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If Doctors Were Like Coders
(cross-posted from https://medium.com/@c09b6133a238/...)
Problem: The patient has a broken leg.
Solution:
1. Ask the patient to reproduce the exact scenario that resulted in the broken leg. Watch closely to see if the leg breaks again. Check for consistency by repeating the scenario a few more times.
2. Explain that this isn’t an intended use case for the leg, and besides, it only affects one person. Ask the patient if, all things considered, he really wants to prioritize his broken leg over your other work.
3. Point out that the patient’s other leg performs just fine under the same circumstances. Ask if he can use his other leg instead, at least as a workaround.
4. Attach several accelerometers to the broken leg and break it again. Stare at the data received from the accelerometers, then shrug and declare it useless.
5. Decide that the patient’s problem must be in his spleen. After all, that’s the only part of his body you don’t really understand.
6. Track down the people who created the patient. Ask them if he’s ever had spleen problems before. When they seem confused, explain that he has a broken leg. Ignore them when they tell you that the spleen they created could not possibly cause a broken leg.
7. Ask Google where a person’s spleen is. Spend half an hour reading the Wikipedia article on Splenomegaly.
8. Open the patient and grumble about how tightly-coupled his spleen and circulatory system are. Examine the spleen’s outer surface to see if there are any obvious problems. Inform him that several of his organs are very old and he should consider replacing them with something more modern.
9. Compare the spleen to some pictures of spleens online. If anything looks different, try to make it look the same.
10. Remove the spleen completely. See if the patient’s leg is still broken. If so, put the spleen back in.
11. Tell the patient that you’ve noticed his body is made almost entirely out of cellular tissue, whereas most bodies these days are made out of cardboard. Explain that cardboard is a lot easier for beginners to understand, it’s more forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s the tissue franca of the Internet. Ask if he’d like you to rebuild his body with cardboard. It will take you longer, but then his body would be future-proof and dead simple. He could probably even fix it himself the next time it breaks.
12. Spend some time exploring the lymph nodes in the patient’s abdominal cavity. Accidentally discover that if the patient’s leg is held immobile for six weeks, it gets better.
13. Charge the patient for six weeks of work.14 -
This story is 100% true.
I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.
The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”
So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”
So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.
Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…
After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.
Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.
It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.
The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.
I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.7 -
Every time my mac mini compiles and gives off too much warm air my workmate splits always our table with a cardboard. So i decide to decorate it a little bit...
6 -
Worst disturbance while working?
Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.
Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."
Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.12 -
Today I remembered why I don’t “wing” things.
Anyway, here’s my cat in a cardboard tank.
Statements related.
21 -
Thought of buying an HTC Vive then I realized I would need to add a few things to my shopping list:
- 16 GB Ram cards
- Windows 10
- 2 TB Hard drive
- NVIDIA Graphics Card
- HDMI Display Port/Controller
- 2 monitors
My parents ended up getting me a Google Cardboard6 -
Amdy's story.
Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.
He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.
Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.
Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.
Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?
Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!
Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!
And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.6 -
Saw the rant @blauesocke made a few weeks ago. Glad to see I'm not alone in my madness.
And yes, that is a piece of cardboard. I didn't have anything better, and I've already grown too attached to it now
3 -
If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.
Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it. -
I had my last day today, after signing an severance package deal some weeks ago. It has been eight long years in this news media company as a sole web developer.
Leaving it behind feels awesome.
There was cake. There was a greeting written with a marker on the cardboard box the cake was delivered in. There were no speeches.
But my by now X coworkers seemed happy to get cake.
I am so excited to start fresh next year as a developer in a small design firm where there is a lot of care and love and nerdiness.1 -
When you're broke, don't have access to a 3d printer but still wanted to make a raspberry pi portable. Cardboard + power bank is the easiest way
2 -
I was hoping to work on my project this weekend. Turns out, the kindergarten gave all the parents a task - to make a Christmas-y house with their child.
Damn it!!
Well, I didn't work on my project, no doubt about that. But I found some other place to overengineer the shit out of it. And, frankly, I LOVED it.
2 days wasted. Not even sorry.
EDIT: all the materials are from the trash bin. That makes it even more fun!
EDIT2: Paint job is my wife's :) I'm too sloppy for it.
13 -
Life Hack: don't use alcohol or chemicals, rub off glue residue easily with olive oil / baby oil
Works like a charm and also doesn't break cardboard videogame boxes/ book covers
9 -
Properly setting the height on my 3d printer and spending time tweaking settings? Nah.
Putting pieces of cardboard under the bed until it prints okay is the way to go -
I had to set up a Raspberry Pi just to display a webpage since it is inexpensive and I didn't have enough budget to get a case for it so I present my homemade case. Lol. It's zip tied to the box within another box.
5 -
At home, on standing desk made mostly out of cardboard and hope, with 5 month old daughter asleep and attached to me with a sling1
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So I log into a great new site with my development machine. 64G of RAM, and 2 hex core CPU's; GTX 1070 video, SSD, etc. 4K display screen. (Motherboard is 5 years old, not trying to brag, just give context). I regularly put 8 pages of text on the screen side by side. Split ergonomic keyboard.
It wants me to load a mobile app for "full access".
Yea, why look at the world with wide open eyes when you can view everything through a cardboard toilet paper tube and type with your thumbs???
== John == -
Before I realized what a Vagrant Box was, I thought everyone was talking about cardboard boxes for homeless people.
So there I am thinking everyone was talking about homeless people and I finally understand that it's a service for quickly deploying VMs for local development when I get invited to a party after a convention with my hosting company and I look over the rail and see a vagrant man asleep on a cardboard box.
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What the fucking fuck is this bullshit?!
I feel like most journalists don't even have brains.
I wake up and I can't fucking turn my head or move my arms so I try to turn on TalkBack with my left hand since I can't fucking see what's on the damn screen of my phone. I google something along the lines of "jammed neck muscles" and as I am in so much pain that I am involuntarily crying I start to search for some way to limit the pain. "Jammed neck muscles? Try these few steps!", you open the page and they proceed to put 10 pages of non-sense in front of the actual steps - every single fucking article. DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE THE IQ OF A CENTIPEDE?!! After 12 minutes of this shit that I had to listen to I just said fuck it and somehow managed to throw myself off the bed and onto the ground - where I landed on all four and was somehow able to stand up and grab some Theraflu forte(apparently paracetamol is the best cure for jammed neck muscles and I know that there are 1000mg of it in one packet of theraflu) from my cardboard box full of meds.4 -
So... My parent's house is 40 years old.
I'm cleaning the corners... and my father as a DIY guy and a man that was never afraid to learn and update, there is so must useful junk, but also soooo many card boxes. He never throws them away, in case he needs to return the item.
So... I've been cleaning a 3 shelf open closet.
- have around 8 bags of cardboard, paper and newspappers for recycling.
- plus 2 bags of plastic.
- 4 bags filled with books for the local community center.
- a bag full of electronics to salvage.
And this only in 2 rows...
Man how could he store so much stuff in there I don't know, but this ends up being fun.
Also, one printer to salvage. :D
When it's over I get to own the shelf to store my stuff :D4 -
Daydream View... After 1 night of usage and the overheating problems I realized I just spent $40 on a Cardboard Viewer that has a Bluetooth controller.... And well not needing to hold the viewer all the time....1
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Who the fuck thought putting a motherfucking portable AC that is almost half my weight and that has rotating wheels on the bottom onto a fucking flimsy piece of angled cardboard was a fucking good idea?!!
That fukken thing drove over my toe, ripped several layers of skin off and sliced into it at the same time... I just couldn't open my mouth for probably 5 minutes because I would just be shouting and swearing like crazy... There was a trail of blood behind me as I somehow made my way to a first aid kit... I'm considering going to the hospital to get it checked but I thankfully managed to stop the bleeding with bandages....
Fucking hell....4 -
When someone asks to borrow your brand new, unused, dry erase marker, and then they use it to write all over a cardboard box2
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Holy shit this is creepy.
So I just got back from a team event today from a location that was a few hours away and, while we were at the hotel there was a little cardboard box on our breakfast table with an ad on it. The slogan on the ad was “Bada book Bada boom” it was really dumb and I almost forgot about it, but just now I’m listening to pandora on a completely separate network, many hours away from the location and an ad comes on with the SAME SLOGAN for what I assume was the same company.
Now I’m just wondering how they managed to do that.... I really do not believe it was a coincidence considering I have never heard that ad on my pandora before....
This is fucking creepy1 -
After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa4 -
Testing out VR without your own VR equipment is a pain.
The glasses are not much of a problem, since you can first develop using the google cardboard SDK and test it with your phone.
It's the controllers that are a pain to test. Luckily vrtk made something that simulates the controllers, which can be controlled with the keyboard.
The controls are very uncomfortable, this is not their fault; you can't really emulate movement easily with a keyboard. -
Play designer board games; they are multi-tenant programs, complex algorithms, modularity, meticulously balanced, and all elegantly linked to an artful UI. They are also made out of cardboard.
It is hard to play them and not become a developer that builds increasingly holistically.8 -
TLDR: Need for easy to use VR headsets for mobile phones...
Complete story:
There are so many interesting places to explore in this world but sadly the current pandemic situation has brought travel plans to a complete halt. Today I tried watching virtual tours of various cities on YouTube and it felt a bit relaxing.
I was planning to use VR to enhance the experience but it's quite a lot of trouble adjusting my phone in VR headset, controlling playback from my hands when the phone is in the headset.
I wish someone, somewhere would find a way to simplify this problem... Like making mobile-based VR headsets bit easier to use and control while keeping it at affordable to use and allow addition of mobile phones of any sizes...
If someone could actually do this...I think we might have the next groundbreaking startup in the next few years...😄
P.S. Google cardboard VR does not fit this criterion...4 -
does somebody know of a tool to remove a green person-like cardboard cutout from an image?
it's a task that need needs to be performed for around 60k images :-|
asking for a friend6 -
* Automated Technical and Fundamental Expert Advisor trading in MT4 with Python dealing with RSS News Feed on the Financial Calendar
* Food decision/recommender/randomizer app
* Food decision/recommender/randomizer bot
* Personal Companion set up on Raspberry Pi with Jasper AI, buy BrickPi and Lego Mindstorm to make it a friendly moving robot
* Cardboard fort for my kid
* A 3D game that involves hacking with drama storyline (inspired from Mr. Robot) and publish it on Steam
* A SaaS app like Tinder that matches would-be Project Managers with Devs to push Devs to finish side projects that we have and push Project Managers to use whatever PM techniques and methodology (Six Sigma perhaps)
And so much more... Ughh. -
Where do you place your desktop tower so it doesn't suck up dust. Per a previous rant, @sunfishcc was right there is a vent at the bottom and probably a very bad idea to place it on cardboard.... Or carpet. But what would be the best?
Would putting it on top of plastic be better?5
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