There is a quirk (almost a bug?) in FreeBSD's qsort where it will switch to insertsort for the whole array under certain conditions, which we hit in production given how our data was arranged.
Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis on us as parents taking an active role in reading with them and encouraging them at home.
I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.
We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
Maybe Ascii art simplified things :-). I think what tends to trip people up are things like - Where do the pedals actually live in relation to the rest of the frame? How/where does the seat attach? The front wheel? Most people know there is kind of an angled bar on the frame, but where does it go exactly?
I like to think of the bike problem. Sit down and draw a picture of a bike from memory in as much detail as you can in 2 minutes. Easy right? But it is surprisingly hard.
So not like my take when I see a pack of Tim Tams with a half-star health rating.. "Hey these things are a little healthy, looks like you need to eat a lot to get any benefit though"
I joined a big tech co and dove in to a huge unwieldy code base that had gone through the process you described above. I did a lot of reading of the code, and soon became the only one that understood it and could make big architectural changes.
But.. that is a dead-end job. There is no career path being the maintainer of a large legacy code-base. It was pretty good if you wanted to rest-and-vest, I could do whatever I wanted. But there were no great features, no demo's, no selling of the work. Even small changes were painful.
Moved to a different team where everything is new and building from scratch and suddenly opportunities open up.
This was my first thought. I just have a * rule on my domain hosting account to send all email to my gmail, but can’t actually send from any of those addresses. I’ll usually sign up with [email protected]
Deformed corner here too! it was sitting precariously on a pile of papers on top of a set of plastic drawers on top of a standup desk which was half raised (where the printer lives, was silly I know). My daughter came in and bumped the table and my open MacBook fell directly on the corner of the screen. It has a dent there now but no other damage
Ah, I remember it is the non-intuitive one, but then when I use it a while, I keep double-guessing which one is the intuitive one.
Kind of like when my wife tells me I'm doing something wrong and she wants it to be the other way.. I know she thinks this thing is important, but can't work out which way she wants it done.
Very similar to me! Double degree in EE/IT, my first job out of uni was with a small company building gps chips. I actually spent a lot of time writing testing software. A couple of years in it went down the drain and I just naturally transitioned in to a software role (paid a lot better).
I once had to change my mental model for how fast some of these things were. I was using `seq` as an input for something else, and my thinking was along the lines that it is a small generator program running hot in the cpu and would be super quick. Specifically because it would only be writing things out to memory for the next program to consume, not reading anything in.
But that was way off and `seq` turned out to be ridiculously slow. I dug down a little and made a faster version of `seq`, that kind of got me what I wanted. But then noticed at the end that the point was moot anyway, because just piping it to the next program over the command line was going to be the slow point, so it didn't matter anyway.
Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too vague and she wants to know what really happened and is frustrated I won't give her details.
I think a large part of it is just that you store what is important to you. To me the day-to-day politeness is just filler. I don't care if they had black coffee or a latte. If someone was struggling with something and poured out their heart over multiple conversations, I'm going to remember what arguments and concerns they had and the mental model I built up around that situation. The filler is just unimportant and doesn't stick around.
My wife is the opposite. Signs of weakness are an embarrassment to be forgotten. She lives for the day-to-day.
(I think this was the check) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/lib/libc/st...