In my experience, when it comes to debating the validity of religion, people tend to get far more emotional than other topics. People who are normally level-headed and quite logical tend to completely lose their ability to think rationally. And I mean both the people who argue for religion and against it.

It’s the casual fans who are bad imo. The ones who hate everything except the OT. And they just constantly talk about how Disney has ruined Star Wars because the only thing they watched was the numbered movies.

I don’t have advice, just a worthless anecdote.

I work at a large tech company. We had a Windows XP system on our network get hacked. They used that to jump to our servers. IT had to quarantine off the whole lab, because they didn’t know where the hacker had hopped next. So then IT had to do a post-mortem and figure out how they got in and what was affected. That process took 3 months. In the meantime, any team with servers in that lab couldn’t use them. The team directly responsible for this couldn’t work at all for the full 3 months.

Also, The Presidents of the United States of America.

The song “More Bad Times” came on my Spotify radio playlist a few years back. I had never heard the song before. I was dying of laughter. I was not at all prepared for a song that silly.

The 20% is relatively new. It was always around 10%, and then restaurants started “suggesting” higher tips on the receipts, and basically guilting people into tipping more. It was pushed up to 15% in the mid '00s, and then only pushed up to 20% during Covid. I have been called a piece of shit human on multiple occasions because I didn’t buy into the restaurants randomly changing it on me. There is immense social pressure here around tipping.

The restaurants have a financial motivation to want the tips to be higher, so I feel like it’s a conflict of interest for them to be suggesting the tip amount. I think the government needs to get involved and regulate tipping or even outright ban it at this point, because restaurants aren’t going to stop pushing the envelope at 20%.

I live in the US and I have never tipped housekeeping, nor have I ever heard of someone doing it.

I conducted coding interviews for a few years at a startup before moving to a bigger company where I had a smaller role.

For me, I never cared about if someone got the right answer. I have actually said no to people who got the right answer and yes to people who got the wrong answer (or didn’t finish). The purpose of the interview is to see if I want to work with that person. If someone can write a perfect program, but can’t tell me why it works, that gives me no insight into how they solve problems or if they even know how to solve problems. What I want to hear is their thought process.

First repeat the question, and emphasize the key details. Speak an example input and output of the function so the interviewer (and you!) knows you understand the problem. Then start talking about what kind of algorithms or data structures you might use to solve this problem. Reference other common problems that might be similar, and how they differ. Specify patterns that could be used for this problem or even your comparison problem, and whether or not that will work for this one.

Doing all of these steps with spoken words helps your interviewer understand how you think, and they may give away hints to mistakes in your thought process, or even point out that you are misunderstanding the question entirely. And that’s okay! It’s better to work out the details when speaking about it before writing any code.

Treat the interview like you are solving a problem with a colleage in pair programming. Bounce ideas off them and see what they think. They are very likely to give hints if you talk to them in this way. If you are stuck, tell them! They might be able to reword a part of the question to help you think about the problem in a different way, leading you towards the solution.

AFTER you and the interviewer are both confident that you understand the problem, and you have discussed all the algorithms, data structures, patterns, etc. that you need, maybe spoken through a some pseudocode, or maybe written down a table of example inputs and outputs, only then start coding.

I think soap deserves an honorable mention.

I think “you’re welcome” is just too formal. I would say it to a customer, not my friend.

Korben my man. I-I-I-I have no fire.

I think it’s fine for kids younger than teenagers. Maybe around 8 and up. By the time they are teenagers, most kids are watching anything and everything, included R-rated movies.

I just own an adapter that has a headphone jack port and a charging port.

From what distance away? Because I had them, and I promise they weren’t as loud from normal use distance than a jet engine. Maybe if your ear/microphone is basically touching the bag, but your ear isn’t normally that close. Plus, exposure time is pretty significant factor for hearing loss. Rolling up a chip bag once every couple of days when you have chips isn’t going to cause hearing loss.

It wasn’t that loud.

At the time, I thought the Sun chips bag situation was hilarious. If I think back on it now, it’s really sad. Yes, the bag was significantly louder than the original bag. But I feel like we’re going to need to make some sacrifices as a society for the environment. And that seems like a really, really tiny sacrifice.

What’s that song about Grandma getting run over by a reindeer?

When I was like 13 and was learning to play guitar, I learned sooo many songs by Avenged Sevenfold. And then I saw pictures of them playing concerts with the confederate flag, and even had custom confederate flag guitars. I lived a pretty sheltered life and didn’t quite understand how big of a deal that was at the time, but it definitely felt a little gross to me. I slowly stopped listening to them.

They did eventually come out and say that they regret doing that, for what it’s worth. But I never went back to listening to them.

The song 1985 was not originally recorded by Bowling for Soup, but SR-71

My cat loves being picked up, so she would do it again for that alone.

I once was at a social gathering where two vegans were arguing about who was more vegan. It was exhausting.