I remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Coming up on 20 years ago I was building a system that was going to be deployed at various locations throughout a very large country. All locations had internet access; but the throughput, latency, and quality (e.g. packet drops) were all over the map.
For testing we ended up building a small linux box to proxy for the test environment in the office. We could throttle the throughput to any arbitrary level, introduce latency, and introduce packet drops. It's amazing how poorly a frontend will work when you throttle the network to 128kbps, and introduce a small percentage of dropped packets. But once you get the system to work (for some definition of "work") under those conditions you feel pretty good about deploying it.
Years ago I worked for a company that bought another company. Our QA folks were asked to give their site a once-over. What they found is still the butt of jokes in my circle of friends/former coworkers.
* account ids are numeric, and incrementing
* included in the URL after login, e.g. ?account=123456
* no authentication on requests after login
So anybody moderately curious can just increment to account_id=123457 to access another account. And then try 123458. And then enumerate the space to see if there is anything interesting... :face-palm: :cold-sweat:
My favorite example of this sort of thing has been In My Tribe by 10000 Maniacs. The UPC/Catalog Number remained the same between the 1987 release and the removal of Peace Train (track 7) in 1989. I have this memory of sifting through the stock at a large used CD store in the mid-90s hoping to find the pre-removal version.
> it was a good decade before they even admitted Perl 6 might take longer than expected
I was there at OSCon when Larry announced Perl6, and that it would be "out by Christmas". And I was there the next year, when he was asked about that, and cheekily replied "well, we never specified _which_ Christmas."
> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.
All of them? It's gotten so bad that I remapped the Netflix button on the Shield remote to mute the receiver. The remote has volume up/down buttons, but no mute, and ads are _so_ loud now.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
This. "Scam resistance", in my mind, maps to critical thinking and a bit of pattern matching. Could definitely be taught, but critical thinking seems to be out of favor in (American) education at the moment (and has been for a while, honestly).
At the start of Covid lockdown my group at work started having a daily "drinking alone together" afternoon Google Meet.
When that job ended, our household started drinking on our front porch in the afternoons. Soon a few neighbors started doing the same, and we got close enough (15-20 feet) to trade cell numbers. After that we would text back and forth to communicate during "distanced happy hour".
The friendships we made drinking _not_ together have lasted, and we still count those neighbors as friends...