Discussion

@[email protected] My Italian wife is sometimes told she speaks very posh English because she naturally defaults to the words with Latin rather than Germanic roots - which is still a class ihdicator in the UK even if the Royals have been more German than French for quite a long time now.

Through a chain of events that all make sense individually, my son (just gone to uni) has this week been given exercises by one professor on how to write if statements in Python and asked by an other to translate postgraduate research prototyped in Matlab into native code with GPU compute support. This amuses me greatly.

@[email protected] How about "have seen many programming languages and found Ruby not to be a good fit for my brain/specific flavour of neurodivergence?"

Although even there, the problem isn't Ruby as such; I hit a brick wall on Rails being very opinionated and convention driven and I didn't agree with the opinions or like the conventions. There's very few languages I would say are "bad", and I'll avoid mentioning any by name to avoid stirring any pots.

@[email protected] My wife of 20+ years occasionally makes the statement "You're the one who's here" which depending on context, timing, and tone, can be absolutely amazing to hear or the harshest damning with the faintest praise.

@[email protected] I'm going back and forth on the fact my current profile lists that I'm a Christian. Not because I'm ashamed of Christ, or even being a Christian, but there are sure some other people using the term who I would prefer not to be associated with.

And there are a few Christian teachers out there who actually read the old testiment as the book it is rather than something to mine for pre-existing ideas, but they are rarer than I'd like. If anyone reading here is interested, Tim Mackie studied the bible as a scholar first and then when he became a pastor he started giving a series of talks he's now grouped under the heading "[Exploring my Strange Bible](https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/shows/exploring-my-strange-bible/)" because he realized most of the people in the churches he was teaching at had no idea just how different the bible was from what they thought. It is not a modern Western book written by or for a Western culture, and in fact (as you're no doubt aware), it isn't really a "book" at all.

@[email protected] Indeed. "I'm sorry to be pedantic, but your entire world view is an abomination based on centuries of lies and when talking about your chosen topic you didn't mention my unrelated favourite conspiracy theory once meaning your opinion is invalid."

Did you know you can publish your #VisualNovel from VisualInk to be played on Itch, allowing you to build a community or submit it to a game jam? No? That's probably because until now you couldn't.

But now you can. We have instructions and everything. #GameDev #InteractiveFiction #GameJam

@[email protected] My aunt used to work in the secretarial pool of a lawyer's office (back when that was a thing) and apparently on one occasion typed out entire dictated letter and took it to the lawyer to sign before noticing she'd started touch typing with her fingers on the wrong home keys.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Yes! The number of interview panels I've sat on where interviewers tried to find "the signal" to compare the remaining candidates when in reality our process just couldn't distinguish any further.

That's what I loved about this manager's approach. He liked to comment that if he told a prospective hire they'd be working with the "best of the best" he was revealing himself a lier and encouraging the arrogant to apply. While if he told them he would move heaven and earth to ensure they never had to work with an arsehole, it was something he could genuinely aim for with the tools available.

Of course, we did still want to assess competence/aptitude, and I don't really feel we did any better at that than anyone else. Nice team to work with though!

@[email protected] @[email protected] I spoke to one manager who (with rare insight and humility in my experience) pointed out that if he couldn't be 100% confident in the accuracy of his interview process - which he was not - it was much more important for him to focus on "not hiring someone bad" than "not missing the best possible person". After all - hiring someone bad is an immediate negative impact, hiring someone who wasn't "the best" was at worst a small opportunity loss.

Having come to that conclusion, he then thought about what made a hire "bad" and immediately prioritised personality over technical skill, with the only immediate way to fail the interview process being to reveal yourself as an arsehole to the interviewers. You still might not get the job enough other candidates appeared to have better technical skills, but no amount of apparently technical skill would get you through if you (for example) answered questions a female interviewer asked you by speaking exclusively to their male colleage.

Apart from the fact I agreed with his priorities, it did give me pause for thought on a lot of the ideas around "objective hiring" (and I've worked in local government, so I've seen... things... done in an attempt to make hiring objective). Apart from the fact we're terrible at assessing competence, in many cases it feels like it shouldn't even be the most important factor.

This week in our #VisualNovel course we looked at using LISTs in #Ink to keep track of what is going on in our game.

If you're curious, you can both playthrough and view the Ink script for the example we were working through, using lists to keep track of things like which spells the player has available and which party members they have with them. #InteractiveFiction #GameDev

I have just sent out a Google Form to ask people about when they'd like training on how to use Google Forms. I would say this is Meta Google training, but that would probably involve far too many lawyers.

@[email protected] Turning over a new horse (it obviously has to be a horse - cow tipping is illegal after all)

Distributed computing strikes again; we've had to temporarily disable shared editing on VisualInk because under certain conditions the host (which included sessions with just one user, i.e. normal editing) could end up deleting some of their own work in a race condition. Ironically, updates from invited guests seemed to be always handled correctly.

We'll try and turn it back on soon, but data loss is one of those things we'd prefer to avoid even if it means disabling some functionality for a moment. Apologies if you were hoping to use the collaborative tools in the next few days 😞

@[email protected] Thank you!

@[email protected] For teachers and students! This is an introduction to Google Workspace for the teaching staff.

Random question for any teachers out there: I'm going to be delivering some training in a school that uses Google Education on getting the most out of their IT. I know how to use all the individual apps in a business context, but do you have any teacher/school specific tricks or tips you wish someone had told you about earlier? #teacher #teaching #classroom #google

@[email protected] @[email protected] I suppose I need to be more precise: I will draft important writing, and I prototype code all the time. But that's very emotionally different from actually doing it for real and then restarting (which is, of course, a stupid squishy brain matter distinction).

The realization moment when that happens unexpectedly is inexplicably agonizing compared to the amount of time lost; I know on at least one occasion I spent much longer trying to restore the corrupted backup than it would have taken to just redo the work! If I'm trying to get the effect on purpose, I just do my best and then ask my wife (who is significantly better eye for detail than I have) what needs work which inevitiably gives me more than enough incentive to burn the first attempt to the ground and make something better. This strategy works fantastically, except when I'm actually trying to make something for my wife when it works... less well.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I do this with code every so often, and on the one hand it feels such a waste and I hate it. And on the other hand, I then re-write the same thing in half the time and twice as well because I've already done the thing and now I know how I want to do it.

A traitorous part at the back of my brain sometimes tries to convince me that this is what "real" editing/refactoring looks like, and to write code/prose to a "good" quality I should always draft and then recreate. But that's a filthy lying part of my brain that lies, because that way lies nothing but #ADHD procrastination lock and perfectionism. I try and only let the little weasel out on things that actually need that level of polish.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, apologies if that's the case. I'd read it as an example of something so obviously unreasonable that it would probably never happen, but re-reading you're likely correct.