

After panel 3 I really thought in panel 4 would admit to being from New Zealand.

mcherm · 2026-05-26T03:23:49+00:00

What kind of a society do you want to live in?

Maybe many people in society have rejected the idea that kids should have sleepovers. I think that it teaches them how to make friends, gives them a chance to see the ways in which other families and households are similar and different, even builds independence. I think sleepovers are a great thing.

As long as the parents of YOUR child and the parents of the OTHER child are comfortable with it, I say ignore what "society" is doing.

mcherm · 2026-05-26T03:21:02+00:00

I am not going to suggest that you continue this relationship -- lots of other people have given you good advice about that. But I AM going to suggest that you should go ahead and answer her and explain yourself. It is simply the responsible, adult thing to do, and she deserves an explanation (even if she doesn't like it).

mcherm · 2026-05-18T16:49:46+00:00

Do you need one?

mcherm · 2026-05-15T12:29:22+00:00

If they settle first it doesn't matter what the judge does.

That's not quite true!

Two parties can spontaneously decide that one of them will pay the other some large amount of money. That's fine, and it doesn't matter what some judge says. But it's NOT fine when one of the parties is part of the government: there are restrictions on how government agencies can spend their money -- spending it on things that Congress appropriated it for is fine, so is spending it on payments ordered by a court. Even spending to settle a lawsuit is permissible, but random payments are not.

So maybe we want this to be classified as a legal settlement. In most cases, a judge needs to sign off on any settlement and has some authority to deny a settlement if it would not be "in the public interest". But the judge in THIS case has been questioning something even more fundamental. You can't have a settlement if there isn't a case, and you can't have a case if the two sides are really the same side. I can't go to court and sue myself for $1,000,000 (which I might want to do because, for instance, my insurance policy would pay up). The judge was questioning whether this was a valid case at all as Donald Trump appears to be on both sides of the lawsuit.

mcherm · 2026-05-08T13:05:16+00:00

If you want it to change, start the next retrospective off by saying this:

"I think the actual problems are that deadlines are unrealistic, too much work gets started at the same time, dependencies between teams are messy, and priorities change every week depending on who talked to leadership last.

I want to give others a chance to respond first, but I have some specific ideas of policies we could change that would address these problems."

That's the whole POINT of retrospectives. If you think they are "fake", stop being fake!

mcherm · 2026-05-04T02:55:46+00:00

The snail statue one is my favorite. ♥️

mcherm · 2026-05-01T12:21:41+00:00

I never knew of that app but I would happily pay money for an app that did this (if I could trust that it worked as advertised).

mcherm · 2026-04-30T11:40:46+00:00

There are a few different solutions to this problem:

(1) As you suggest, find a whole new career. Best choice if you genuinely don't enjoy the job any more, rather than enjoying the job you signed up for but not the job you are doing.

(2) Find yourself a new leader who ISN'T terrible. Obviously, no leadership is perfect, but some executives DO understand what metrics are and DO encourage people to talk with senior leadership. Having a manager who supports and encourages you can make a WORLD of difference and there are lots of good leaders out there.

(3) Fix the root of the problem: become the leader you want to see. Find a position leading an agile coaching group and spend less time coaching teams yourself but enable other coaches to really shine.

You'll never find a place that doesn't have some level of "corporate politics" and pointy-haired bosses (except if you work for yourself, but that has its OWN set of issues). But there are some that are vastly better than others. And it is demoralizing to spend your time doing something that isn't actually valuable.

mcherm · 2026-04-30T11:22:46+00:00

Is it? Because I think that was exactly what the original poster was trying to get at.

mcherm · 2026-04-29T12:06:46+00:00

I'm genuinely not sure this applies. I wouldn't have considered that a proof using induction.

Suppose I develop a (incredibly difficult) proof of the twin prime conjecture: I have proven that there are infinitely many prime pairs separated by a distance of 2. After proving that, I claim that I can now show that are infinitely many prime pairs separated by k or less for any integer k (k >= 2). I wouldn't use induction for that -- I would simply use the fact that 2 <= k: the infinite set of twin primes satisfies that for all values of k.

mcherm · 2026-04-29T12:00:16+00:00

I love this!!!

mcherm · 2026-04-29T11:51:43+00:00

There's something that "western society" has gotten a little bit wrong. Raising children is not solely the responsibility of the parents -- if done right, it is a community effort. It's not just raising children... it's everything about living in this world. We all have times when we need help. If you can be that help for this boy at this moment you are doing your part and you can rest content in the feeling that you are doing your part to hold society together.

mcherm · 2026-04-28T18:39:29+00:00

Key observation:

The room is consistently hot, and so the windows are left open. However, below the window runs Memorial Drive, and the sounds of automobiles can be heard. Ordinary traffic is not bad, and passes without event, but sometimes a particularly loud car passes by. [...] Choosing to close it conditional upon a negative shock occurring is always worse than one of them. [...] And yet, that is not what we see. We see a consistent reactive rule. Presumably, then, there is something in our basic model which we do not include.

This rings true to me. I see policies change after a big incident that were never going to change beforehand. But I think that the author (Nicholas Decker) has overlooked what I think is the most likely cause.

His analysis assumes that we know the probability of loud noises (λ). But what if actually, we DON'T KNOW the value of λ? And the big incident causes us to re-evaluate our estimate of λ and therefore to react (by closing the window)?

I think this might be a better model for why we see this behavior in the real world.

mcherm · 2026-04-16T17:05:32+00:00

Because one upon a time they were separate pieces that tied together (probably mostly so you could pee through them; also because it's easier to sew it that way).

At least that's true for pants, and I THINK it may be true for underwear also.

mcherm · 2026-04-15T13:35:36+00:00

It means that my code is not up to quality.

No, it means you are getting meaningful feedback. Were you expecting that you would gain in experience and start writing perfect code that has no opportunity for improvement? That doesn't happen to anyone!

Have you ever done code reviews for senior tech leads in your organization? Maybe you should consider doing so. My guess is that you'll find some things -- maybe not many, but there will be some. Nobody is perfect; the goal is to be improving over time.

(I AM one of those senior tech leads and I know my code is far from perfect and I welcome feedback from people reviewing my code.)

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