Our team tends to prefix all our comments with one of
* thought: Maybe foo'ing is more common in the future - we can refactor if that happens.
* change: This is a leaky abstraction, would prefer to see this modeled like bar instead.
* nit: Naming seems a little unintuitive, consider "Baz", "Boo" maybe?
* fix: This unit test is validating the wrong field.
* chat: This is a big decision and would dictate how solutions of this category look like going forward. Let's bring this to the team first.
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With the idea that some of those prefixes are stopping the PR until they are changed, and some are just a "take it or leave it" type comments. It makes it unambiguous to the opener that you consider these X things as "We've gotta get on the same page" and these Y things as "Stated preferences" or "just an observation".
word of warning - don't feel bad if you leave a nit, the other person disagrees and ignores it. If you felt strongly about it, it shouldn't have been a nit.
Man, once you start picking up on the LLM style you can't stop seeing it everywhere.
> It's not just the foo, it's the bar. Short sentence. Every sentence attempting to be profound, but isn't. I quietly put adverbs in strategic locations, quietly, deftly, and always lists of threes. Your advantage is the ability to foo, not just bar.
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re: the content
You're missing the point of "arguing" in the workplace if you're arguing with individuals and you see it as your objective to destroy them with facts and logic.
> So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper.
This one points out the biggest miss and why this person finds their strategies impotent. The goal of "arguing" in the workplace, or more pr-friendly, "debating the merits" should never be to convince that guy to take your position. That's both ineffective and way harder. You should focus your energy instead on constructing the arguments towards the audience and bleeding support. Nothing of importance gets resolved in a singular meeting with a singular debate.
Watch some Oxford style debate prep to understand this point more deeply, but some number of peers are going to agree with your position ahead of time and some are going to disagree with your position. Instead of trying to obliterate all the points one-by-one from the person on the other side of the issue, try to make just a few succinct points that will pluck off a few onlookers. That's all you need at the moment. Take the tiniest win, move the overton window a little further in your direction, and retain all the goodwill and camaraderie on the team or in the org.
Do this in *SMALL* and *INFREQUENT* ways and over time you end up becoming the person who tends to be right on the issues and onlookers become more sympathetic to your positions by default. This lets you make bigger pushes, or allows conversations to start off as already "in your camp" to begin with. This builds up social credit (reputation) which you can then spend on taking more risky bets/positions within the org.
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The other thing it lets you do is open the door for others to debate merits of their ideas. By keeping the focus on just a singular point or two, keeping it low stakes, and then being willing to walk away amicably at the first sign of any emotions you implicitly grant permission to others (who may agree with you, or who might just need to practice their own abilities) to voice a dissenting opinion on something orthodox. Maybe you agree with them, maybe you don't - but never shoot down a first timer's / shy guy's idea on it's first float.
> I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.
If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ? If not sterilizing - what about propagandizing their younger population to not reproduce? Would that be a net-good?
> If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ?
> is the only known working solution to a decreasing population.
Which it obviously isn't a working solution in any nature of the word. Using arbitrary countries to avoid common mousetraps.
Hypothetically all women in Estonia suddenly opt out of having children for a variety of reasons. They had previously had no problems like this and enjoyed a high fertility rate up until now. The government of Estonia sees this and starts mass immigrating Japanese men and women and are able to stabilize their population. Though, the Japanese women also normalize to the same state of opting out after just one generation.
The government claims that this too is an emergency and seeks another seemingly arbitrary population of humans to import.
Agree with the entire article - but if I knew Pam, I'd coach her on
> Pam sees this and wonders, "What is considered a large project?"
The first interaction when getting hit with artificially introduced friction _SHOULD NOT_ be to just adhere blindly to the friction without a meta-consideration for the friction itself.
Pam shouldn't be asking "What is considered a large project?" - Pam should be asking "Why would a large project need this review and a small project not need this review?" Then categorize her project based on that answer. Understanding the purpose of the review should give her much more autonomy and confidence in saying "My project doesn't need X review." without relying on "I identified it as 'small'" and instead rooting her decision in whatever business concern is being hedged against.
This isn't your home with open stairwells and loose venting doorjams. This is a thirteen story office building with elevators and badged access easements.
My dorm room was on the ninth floor of a nine floor building.
I assure you, heat passes through elevator shafts and floors just fine, and office buildings aren't usually built like a BSL-4 laboratory. If anything, they're typically less insulated than a regular old house.
> They turned the english language into enterprise java
.... tell them not to do that if you don't like it?
"PR Descriptions must explain the entirety of the PR's contents in 300 characters or less and be written at no greater than a 600 lexile score. After writing the description, carefully review it's claims against the changeset diff if any staged changes are unable to be tracked back to a claim in the PR description, reject the creation and alert the user of the discrepancy offering solutions on how to remediate"
> The solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that.
Aside from the LLM-ism (it isn't foo, it's bar) - this is a thought terminating cliche. You definitionally don't know if some information is better or not given that you were uncertain about the information in the first case.
"I went to three mechanics and got three different answers" - your takeaway is just "Ah - I clearly need better informed mechanics."
Which is on it's face absurd because if you could clearly judge the ability of the mechanics you wouldn't need their evaluation. You'd just do the evaluation yourself.
> Then again, many people don’t want the burden of caring for bytes for the rest of their lives and prefer to download on demand.
Agree that people want this - but this is an undue burden on the provider side. You have to perpetually maintain and provide access to content FOREVER including all the systems and support staff to auth.
In a world of monopolization, where there become fewer and fewer companies because they buy out their competition... If they can't pay for basic storage and delivery of goods, then who can?
If I can individually pay for and maintain an NAS with TB's of data on it, I think these multinational megacorps can afford to do the same. Maybe scale for delivery will cost them a bit of profit, but really it's a shame how individuals say this is some how an undue burden on these corporations...
You know what is the real undue burden? 100 year long IP/copyright law. It actively diminishes our culture, making it bland and hardly changing. Humanity is created by the stories we tell, and retell, and with every retelling - the stories change and evolve... But you can't do that and make a living in modern capitalism... That is the true undue burden, and I think forcing these companies to at least provide access to the stories we paid for is the least they can do for a nigh 100 year monopoly on the stories of our society.
I have a fantasy of an alternate history where we as a society got our shit together and subsidized local libraries and ISPs so that they could offer cheap and even free NAS for everyone. Economies of scale and all that. It would have been a worthwhile public investment, but it's hard to justify spending public money on that and our politicians are so blinkered that cannot comprehend what "investment" means. Like...making it easier for kids to get smart? Why would we want that?
Instead we have the private marketplace fulfill all those needs for the low low price of ad infestation. Imagine how smart our kids would be if instead of 20 minutes of unsolicited ads a day, they saw 20 minutes of educational content and were required to pass a math quiz to access YouTube?
you can do it stop killing games style. publishers can decide to stop access any time they want but they have to give you a drm free download to compensate.
* thought: Maybe foo'ing is more common in the future - we can refactor if that happens.
* change: This is a leaky abstraction, would prefer to see this modeled like bar instead.
* nit: Naming seems a little unintuitive, consider "Baz", "Boo" maybe?
* fix: This unit test is validating the wrong field.
* chat: This is a big decision and would dictate how solutions of this category look like going forward. Let's bring this to the team first.
----
With the idea that some of those prefixes are stopping the PR until they are changed, and some are just a "take it or leave it" type comments. It makes it unambiguous to the opener that you consider these X things as "We've gotta get on the same page" and these Y things as "Stated preferences" or "just an observation".
word of warning - don't feel bad if you leave a nit, the other person disagrees and ignores it. If you felt strongly about it, it shouldn't have been a nit.