The oddest I've ever encountered: EXACTLY 15 characters long. No more, no fewer. 15.

Honorable mention: Various online accounts where I used my password manager to generate a long, secure password, which the website accepted without warning or error. I was then locked out because their user management system could not handle such long passwords (had to create a second account with a much shorter password to find that out) 🤣

In the USA and other English-speaking countries: weary =/= wary.

For example, I'll see someone write something like: "I am weary of the campfire because it is so hot"

You aren't tired of the campfire! You are wary of it!

-Ahl here! Human-readable sizes and get rid of . and ..!

edit: format code so ..! doesn't look funny :D

Oh goodness, the Windows filepath limit has caused so many headaches at work. Even if you enable longer filepaths, not all applications pay attention to that, since at some point, Microsoft promised a specific filepath length and some applications hard-coded it in, so Microsoft is kind of locked in to supporting that being the default max filepath length. Not sure if any Office applications fall into that camp, but given that most filepath length errors I see are from Windows itself silently failing to finish extracting a zip archive, it wouldn't surprise me!

This makes my heart happy. You may have just become that teacher in his life who gave him the lightbulb moment he needed of "wait, math is useful for stuff that actually interests me?!" <3

"Positive feedback loop" to indicate a situation in which circumstances feeding into each other result in more good things happening, or "negative feedback loop" to indicate bad circumstances feeding into each other to result in more bad things happening.

I have worked with enough controls folks to know that positive feedback in a control loop often leads to instability (bad), while negative feedback in a control loop can be used to stabilize the system (good). It just comes down to the math in the situation.

So people saying that they are in a positive feedback loop can, to a controls person, sound counterintuitive. E.g. "I'm in a positive feedback loop of working out, having more energy as a result, and working out more, making me healthier!" would be momentarily confusing.

I did grad school at an engineering/STEM-focused school, and the campus psychiatrist actually used these terms correctly when discussing anxiety attacks! As an engineer myself, that made my nerdy heart happy 🤣

Another control theory phrase issue: The phrase "more optimal" is incorrect and very well may earn the speaker an "umm, actually" from any controls folks in the conversation. Optimality is not a scale--either something is optimal (with respect to a specific metric), or it isn't.

(EDIT: reducing verbosity)

I lived in a city for a while that had a small number of loanable tickets to a family-friendly local attraction or two (e.g. zoo or aquarium) people could check out for the day. Especially popular with families with kids on a budget!

Having worked for people who (even if they didn't do so intentionally) treated me differently after I told them I had ADHD, with my current job, I'm seeing how things go not disclosing my ADHD to my manager or coworkers explicitly, but mentioning what is a weakness or strength for me. This is in a work culture where the managers are managing a bunch of researchers (aka nerdy specialists 🙃), and so it is accepted that not everyone will be good at everything, and that's ok--we can choose what of our strengths we want to build on more, choose what of our weaknesses we want to work towards growing in, and choose what weaknesses we are willing to let stay a weakness (and ask someone else to do--fortunately it's a large workplace). So I've approached this by telling my manager or coworkers that I am, say, not great at estimating how long a given task will take, or telling them that I am great at organizing projects that I find especially compelling (and not as great at organizing things that I don't find as interesting), or that sometimes I'll bounce back and forth between tasks but I can still get things done. So far, that has been received pretty well. It's not that I want to assume that my coworkers and manager will treat me differently if I tell them I have ADHD--I don't know whether they have pre-conceived notions about ADHD, and if I tell them explicitly, it's a bell I can't un-ring. But it's absolutely a personal choice about who to tell, under what circumstances, and how to present the info. Best wishes in whatever you decide to do! ❤️

Or ctrl-/command-click!

To add onto this, sometimes it's about getting more specific with your questions to get the more specific answers.

For context of how I would suggest structuring these detail questions, here's how I think about code I write or debug: The functions and classes my code is made of are meant to get specific inputs to become specific outputs via a defined process; I think of this as inputs->how->outputs. Figuring out what inputs you need to execute the "how" part to get the outputs you want is the puzzle of each function or class I write. The "how" part can even be broken down further into smaller chunks of inputs->how->outputs.

I think asking your engineer friends to frame things in this context would both show your appreciation for the nitty-gritty details you are needing, as well as give you further context to ask more detailed drill-down questions (about deeper levels of inputs->how-> outputs) if needed. For example: "you said to get inputs A and B to result in output C, we need to run the fizzbuzz algorithm on A and B. What roles do those inputs have in that algo? Do we have to do any preprocessing on A or B before we fizzbuzz them, or any post processing of the fizzbuzz's direct output to get C?" "Oh, yeah, we have a wrapper that takes A and makes it column-major so that fizzbuzz executes faster, but we need output C to be row-major for when it goes into otherFunction(), so we do such-and-such to fizzbuzz's output to get the C we output." This gets you a level of detail deeper, and you could ask further questions about the transformations happening to A and the post-processing of fizzbuzz output to get C, as well as get more context for otherFunction to ask more about later.

You could also use this context to ask further questions about what they think the future implementation should look like. "Are there any assumptions we can make about A and B or how C is used that could simplify how we go from the former to the latter? Are there any requirements on the inputs and outputs that would better be either relaxed or made more stringent, and if so, in what way?"

I hope that helps! Best wishes for your work on this project--streamlining processes is hard, especially when working with other people's code, but your appreciation for the details to get things implemented well is admirable!

Youtube Premium also includes Youtube Music, which allows downloading music-specific playlists for offline listening, but you're stuck playing them in the Youtube Music app, AFAIK.

When I was in college (so maybe 20 or 21 years old), I asked my mom when I would start feeling like an adult. Without missing a beat, she said "I dunno. If you find out, let me know!" <3

I guess I started feeling more like a "real" adult when I started working full-time and rented a house instead of an apartment, though now even that pales in comparison to when I finally purchased my own home. Each phase of life feels more "grown-up" than the last, with new perspectives, greater understanding of my relationships with God and people, and matured confidence going into the new phase's challenges. And yet I'm still me at heart--as I like to call it, "a big kid with bills." I am very blessed.

I'm glad you found it helpful! And no, I love my current job, but I appreciate the sentiment!

First thing I installed when I moved into my current rental!

Like many in this thread, I like to wash shirts with designs/print on them inside-out to wear out the design more slowly.

For pants, in addition to not wanting rivets/buttons to catch on other clothes, I turn pants inside-out for washing--but I made it a personal rule that I only turn pants inside-out once I have checked and emptied the pockets. So if I'm putting things in the washer and find any right-side out pants, I know to check the pockets (and turn them inside-out) before sending them on their laundry journey. As a result, I don't remember the last time I accidentally washed something in a pocket. 😊

+1 on the great documentation! Have I ever used Arch? No, and there are enough distros out there that I'm not sure I ever will. But have I ever referenced Arch's wiki? Yes, often, and plan to continue to do so. <3 to the Arch Wiki authors!

I see some other Nivea mentions in this thread, but not what I use: Nivea in-shower lotion. After rinsing off body wash/soap, I use Nivea in-shower lotion, then make sure the body parts I put it on get wet again (water activates it) right before I turn off the water. Then there's no need for additional post-shower lotion.

Another non-minty toothpaste: Tanner's Tasty Paste (here's an amazon link for their Vanilla Bling flavor, which is indeed tasty: https://a.co/d/eyJlgCk). It's apparently intended for kids, but it has the same active ingredient as regular fluoride adult toothpaste!

Even better: purchase an inexpensive strap wrench with a rubber strap (something like this) and keep it in the kitchen for stubborn jar lids. For the jar lids that even a strap wrench alone can't quite open, I've had success by using the strap wrench on the lid while holding the jar itself with a silicone oven mitt (or oven mitt with rubberized grip--the rubber band trick might work here as well).

Oh wow, you may have just solved the issue I've been having with email chains I pin coming back! I'll have to give that unpin trick a try--thank you! That workaround shouldn't be necessary, of course, but I'm happy to have another option to try to unpin some of the long-past-relevant conversations that have been pinned in my inbox for over a year 😅

And thank you as well for the info about Teams phones. Some folks at work floated the idea of switching to Teams phones instead of our current VOIP setup, but if they don't show missed calls, I'm glad that idea never came to fruition!