Software is a house. The more you lean into the analogy, the better.
I often tell clients "The first thing you asked me to do was to move a dining room chair into the living room. Then you asked me to do the same with the toilet. The latter only works if we tear out all the plumbing."
Non-coders seem to understand these analogies intuitively.
I must be doing something wrong then. I’ve used almost exactly this analogy. But rather than mollify the client it leads to frustration and annoyance: they see the features as similar and are frustrated/skeptical about why I’ve claimed this new sitting feature is so different than the other one. Often goes with sentences that start with “can’t you just…”.
Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Way less condescending because he isn't trying to offer a solution to something that is your domain of expertise, but it also says he doesn't care if you think it's not feasible right now. Think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible. This often needs to be said because people tend to jump to the conclusion that it is too hard before they take time to think about possible solutions.
Give me the budget that Steve Jobs gave to his engineers, and I'll figure it out too.
The difficulty in what my clients are asking for is often not the feasibility but rather the time, monetary, and opportunity cost for ignoring other features.
Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success
It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!)
A budget is also time, resources, and latitude. Steve Jobs’ “Figure it out” was “I’ve given you a task, now go do what’s necessary to get it done”. This is what the post you’re responding to is referencing: the client is asking for something to get done but is not providing the resources required.
As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make.
I'm not sure this makes the idea of him saying "just figure it out" any more applicable to the rest of us (which is what the parent comment was responding to). You've pointed out that he was _unsuccessful_ for a number of decades before hitting the jackpot, and I'm dubious that the only reason he was more successful than everyone else in the long run was due to the rest of the industry just not trying hard enough. That means it was some combination of his specific skills or circumstances beyond his control, and either way, it's not really super actionable advice to "just figure it out (and either be uniquely talented or extremely lucky)".
When I think of “budget” in this context, I’m thinking about what is available to the engineers in terms of tools, resources, and time.
Where I work, it doesn’t really matter what I’m paid, we don’t have a budget to go get what we need. If I think a certain tool would help get a job done faster, too bad, I have to cobble together what I can with the tools I’ve been provided. If I think something will take a year, too bad, it’s due in a month and we’ll have an hour long meeting every day to ask why it isn’t done yet.
In this context, employee pay is largely irrelevant.
I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.
I had a coworker who wanted a BMW more than anything. Typical young Indian male aspiration of that era (everyone had a BMW as their wallpaper).
He got the money together to buy one. Or thought he did. Forgot about insurance, being a young male and little driving history. Doubled his payments.
Also he was a terrible driver. The expensive thing about BMWs is not the car it’s repairs. Which is also why the insurance is so high. He wrecked that thing three times. He probably could have gotten his family into a better house for the amount of money he burned on that car. So foolish.
Customers live out this sort of drama all the time. They need a good used car but they want something that’ll bankrupt them because they have an image in their head. Either a dream or a status symbol.
Gordon Ramsay did a whole TV series about restaurateurs with the same mental block. They want to be successful but they don’t want to pay their dues and pretend instead.
I generally find that more resources are often the easiest thing to get and rarely helpful.
Most of the time the issue is the "9 women can't have a baby in a month" problem where adding more resources is not going to make things happen faster - in fact it may slow things down.
But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster.
At its core software is not making a thing - it's inventing a machine that makes the thing.
If you're Little Debbie and you have a machine that makes cupcakes it's hard when the business comes in and says, "now it needs to make fudge rounds." And no amount of extra people working on the problem will get that machine retooled any faster.
Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all problems are solvable by throwing more resources at it, that clearly isn't the case.
But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it.
"Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page.
"I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?"
It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".
> But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster.
People tend to understand that there's an upper limit to the amount of people that can be deployed to dig a ditch any faster too
They just refuse to believe that with software, sometimes that number is smaller than they think it should be simply because people aren't physically getting in each others way
"Get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri next year. Oh, and it has to have a crew of at least 20 people, who all return safely to Earth by the end of the decade." I'll leave you to think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible.
Sure, sometimes you can re-define the goal. ("We need to know more about what's in the Alpha Centauri system.") But sometimes domain expertise means telling non-experts about reality. (Pi is not 3, no matter how much someone thinks it should be.)
I had a boss who I’m now sure had aphantasia and his two best UI people would tell him something wouldn’t fit in backlog grooming, then we’d get to spend a week showing him all the different ways it doesn’t fit before he would shut the fuck up about it.
We already “figured it out” in our heads because we are equipped to do the job. We were already doing some pretty sophisticated typesetting to make more things fit on the screen than really did.
He was sure he knew where the problems were in the org and that they weren’t him.
Since they referred to talking to “clients”, I’m guessing the problem wasn’t that the task couldn’t be done but that the client didn’t want to pay more for the additional work.
I've built you a toilet with a collection bucket that smells, needs regularly scheduled emptying into the other toilet, and it overflows anyway when you throw parties.
This resonates with me. I get a lot of "But Microsoft Office 365 Cloud does…"
I tell them that Microsoft spent a quarter of a billion dollars on that item last year, and I'm perfectly happy to re-create it if they give me a quarter of a billion dollars, too.
While I agree this is an improvement, and that it respects the agency of the worker, it’s not enough. Pushing true boundaries may in rare cases be catalyzed by an inspirational leader, but that’s exceedingly rare even if survivorship bias makes us think different. On the contrary, our tech graveyards are littered with bold bets that failed because leaders deluded themselves with yes-men.
Fuck “just”. When someone says “just”, all I hear is “I have no fucking clue”.
Just is a bitch mother that seeks to handwave away any potential problems.
If it’s just that, I’ll gladly step aside and let you do it. But if you then tell me you can’t do it, then you better sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen when I tell you something is more complicated than you think.
Adam Savage has a most excellent rant about the outrageous arrogance of the phrase, "Why don't you just..." I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
My best example of this is my father-in-law. He's an absolutely wonderful man, generous to a fault and all of that. Fancies himself a handyman. But I had to stop asking for his help with around-the-house projects out of sheer anger and frustration because every SINGLE time I made a decision about how to proceed with the job or pick which tool to use to cut something, he would stop and and ask, "Well, why don't you just do X instead?"
It didn't seem to matter if I explained my reasoning, or if doing X meant redoing a hour of work just to get back to where we currently were. I even attempted to humor him by trying things his way whether or not they were going to work out. (They often didn't). Eventually it ended in me saying "no" way more often than "yes" and he would infer that I was refusing his help and he'd throw his hands up and walk away.
every SINGLE time I made a decision about how to proceed with the job or pick which tool to use to cut something, he would stop and and ask, "Well, why don't you just do X instead?"
Sounds like he spends a lot of time on StackOverflow.
In some cases, it's diminishing or trivializing the work. "I just need to do X" trivializes the amount of work that X takes and in some cases implies that the person I am talking to is not competent / capable of doing it themselves (often implying that they should be).
Likewise, "they just did X" trivializes the work that the other person does.
Its a word I ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ don't believe adds value to a sentence.
My wife and I agreed to expunge "just" from our vocabulary, at least with regards to asking to do this. It's almost always kind of belittling, implying that the thing you're asking for is easy and obvious, and you're an idiot/lazy for either not doing it already or trying to explain why its more difficult that it looks.
I see “just” as an invitation to win the argument by agreeing with the person. “Ooo yeah good idea, I think we could. Can you help me think through this?” — And then they ideally proceed to come around to essentially what you wanted to do anyways.
When my daughter was working in her university's dining hall, the most demanding orders always began with "just". Can I just have a non-fat sugar-free vanilla latte with two pumps that isn't too hot?
to be honest, it's a flaky analogy at best. Houses are physical constructs - you can't have the toilet be physically in two different places of the house at the same time. Also dramatic changes (eg rebuilding an entire house) take more time than simpler changes (painting a wall), which isn't the case in software (sometimes a tiny change takes longer than building entire features)
A better analogy is a tapestry. Developers are like weavers, threading designs line by line on a substrate. Some task like "add a leaf to this flower's stem" can be done incrementally, but others like "move the flower one inch up" require unweaving the whole design and rebuilding it from scratch.
Doctor might not be the best example. There are tons of Facebook groups out there treating all their diseases with crystals and a bit of WebMD. Had to sit an extra 20 minutes at the dentist just this week because some lady refused the XRay and was lecturing the staff and then the dentist about how they should be able to figure out her problem with just their eyes.
It's also a bad example because most doctors people encounter are overworked, on a budget, and not very smart,* which means they're very frequently wrong.
Assuming the patient is as intelligent as the average on HN, and motivated about their health, they may well be able to learn more about what's going on with their health in the month it takes to get an appointment than the doctor will in the ten minutes they spend with you.
(* Because most people who live in cities, and most people who go into primary care in cities do so because they weren't competitive enough for one of the more interesting and lucrative specialties. It's a similar dynamic as to why most people in the tech industry that people encounter—IT help desk reps—are not usually the cream of the crop.)
This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer research center because he put more value on helping to cure cancer than making more money. There actually are people out there who value service to the community more than fame or fortune. They deserve praise, not scorn.
It isn't an insult to anyone. I very clearly said "most" and "usually." We also have excellent IT support, done by developers, because we specifically negotiated for it. They are excellent. But we specifically included that in the contract because it is an inarguable, objective fact that most IT help desk support is not staffed with the most skilled people in the tech industry.
Unfortunately, the kind of sacrifice and selflessness you describe is not the norm in our society. As a result, the dynamic I articulated holds for "most"—just like I said.
Your post is deliberately dishonest in its characterization of what I said, and excessively hostile. That kind of behavior is not consistent with the community norms on HN. I urge you to reconsider how you interact with people here.
This isn’t a good analogy imo, and I’d argue that it’s often healthy for someone to push back this way.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence as a customer and a developer, and have at times had to straddle the fence as a PM.
The hardness of a problem does not mean the problem can’t or doesn’t need to be solved.
A client pushing back is often their way of trying to ensure that the developer actually understands what they want.
“Pushing back” as a developer is often mostly about setting expectations, i.e. “no, this is very different, won’t benefit from previous work and won’t be easy”.
All of this is necessary to gain a shared understanding, and the end result may still be that the work must be done.
IMO, the "can't you just" people do this with everyone. I can understand why, as it is sometimes effective at queuing people to keep trying and to find a way.
Unfortunately, the part after the "can't you just" is rarely helpful.
If I'm to believe a friend, who'se a family doctor, this is exactly what happens.
Especially since corona. And not a tiny minority, but a big group.
He told me that a few decades ago, there were the occasional homeopathic or other "nutcases". But that today this is common.
What I've read about this, it's a global trend, in a fly-wheel (feedback-loop) effect with mostly populism. Populism feeds distrust in authorities like lawyers, doctors, journalists. And distrust in authorities feeds populism.
There are good doctors and bad doctors just like any other profession. I have gotten plenty of bad advice over the years from doctors. Took me 2 years of going to various doctors to figure out I was having a reaction to mold. My neurologist just had me try all these different medicines, almost all made me worse, but none of them got to the actual problem. This is VERY common. Doctors so often just treat symptoms. That said, there are idiots out there that don't listen to anything a doctor says about politically charged issues like Covid. Homeopathy is mostly nuts. But integrative medicine is also often poo-pooed, but it makes logical sense to treat the whole person, not just symptoms. But I am sure there are plenty of crackpots there too. The waters are muddy my friend, not much is clear.
Yes, i feel like the biggest problems getting real treatment are in equal parts, people not thinking of the concomitant factor/asking the right things/being afraid to tell certain things, and doctors having no where near enough time to actually listen to someone and think about their situation.
I try not to fall into the first category but I've known many people who do. Though I've had many experiences with fast talking, eyes glazed, interrupt me to push the first thing that comes to mind type doctors. Once i had to fight with guy to just get him to let me finish a sentence! He changed his mind every 5 words trying to get out of there but it'd've been faster if he just let me talk! It's infuriating, I'll never go back to a doctor like that. Seems like he didn't even wait to leave the room before i was out of his mind, possibly i never even entered it
IIRC Jack “Wow” Davis (a photoshop expert) mentioned this is what his clients like to say to him: “Can you just remove the thing in the photo?” The “thing” can be the eyeglass they are wearing, etc. And he said, “come on, I’m going to come to your house and take it again.”
The reason someone is paying you cash for your time and expertise is because they cannot do it. If you can’t do it either then why are they paying you? In these situations you need to be very delicate about explaining the nature of the challenges in a way that doesn’t make them feel like an idiot for paying you money in the first place.
That’s funny because I argued with my plumber. He wanted to do a long term solution to a problem I have. It was a good solution. I said I didn’t want to do it because it was quite a bit less expensive for me to just deal with the acute issues when they arise over the rest of my lifetime.
I’m usually paying experts to advise me so I can make my own decisions and then enact those decisions. Occasionally, I will have an opinion on methods. I’m not reliant individually on any expert, even if I am ultimately reliant upon their profession. And I hire people for work I can do all the time.
Experts are often wrong. They misunderstand requirements. They don’t fully understand the system they are modifying. They can be lazy. They can consider a job or client as less important than other jobs or clients. They can lie. They can have incentives that don’t work for the client. They can be terrible at their work.
Even when experts are good and honest, they can make decisions that don’t work for their clients. My divorce lawyer was amazing when he was on the warpath, but I told him I didn’t want to take that approach generally because I knew my ex’s back would go up and we’d both pay a lot more in legal fees to achieve the same results. He was good at his job and he wasn’t wrong, but that particular method didn’t work for me.
I'm currently building a skyscraper on the foundations of a bikeshed.
Anyway, a nice idea for generative AI could be to take source code and turn it into a corresponding image of a building so managers can see what they're doing wrong.
Eh. A better analogy - the output would decide that there needs to be conduit between floors for chilled water, hot water, sewage, dutifully make several 4” pipes, and then from floor to floor forget which is which.
"No, 'c_water' means 'clean_water', it has nothing to do with the temperature, so that's why you got burnt; also 'gray water' has nothing to do with a positional encoding scheme, and 'garbage collection' is just a service that goes around and picks up your discarded post-it notes - you didn't take that rotting fruit out of the bowl, so how could we be expected to know you were done with it?"
Are they willing to pay for a skyscraper at least? I find that a lot of people expect to pay for a shed and get a skyscraper that has no maintenance cost.
Have you tried this? I bet it would work right now and look exactly as expected, a mess. The again, I gave GPT-4o some obfuscated js, a canvas rendering some buildings (shared here originally), and asked what was being rendered and it returned that it was a heart. So maybe not.
> I'm currently building a skyscraper on the foundations of a bikeshed.
Not sure if you are joking or not, but I often hear similar things and I believe that it misses the point. What constitutes a good foundation in software is very subjective - and just saying "foundation bad" does not help a non-technical person understand _why_ it is bad.
It's better to point at that one small rock (some ancient perl-script that no-one longer understands) which holds up the entire thing. Which might be fine until someone needs to move that rock. Or something surrounding it.
I like this thinking because it's a true reflection of how things work. I strongly doubt any housebuilder goes back to the architect and says "can't do that, foundations bad." They'd explain what the problem is: maybe the design is rated to a certain weight/height, or what's in the ground composition that prevents the requested changes.
We should do the same in software engineering. What exactly in our design (e.g. that Perl script that's running half the operation that we need to investigate) is stopping us?
And to extend the analogy in-kind to fit the conversation it would also be like 10 Years later all the plumbing became wireless (802.11pu) and so what was hard to impossible is now simple (cv object recognition of a bird in a photo).
Love the analogy. As a robotics (software) engineer I've long struggled to explain to software engineers why certain things are extremely hard.
I think I'll use your analogy next time, "and then robotics is like gardening. You don't know when the weather will change what wild life will come and try to ruin it, or the soil composition. At least in the house, you can be certain everything is made by human for humans, and things make sense. Outside, not so much. "
The analogy is useful to explain some changes are harder than others. However, what concrete situation in software could this analogy cover? What is the chair, what is the toilet and the concept of moving mean in this context?
Yesterday, I delivered a long-asked for feature - optimistic updates for a UI screen after a button click on Screen #1. It took only one day because the server-side logic is entirely under engineering control and the only edge cases are "their account was concurrently drained" or "the person who clicked the button is trying to hack us". Both of which will be handled when the server responds with a non-successful response. There is little to no likelihood of this behavior changing any time in the next 10 years so I ensured coupling between these components was respected with a simple comment in both places.
Today, you are asking me to provide an optimist update for a button click on Screen #2. However, that button runs business logic that is specified by multiple other users in a scripting language based on a variety of inputs, some of which are dependent on the responses of external systems over which engineering has no control. The response's fields are known in advance, but those fields' values are not.
Of course, anything is _possible_ and if we build a feature where users can specify the likely result of the external systems and build a heuristic-based analyzer for common patterns in the scripting language we could eventually get to the point where simple screens driven by this monstrosity could optimistically update. However, it will take a lot of development work and the testing effort will be high, both for the initial design of the feature and to add sufficient integration / system tests to ensure that future updates to any of these systems do not break common assumptions between them.
Honestly, I think the bottom line is decision makers need to be technical. If you are responsible for an area and are non-technical you must find someone who 1)you can trust and 2)has the requisite background such that you can fully delegate to them. Anything else is essentially irresponsible.
The only thing analogies help with is essentially to convince non-technical people who do not trust you that you aren't lying to them.
If the poster is referring to the comic, the geotagging is the chair, the bird identification is the toilet, and the act of "moving" is the effort involved.
An analogy that could more closely fit could be something like:
You have a new kubernetes cluster and some servers running code. You're migrating some services over (moving rooms). If you have a simple webapp that has no persistent storage and is containerized, the move would be simple (like moving a chair between rooms). However, if you were to try to move a webapp with login info and databases, there's a lot more "plumbing" not apparent to an outsider that would take a lot more work.
I think the analogy best captures "some things are easy, some things are hard". For instance, if I were the stakeholder and this analogy was used to convince me that moving a web app that uses a database is hard, I would still wonder what you really mean (and I have lots of experience with Kubernetes). Probably better just to say what is actually hard instead of reaching for an analogy unless you just want to get past the stakeholder's "BS firewall" easily so you can get back to work. If that is your goal, absolutely use any persuasion tactic at your disposal. However, this scenario has a massive bug: the non-technical stakeholder didn't delegate decision making to someone that they can trust.
The analogies shouldn't be needed at work for sure, but they work well for people who aren't industry and don't especially care. Eyes glaze over at anything beyond "database" but people know about moving toilets so they appreciate the analogy when you're at a family reunion or something.
Perhaps, but those people are the bug in this hypothetical. They should instead delegate decisions to someone who is competent. Obviously the real world is filled with bugs of this nature, but helpful to at least recognize where the problem stems from.
I tend to think of it as plants/trees. It starts from a single point, the main routine, and branches out its behavior over time. Branches get pruned, abandoned, merged, coopted to optimize for the nutrient gradient. I especially like the “roots” analogy i.e. it draws its strength from the parts that are hidden and difficult to assess by typical observation.
yes, but aren't we the creative gardeners/pollinators? Not to mention that software is naturally more dynamic and cross-compatible than real plants, given to all manners of chaotic mutations and grafting.
the software/architecture analogy works in many other ways, some concepts on functionality, reusability and modularity are very similar, but i guess that works for any complex system created to solve a user-specific problem
I personally think that this kind of analogy is inheretenly wrong.
Software has very little bounds to physical world, comparing to actual architecture. Most of the bounds rise from ideas.
Toilet in this analogy cannot be moved, because it was originally decided, that it will be locked and didn’t invest in mobile toilet. Which was reasonable, but highlights lack of vision for the final product.
And this is the biggest difference with architecture. Nobody starts building a house without knowing final design.
> And this is the biggest difference with architecture. Nobody starts building a house without knowing final design.
Many houses are actually built without knowing the final design, especially in informal settlements in the Global South.
It's referred to as incremental building or incremental urbanism. What starts as simple structure (e.g. a shack) will develop over time into different more formal types of housing. It's an approach to housing that works well with precarious financial means, shifting regulatory environments, uncertain land tenure, changing household size or the lack of building supplies.
There are design patterns for "incremental building", such as mounting pipes and wires on the surface of walls, ceilings and floors instead of burying them in concrete. Being able to reorganize a simple house easily is the "final design"; what point are you trying to make?
Point is that software is much “softer” and fluid than buildings. If comparing changing wites ir rooms layout is similar what refactoring of software is like, then I am happy for experience you’ve had!
...and if you extend the "building" phase to multiple generations or even centuries it's even more prevalent. You get a very organic & dynamic environment that many would say is a slum, but is an accurate representation of most of the software I've seen.
Maybe the guy who designed that church had a clear idea of what it would look like when finished, but i doesn't look like that today!
At least 50% of debates on HN are basically: "you said that A is a good analogy for B, but you're wrong because A and B are not literally the exact same thing."
I'd say the number is at least capped at about 100 billion, but that depends on how tightly you define "person" and "place" (not even getting into the specifics of "autistic").
E.G. if you want your instances of "people" to be active, we're now capped at roughly 8 billion, since 92% of instances have already been garbage collected in this run.
I would still recommend planning a Long integer, just to get yourself some room for error.
Toilet in this analogy cannot be moved, because it was originally decided, that it will be locked and didn’t invest in mobile toilet. Which was reasonable, but highlights lack of vision for the final product.
I don't think the point is that the toilet can't be moved – it's just expensive and disruptive to do so.
Nobody starts building a house without knowing final design.
I would argue the exact opposite – literally _every_ house is built without knowing the final design! Who knows what someone is going to need or want in the future? I'm writing this from a house that was built prior to the existing of indoor plumbing!
> I would argue the exact opposite – literally _every_ house is built without knowing the final design!
The sheer number of houses that have additions, bathroom renos, kitchen renos, walls blown out, basements apartment added, second floors added etc. etc. makes their claim ludicrous on the face of it.
In software we are often taking an existing design and modifying for new requirements. The house analogy is excellent for explaining WHY one thing is easy but another is hard.
A while back, I visited a facility that builds prefabricated houses. Using CAD, they can, and do, create large and architecturally complex one-off designs, something that would not be possible without knowing not only the final (as-constructed) design, but the intermediate states as the modules are constructed, moved to the site (including ensuring that they can be moved to the site), and assembled.
I don't suppose that everything works entirely according to plan, and of course there is no way that every future change request can be anticipated, let alone accommodated in advance, but for all practical purposes, this shows that if one is prepared to do what it takes, one can start the construction of a house knowing what you are going to get and with a detailed plan for getting there.
Computational technology has a particularly broad and active leading edge where unknowns are being tackled, but even so, most software development is nowhere near that edge.
The original point about houses is that with software, similar-seeming changes can have greatly differing costs, on account of what is hidden from the users' view, and I think the analogy works very well in making that point.
>Nobody starts building a house without knowing final design.
There is a TV series in the UK called Grand Designs where people build their own houses. Nearly every cost and time overrun is down to making stuff up on the hoof. The few projects that are on time and budget are the ones that decide everything upfront.
I've watched this show, and the process - and results - look an awful lot like software development projects. Just replace the owner with a c-suite executive.
>I personally think that this kind of analogy is inheretenly wrong
Well, every analogy is inherently wrong at some level of detail. Find an analogy you think is appropriate and zoom in further and it will break.
No analogy, metaphor, or general comparison is ever perfectly isomorphic with the target. As a function of communication, the mark of a good one is if your audience understands.
Agree. I no longer use analogies from problem domains that I know nothing about (home building, bridges, vehicles, etc) to describe software. A better analogy, I think, is search through high dimensional space.
> And this is the biggest difference with architecture. Nobody starts building a house without knowing final design
I must disagree based on the number of residential homes turned into businesses, large scale remodeling, or tearing a house down to rebuild. All these fit well into the analogy.
Yea. Many places in Europe have historical city scape protection. Buildings that have been built centuries ago are being rebuilt internally all the time to fit new purposes and regulations. Not to mention extreme cases like the Kowloon walled city, that was basically a gigant interconnected amalgamation of buildings that housed 35000 people. Nobody envisioned what that would become when it started as an imperial fort, that's for sure. There are many reasons why building are remodelled to fit a new purpose without the new purpose even having existed when the buildings were first conieved.
ps. And even modern buildings suffer from this, like the projects where the requirements change all the time. Like Irelands new children's hospital, that should have cost just a couple of million Euros and balooned to billions. Construction projects are somemites done exactly like software development projects with all the fallout that comes with it. Same story with the airport in Germany (BER).
I like the house analogy, but I like to think of it as if the people building the house did not know how it was supposed to look (or function). This is mostly true, since very few developers know exactly how the end result (product/service) should look and function when the start coding.
e.g. "We did not know where to put the piping at the start, so we put it on the outside and now installing a new restroom is sort of tricky."
This is why nobody can decide if computer science is actually science, engineering, or art. It's such a vast industry that it's clearly all 3 depending on what your doing.
Ha, but to me it's why the analogy works. People don't question that we to do software without knowing final goals because, it's legit unknown, and from an external point of view the waste is not distinguishable from strait work.
The house analogy makes the waste understandable, if you accept to compare design errors with late design.
I agree—I've used the analogy in the past, but I don't anymore. The reason is: with new home construction, there's a very clear move-in date. You can make additions or renovations, but most people are not constantly changing their house.
However, in software, you need to continuously work on the product—and it's not just routine maintenance analogous to cleaning the gutters or changing the air filters. In software, it's possible to launch ("move in") before most of the rooms have been built. In software, you can use a library or API and start with a skyscraper on Day 1.
The analogy just doesn't work. It tells clients/stakeholders "this is a tough project but it'll be over someday, and you'll never have to think about construction again."
Oh, the analogy does work. Every construction needs to be adjusted at times. Sure, not as often as software, but new regulations and the passing of time is eating at the substance. After a couple of decades most buildings tend to need major overhaul and that's not much different than software. Even the reasons are similar (e.g. new building codes, energy efficiency standards, obsolote tech stacks - think asbestos and lead pipes). Especially if you live in an area where the city scape needs to be preserved for historical reasons, houses behave very similar to software - just on a different time scale.
> After a couple of decades most buildings tend to need major overhaul and that's not much different than software
Respectfully disagree. Software is like building a house, and then needing to build more rooms every month forever, and every few years having to tear it all down or completely rework the foundation.
Guess it depends on the software. I have seen enough business critical software that was built 15 years ago with the developer having long left the scene and nobody having any idea on how it works internally (much less skill to actually change something).
Perhaps the NPS is exempt from those statistics as a federal agency – I imagine the EPA's oversight is different there (as it is for usual local and state agencies, which those stats seem to cover.)
bringing in and generating nearly 70 million tons of trash
God knows how they get to that number tho. Probably was a sum of all trash operations for all parks system-wide? That would include all the ranger’s trash from living there, along with any waste generated by maintenance, hospitality, and rescue activities. That makes a bit more sense if we consider that there are many national park service units (including national lakeshores, national battlegrounds, etc.), some of which presumably have a much lower ranger:visitor ratio than, say, Great Smoky Mountains NP. Like Gates of the Arctic NP!
Some activities are pretty wasteful (looking at you, mountaineers) and some people dump their RV trash in the little trash cans at the visitor center, but no way that puts a dent in 400lb/person, IMO.
I could believe it, if most visitors are simply walking through the visitor centers and then leaving, which I bet is the case for a lot of the high traffic parks (think Independence Hall, Lincoln Memorial, etc.) At most you’re dropping some food wrappers, which is pretty light.
Seems low. Talking about trash on both sides of the economic exchange. Buy a meal and you will generate a bunch of trash on consumer side, the business will also generate trash during production.
It is so easy to avoid GA as a web user that i’m surprised anyone concerned about this isn’t using an blocker that blocks GA scripts and requests themselves.
As someone building an AI company right now, my quick Pro/Con for 4o vs Claude 3.5:
Claude: subjectively sounds more human to me, and really nails data questions that 4o is lackluster at
4o: far better assistant logic reasoning. I can trivially break Claude's assistant (system prompt) instructions within the user prompt, where 4o succeeds in all of these tests.
Pricing and output speed, for our purposes, are functionally identical. Exciting to have a competitor in the space already who stands to keep openai honest.
Aha, so I’m not the only one. For both Claude 3 Opus and 3.5 Sonnet, anecdotally its language is far more natural. So much so that I prefer it over 4o.
Great mix of napkin math and proper analysis, but what strikes me most is how cheap LLM access is. For it being relatively bleeding edge, us splitting hairs on < $20/M tokens is remarkable itself, and something tech people should be thrilled about.
Smacks of the "starving kids in Africa" fallacy, you could make the same argument that tech people should be thrilled for current thing being available at $X for X = $2/$20/$200/$2000...
The usual idea is that there’s something more fundamental. Threads to weave the fabric out of, to extend the analogy.
Nobody has yet created a fully convincing model, but it certainly would be elegant if spacetime itself arises from something that doesn’t need four-dimensional semi-hyperbolic space to be assumed.
Curved spacetime is a mathematical model Einstein used to model gravity. Einstein advised to be careful to not confuse the model with reality. To wit, GR doesn't explain how mass/energy curves spacetime, it merely(!) provides the tensor needed to explain gravity as the result of such a curvature.
Consider this: you have two massless particles that are motionless with respect to one another. Suddenly both particles acquire mass at the same time (let's set aside this is physically impossible - this is a thought experiment). How does curved spacetime explain the sudden gravitational attraction between those two particles and how they're accelerating toward one another? It doesn't.
These problems are how we know GR is wrong, the problem is it's not flat-out wrong! Einstein's field equations are better than what Newton had provided and explains more observed phenomena - they even predict phenomena we have since observed! GR is a very good theory (model) for gravity, but it's not the whole picture - and we know it. We simply don't know how to improve upon it and I personally think that believing curved spacetime is actual "reality" is a big part of why we haven't made much progress. Well, that and some other issues QFT has when attempting to model a graviton, but this comment is already long!
EDIT: merely(!) - this isn't to understate Einstein's contribution to the matter which was quite considerable! But when the old genius himself is warning you to not get too caught up in the model, I suggest we take heed.
EDIT 2: QFT has issues modeling a graviton, not a gluon.
Taking a gravity and then performing an impossible physical modification so you can make conjectures on the model is nonsense.
You can't take an model, apply an impossible scenario and then claim the model is invalid because it can't account for this scenario that you admit is impossible.
> You can't take an model, apply an impossible scenario and then claim the model is invalid because it can't account for this scenario that you admit is impossible.
That's not what's being said. The fact is GR cannot explain why these two particles will suddenly start moving toward one another. All I've done in this simple thought experiment is eliminate every other externality.
The key point here is GR doesn't explain why curved spacetime causes objects to move. It only says that the movement can be modeled by curved spacetime. This thought experiment was just a way of expressing that.
Which is all to say GR doesn't explain what gravity is, it provides us a (complicated!) set of equations for determining an object's motion in a gravitational field. In my mind that's a fundamental shortcoming of GR as it was a fundamental shortcoming of Newton. NEITHER of their theories even tried to explain what gravity was, they provided a mathematical model for describing the effects of gravity. Newton's was good, Einstein's is better - but neither tell us much about gravity itself.
OTOH, quantum gravity tries to tell us what gravity is, but that has run into issues. Not only is it going to take someone of the caliber of Newton and Einstein to figure this out and people like that only come around every few centuries, but we have to have the means to test the theory. We have several theories, but we don't have the ability to test which theory is correct. We simply don't know which way to go.
Anyway, all that is to say GR is incomplete - and we know it.
The thing you are asking for, the "why does mass cause spacetime to bend" seems... perhaps impossible to answer? Or like, I don't see why there should necessarily be anything that satisfies what seems to be your reason for dissatisfaction.
Imagine we explained it as "Mass causes X, and because X causes spacetime to be curved, we have that, mass (indirectly) causes spacetime to be curved." . But then, why would you be any more satisfied with this? Why would you not then ask, "Well, why does X cause spacetime to be curved?" ? (Or, "why does mass cause X?")
Now, perhaps there is such an X, and perhaps it will be found. But, I don't see why this would satisfy you any more than "Mass causes spacetime to curve" satisfies you.
If you keep asking "why", you either eventually end up in a loop, have an infinite regress, or stop getting an answer. A non-empty directed graph either has a cycle, an infinite outgoing path, or a vertex without an edge away from it. (And also, either a cycle, an infinite incoming path, or a vertex without an edge going to it.)
Many are content to allow the laws of physics to just be, without explanation, others may say that the laws of physics are explained by God, who is without explanation. Personally, I go with the latter, but, unless one wants to go with infinite regress or a cyclic explanation, one has to allow that something is without explanation.
For your complaint to be compelling, I think you should give criteria for, what conditions would something have to satisfy, in order for it to satisfy you?
(Also, you seem to assume that if the two particles suddenly acquired mass, that they would immediately begin to feel a force between them. While the hypothetical is presumably impossible, still, what I imagine happening would instead by that there would be a light-speed delay between when they gained mass and when they began to accelerate towards one-another. Though, I'm not sure if there is a fact of the matter as to "what would happen in this impossible hypothetical".)
I am not a physicist, my sense though as a layman is that GR explains the motions with which it is concerned more effectively than QM or QFT do. As in, with Schrodinger's cat, what causes the poison's release? And why does that happen? The "shut up and calculate" thing I'd assumed referred to quantum theory.
:) - yes, the "shut up and calculate" was a reference to quantum theory applied to GR, since people neglect to mention that GR doesn't explain what gravity actually is. And really, if you "shut up and calculate" using Einstein's Field Equations, you'll get results that largely align with observations, more so than Newton's equations, anyway. But there are observations that can't be explained by GR and there are simple thought experiments that can't be explained by GR. As I keep saying, we know GR is not the final word on gravity. That doesn't mean GR hasn't been incredibly useful - especially if you just "shut up and calculate!"
An idea I’ve been toying with as an amateur physicist is to take the equal signs to mean “is” instead of “in proportion to”.
For example, take the famous equation:
E = mc^2
The common interpretation is that mass can be created from energy with the proportionality constant of c^2. That constant can be set to “1” using natural units. This just leaves:
E = m
But GR also have a similar equation basically saying that curvature = mass.
Soo… by my interpretation:
Mass, energy and spacetime curvature are the same thing! They’re not “proportional” to each other and one doesn’t “generate” the other like an electric field by an electron. Instead, everything is literally made up entirely of space time curvature. That’s what matter and energy are.
This is why all forms of matter have masses — the only other option is empty space with a flat curvature, but that’s just the absence of matter. If everything else is curvature, then they must cause long-range distortions — which we call gravity.
You can't just set c = 1 as a pure number and conclude that E = m, the units won't match.
Natural units are very useful when doing math, but they don't reduce constants down to plain numbers, they still retain their units. Once you factor this in the rest of your argument falls apart.
That's a valid criticism, but the point is that you can have two types of curvature that you assign different "units" to when measured, but they're still both curvature.
As a hand-wavey example, one could claim that energy in the form of bosons is just a "wiggle"[1] of the spacetime fabric, and that matter in the form of fermions are topological defects or knots.
That way they're different enough that you'd want to use different units to represent them, but at their core, they're both distortions in spacetime that must inherently cause a distortion in spacetime at a distance (GR).
It also explains how they're inter-convertible. E.g.: energetic gamma rays can be converted into electron-positron pairs. If they're both "made of distortions" then it's like a very strong wave creating a pair of vortices spinning in opposite directions. You can't count the waves (it's smooth and continuous), but you can count the vortices.
[1]
For the wiggle, imagine taking a huge sheet of cloth laid out flat over a smooth surface. If you tried to put a wave into the middle, the edges of the cloth would be pulled in. Contrast this with the typical view of fields as "vectors on top of a base (flat) spacetime", much like a mathematical function graph.
This doesn't appear to fit with other quantities like say, electric charge, or lepton number, or whatever. Like, there's more to matter than "how much is there here".
On the contrary, I got the idea from Kaluza Klein theory, which unifies general relativity and electrodynamics by converting the electric charge into spacetime curvature.
Roughly, my concept is conserved quantities are topological defects, which is why they seem to have a neat “algebra” and integral quantities.[1] Conversely, mass comes in fixed but non-integer quantities because the total curvature of some complicated knot doesn’t have a simple algebraic expression.
[1] Makimg the fractions disappear is easy. Just multiply by the denominator. E.g.: we say the electron has a charge of -1 because we discovered it before the quarks historically. If the quarks were discovered first, we would assign it a charge of +3.
I'll share a lengthy anecdote (from CO, not OH), of how absurd these suspensions can get in strange edge-cases. Also, i think this shows how most processes have "bugs", but people don't think of them that way when it isn't in software.
One day, while helping someone get their car out of an impound, i was informed by the officer on duty that my license was not showing as valid. They couldn't tell why though, said the status/notes listed made no sense to her, and i should contact the Denver office to find out what is going on. I was rather confused, as it had been many years since i had last been pulled over, for a minor speeding ticket.
Denver was similarly confused by the details. After some research, they tell me what appears to have happened was i paid my ticket years ago by check, in person. They recorded they received the check on time, but either due to a clerical error or something (they aren't sure), a late fee was assessed on my ticket prior to the payment being processed. The fee was, i think, $5.
Around this same time, i moved, and while i changed my address with the USPS, i didn't with the DMV. The DMV was thus sending my "you owe us $5" letters with "Do Not Forward" instructions via the USPS, who were knowingly delivering the mail to the wrong address (my old place).
When i discovered all of this, years later, my license had been suspended for 54 weeks due to delinquency. In CO, if your license has been suspended for over 1 year, you may not just satisfy the debt, you must also retake your driving test. But since i didn't take my original test in CO, i would also need to re-apply for a permit and pass a written permit exam before being allowed to schedule my drivers test.
The poor lady i spoke with in the Denver office recognized the sheer absurdity of everything she was telling me, but could do nothing to fix it. She also let me know the outstanding debt was now $15.
I was pulled over for something, actually it might just have been this.
"Your license isn't valid." What? Why is it suspended?
"It's not suspended, it's just not valid."
What the hell does that mean?
"You'll have to talk to the DOL. And you can't drive your vehicle from here."
I'm meant to be working the next night, so I need to figure this out.
Go to the DOL's website. It literally says my license is valid, in bold green letters. Huh. For fun, I click on "Pay any amounts owed (citations, infractions, etc.)". "There are no amounts owed on your license."
I take print outs of both of these, and am at the DOL when it opens the next morning.
Similar to you. I paid, in person, by check, a fine a few years prior. Because it wasn't "processed" til after midnight, my license was suspended, but unsuspended the same (next) day. But (and I'm not sure how this is justified) there was a fee attached to removing the suspension (that I didn't know about), so my license was "invalidated".
To their credit, at least, the lady at the DOL was very sympathetic. She stamped all my print outs with a DOL stamp, and then all the print outs of the process to revalidate my license (to try to support my case, that there was no way I could have known this, as the DOL's own website tells me my license is valid and is not subject to any restriction).
Went to court to contest the "driving without a valid license". Still took me 20 minutes of repeating, several times over, to the prosecutor this whole flow, the first fifteen minutes of which he was insistent that none of my paperwork mattered because "they would have sent you a letter, so you must have known", before finally capitulating and dropping it.
They're pretty bad at that step. They'll swear up and down it was sent, but questions like "to where" and "was it the same address I have on my driver's license," or "do you have the slightest shred of evidence" are met with deaf ears.
I had the damnedest time once explaining to the clerk why it mattered that the signature she was looking at wasn't my name, wasn't my handwriting, wasn't attached to a document with my name, and wasn't dated within a year of any ticket associated with my license. Her entire algorithm was (document_in_file && ink_in_signature_box).
It might be acceptable if you were at least entitled to a proper trial when they made blatant mistakes. The status quo causes problems though.
My license was suspended for a few weeks for a case of mistaken identity. It wasn’t deliberate identity theft as far as I could tell, but no one would tell me how I ended up the target of the court summons which I missed.
Fortunately everyone was friendly and willing to wipe my record clean, but that could easily have been much worse.
The police there are absolutely corrupt. The way the system works there is that you buy your job. This is what creates the incentive to find ways to use the system to make money. On the other hand, it also creates optimization incentives as well, so that things get done more quickly.
The harsh reality is that no system is perfect. Each one usually has its +/-'s and usually depends on which side of the fence you're sitting on.
One thing I like about America is that we have the same levels of corruption, you can just codify the same process in the law and call it due process
Many states, agencies have “expedited processing” options built in
Looks like Colorado’s DMV did not
At the state and municipal level, you might be surprised how easy it is to lobby for a tiny tweak you would personally like. You don’t have to be registered to vote there, and many times its not even a popular vote required. Just the mayor or a 5 member county board who are even more of a grifter than you are.
You make a very good point. Passport processing is another good example. However, it is so much more fun to pay someone directly where you know it is going to feed their family vs. just being an additional tax to the government. One guy once told me that my money was helping buy his kids books for school. I don't know if he was lying, but I appreciated the thought.
Have you lived in Vietnam or any country where this is a thing? It is weird, until you realize that it often works in your best interest.
For example, if I get pulled over in Vietnam while driving a motorbike, I can just pay the "fine" right then and there. While I admit, it is totally corrupt and questionable, it sure beats spending hours going to the police station and dealing with language issues.
Obviously, this isn't good for locals since it is used as a form of extortion, but it is what it is. I'm not in Vietnam to fix the problems there.
> Have you lived in Vietnam or any country where this is a thing? It is weird, until you realize that it often works in your best interest. […] Obviously, this isn’t good for locals
Most people who have lived in places where this exists were also, at the time, locals, so your description is self-contradictory.
yeah its like this in parts of Mexico too, it is convenient and fun, like "wow everyone's so cool haha what a playful land as long as you have 50 pesos on you" but it can also be annoying as the 'incidentals' add up
I haven't heard that one. And, to be honest, it doesn't really make much sense to me, because the modern Russian constitution is a pretty nice document overall, guaranteeing all the good stuff etc. It's just that it's never really been followed.
This isn't new, either - e.g. the 1936 Constitution of the USSR (adopted under Stalin) was considered a very liberal document for its time. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly were all guaranteed, there was strict separation of powers, universal franchise with secret voting, and so on. Ironically, most of the people who authored it would end up in gulags or with a bullet in their head within a few years of its publication.
That still sounds off given that Russia didn't have any constitution at all until 1906, after the first Russian revolution. Getting one was the primary demand of Russian liberals throughout the 19th century, and was stubbornly resisted by the monarchy because a ruler bound by any kind of constitution is no longer a proper "autocrat", which was an important ideological distinction for the Empire.
Even when it comes to informal, customary constitutions, the only restriction that was universally upheld was that the reigning monarch had to be Eastern Orthodox (if they weren't, they ipso facto didn't have the divine right to rule). Everything else was ultimately subject to the Emperor's whim.
In theory the humans in the process should be exercising judgement to smooth over these bugs (e.g., it's why the US legal system works (or should work) the way it does). Someone somewhere either should have the authority to do it, or has it but lacks the personal agency/awareness to use it.
Unfortunately, most humans involved in these processes are satisfied with being cogs in the wheel. Nothing wrong with that, they have their own bills to pay and a hundred other things to be worried about.
A system that can even allow anyone to “flag” potential process issues to be bubbled up will be quite useful. Such as the role played by X and Google reviews for most private businesses. Or the “How was your experience?” machines outside washrooms with three smiley buttons goes a long way than not having any feedback loop.
Public servants not following the laws to the letter can introduce legal risk. If OP had somehow found the right person at the DMV high up enough to do something about this, they probably could have, but giving discretion to bend the law at even a 'manager' level might be too much of a risk for the state.
This movie was released in 1985. At that time, a dystopian scenario like this was far out. In 2024 I don't think it's very far out—it's on the horizon.
I had a similar thing except on a much longer timeframe. When I turned 21 I went to renew my license and register a truck I bought. I paid by check. When the lady told me it'd be one sixty three (or something like that) I wrote a check for $1.63. She took it, gave me my paperwork and sent me on my way.
Fast forward 10 years the state must have digitized everything and I received a collection notice in the mail. I hadn't even lived in that state or owned that vehicle for several years. At least my license wasn't invalid.
This happened to me in California. They completely lost all records of my payment, I was assessed a late fee, my license was suspended, and then my driving record got marks. I was unknowingly driving on a suspended license for months.
Anyway, no one could do anything about it until I wrote a letter to a judge in the court system and he wrote back and was able to reverse all the damage.
So I found a copy of the letter that I wrote and it was just addressed to “Your Honor” and I physically dropped off the letter at the court in person to the front desk.
I left my mailing address and I got back a return letter in the mail a few weeks later or something.
I have no idea what you can do it for but it worked for my problem at least.
I believe you can generally get items to a judge like that, but do not do it with evidence (at least not in a proper trial). Things have to be entered into evidence, provided to the prosecution, etc.
Things like this are totally worth a try, though. The legal system can be much more flexible than it seems, and the humans underneath it are generally kind of occasionally overworked and frustrated.
I got out of a huge "parking in a handicapped spot" ticket when I was like 16. I was running late to school, the only parking space available was next to the handicapped spot. I thought I was just barely outside the space, turns out I was just barely inside (~3-4").
I just took pictures and went down to the courthouse. I told them what happened, that I didn't intend to deprive anyone of their handicap space and that I know they need them, and that even though I know I accidentally screwed up, the space should have still been usable. I asked if they could cut me a little slack, and they did. I got a little admonition about being more careful, which was eminently fair, and they dismissed the ticket.
New Jersey will take money to "lift your suspension" and blatantly neglect to mention you also have to pay a fee to "Restore your driving privileges". I think they got in trouble with this so now all NJ speeding tickets are court appearance mandatory so they can pull you into their insurance surcharges over three following years and other fee schemes legally. But the pro tip is notify DMV as soon as you move. And nowadays it is best to get set up with the DMV online.
I did, yes. Retook a "written" permit test (which is now an ipad-based test), then had to wait for my permit to arrive via mail, then had to schedule and take a proper drivers test, after paying the adjusted late fee. Was a wild ride.
It's not necessarily about IQ. I'm a US citizen (white, male, professional, no criminal record or questionable associations). For years, every time I would enter the US I would get detained and questioned by immigration officials. Once, while waiting for an immigration officer at a passport check, I noticed that she had paused and looked like there was a problem. I asked what the problem was, and she said "the computer said your face doesn't match your passport photo". I was standing right there, holding my passport, and anyone with eyes could see that I was the same person. I pleaded with her, and offered her two other forms of ID, but she refused to override the computer system and I was detained and questioned. It wasn't that she had a low IQ, it was that she didn't want to accept the consequences if her judgment call was wrong, much safer to just go with what the computer system says and not have a liability.
The next time I entered the US, it was Christmas Eve, and I flew straight to my hometown to spend time with family. Of course, they detained me. I asked what the issue was, and they said that the computer didn't match my passport photo. I told them that this keeps happening to me, and they looked a little closer and said "in the computer system where a
photo of your face should be, we have a photo of a boarding pass". I asked them how to fix it, they said it wasn't possible but suggested that I get a new passport. I never got a new passport, but after that day, I never had trouble entering the US again, so I imagine that one of the officers felt some compassion for me and managed to get the bug in the system fixed for me.
I do think that maybe that officer had a bit of a higher EQ than most.
The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.
Politicians and pundits love to rail against government inefficiency or bureaucracy but that’s an intentional tactic to absolve the politicians who created the problem. If the law says there’s a penalty after 52 weeks, the DMV employee can’t override it unless they’re very specifically authorized to do so.
> The people who enforce rules like that know that their bosses will fire them if they don’t, and I doubt that they’re paid so much that finding another job wouldn’t be a personal terror.
It's very difficult to fire a government employee. This is because of "due process" requirements that apply specifically to the government taking something from you (in this case, a job). The due process requirements are fairly burdensome and drawn out, so often the inept employee is just shuffled off to another office or put somewhere that he has minimal impact on others.
You’re overstating the difficulty: you have to show cause and demonstrate fairness, but in the scenario we’re talking about that’s very straightforward: show that a clerk had been trained on the rules, didn’t follow them, and didn’t improve when warned.
" ... had been trained on the rules, yet interpreted them compassionately according to sober interpretation of their intent, and didn't improve when warned ... "
liquidise says the DMV recorded they received the check on time.
If that is true, and the records show what can only be explained by a clerical error - there is always a procedure to fix clerical errors. If liquidise wrote to his senator and the senator took up the cause, I guarantee the error could be corrected by an orderly and legal procedure.
Of course, whether that procedure is known to front-line workers, and whether they can do it fast enough to achieve their call processing time targets is another matter.
Oh, no doubt. My point is that you don’t rail against someone doing their job, you follow that process for getting it corrected. Like if Verizon messes up my bill, being a jerk to the call center worker won’t do much but finding a contact who actually has the ability to authorize a change does.
Assuming that it's a statistically useful, predictive principle, you'd still have to gather a documented history of me consistently underestimating people's IQs in order to suspect that mine might be low on that basis.
Statistical sampling: a typically academic smart reply.
I believe smartness is an ability to intuitively see patterns that others do not obviously see. Our writing is full of signals and some people are adept at reading a lot into a simple comment. I'm not suggesting I'm any good at it, and unfortunately there are also a lot of people who think they're good but are not.
Mentioning "IQ" at all is a huge flag: often used by people that are academically successful but that is a poor measure of how smart someone is.
While my comment was written in a cheeky style, I am actually writing about my own experience as a reasonably smart person dealing with my own lack of wisdom over the years.
Don't worry: I don't actually suspect you have a low IQ.
Yes, completely off-topic, I shouldn't bite I know!
It has nothing to do with IQ, and everything with turning people into cogs in a machine. Following the rules, no matter how inane, is safe. Making a judgment call to break the rules exposes one to risk, and people who will review it later will likely be in the same conundrum themselves (i.e. it's always safer for them to conclude that breaking the rules was not justified), all the way to the top.
This is also why the larger and the more hierarchical any organization is, the more sociopathic it is as a whole, even if its bureaucracy is ran by people who aren't.
So a daily, single serving of 100% fruit juice results is a small-but-measurable increase in child BMI (0.01-0.05, roughly 1 ounce), and little to no measurable effect in adults. Given the middling results, i'm surprised how strongly other commenters here are taking this.
> "studies that did adjust for energy intake (-0.08 kg; 95% CI, -0.11 to -0.05 kg; P for meta-regression <.001)"
> "in adults, studies that did not adjust for energy showed greater body weight gain (0.21 kg; 95% CI, 0.15-0.27 kg)"
> "Among cohort studies in children, each additional serving per day of 100% fruit juice was associated with a 0.03 (95% CI, 0.01-0.05) higher BMI"
i don’t think most adults, let alone kids, know what the “serving” is. They just don’t look at the nutrition label. Or they don’t care.
I’d bet most kids have 2-3 servings of juice without realizing it. The serving size is usually tiny. That’s not counting all the other junk they might eat in a single day, like cereal.
I often tell clients "The first thing you asked me to do was to move a dining room chair into the living room. Then you asked me to do the same with the toilet. The latter only works if we tear out all the plumbing."
Non-coders seem to understand these analogies intuitively.