Isn't eccentric supposed to mean slightly strange? This just sounds mentally ill. Maybe he was trying to improve job security through intentional obfuscation. Kind of sad, either way.
Agreed. I feel sorry for Sten, not the company or the other employees.
That said, even as shortly back in the 90s, mental illness was still ridiculed and something to be ashamed of, at least we've made progress in that area these days.
I have worked with someone who used female names for temp variables in the early 2000s. He also kinda saved us by substituting all icons with over the top cute looking ones the night before the demo, which was super efficient at distracting the audience from how disfunctional the application was.
I use a random group of words as variable, etc. names when I can't think of them fast enough to stay in the flow. I find it easy to remember what each one does, and can go back and rename them to more reasonable things before doing a commit. It only takes missing one inexplicably named 'deodorant' variable, for me to want to sink into the depths of the Earth at the thought of people thinking I'm one of these eccentrics.
That may or may not be the case, but I worked with someone back in the early 00’s who named all their variables things to do with the planet or sky, actually including both of those words too. Everything was $sky, $cloud, $mist, $hill, $rainbow etc.
The code was at times almost poetic, but a nightmare to debug.
It was practically mandatory in the days when Sun workstations were popular for them to have astronomical names.
I thought I was being quite daring when the lab where I worked got a load of DEC Alpha workstations and I named them after Martian surface features as I'd just read Red Mars.
I worked at a place which had macho weather names for the Suns: "storm", "tempest" etc. I and another chap who started at the same time thought this was all rather silly, so we named ours "drizzle" and "damp"; this made the greybeards mutter somewhat.
In the mid 1980s the CS department I was at was fond of High-Level Hardware Orion minicomputers which were named after deities starting with "O": Ormazd being the one I can remember...
It’s kind of fun to have a few weird names. My laptops have fun names. Right now I have “Okavango Delta” and “Phoenix”.
All of my WiFi networks begin with Aardvark (shows up first in the network list) and all of my iOS devices are Aardwolf (shows up after Aardvark when used as a hotspot).
I worked at a company where all the server names were named after mountains. I totally get it for things that have no meaningful name possible. "Server Three" doesn't actually give you much information, I already know it's a server, and them being numerically ordered adds nothing either. So why not be fun with it.
Variable names on the other hand can carry a lot of information, and naming them arbitrarily misses that opportunity for clarity.
I also worked at a company where all the machines were named after mountains! The company was named MountainGate, so this was probably unavoidable. "Dana" and "Tresidder" sat on my desk.
Nobody wants to spell empedokles at 4am. And if you're not the person who has to deal with this problem, then you are a dick to whoever does, if you name a server something like this.
"server three" actually does give you information. It's a server. Not a router. Not a firewall. Not a load balancer. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. Not your HSM. Not the telco gear. Etc... etc...
If "well I don't have any of those things", then sure, whatever. If you have three servers, then it doesn't matter.
But then you grow a bit. And now you have 20 servers, and kinda matters that you have a pattern that IS NOT "greek vs roman gods", but maybe "diskfulls" and "CPU-monsters". At a previous company we named these "db<n>" and "quick<n>". And did not reuse numbers, because then we could also infer the hardware generation (lower number means older hardware).
db<n> wasn't even running any relational database. We could have named them "storage<n>", and it wouldn't have made a difference to the fact that the name was incredibly useful.
Sometimes you can save the company your entire year's salary by reducing an outage by the few minutes not making typos or misunderstanding about "is this part of prod or not?". Communication is important, and coming up with the "funniest" name is not so funny when the site is down and you're trying to figure out the problem.
Fair enough, I think it's clear that "it depends" then because those were not issues for us and our set up. We weren't running a server farm, these were just internal development servers, the parts that did have context were named appropriately like "Production, Staging, Feature-1" etc. The networking was trivial. I am sure you are right and that if it had grown, a naming convention would be nice.
I do get a bit tired of the Everything is Enterprise approach to software. We aren't all trying to scale to the moon, and enterprise tooling has it's own costs.
A few maybe. But when you have 50 routers, 60 switches, and 10 firewalls, then it's not exactly fun to need to start thinking about if this name is latin or greek, and how exactly do you even spell it?
Your laptop? Barely matters. Won't show up in a traceroute.
I tend to keep the chaos at higher levels of abstraction. All of my home automation devices have printed labels with a number. (I have way too many.) The same number goes on the device name in Home Assistant. If one of the remotes ends up in the wrong room, it’s easy to look up where it belongs.
However, the internal applications I maintain at my day job have fun, easy to spell names. The servers they go on are prefixed with that name with their function after it. e.g.“snowplow db”. Everyone knows (or learns) that snowplow is the custom UI for the big SNP printers.
I’ve found having a name that’s short and relatively related in some way keeps different departments from coming up with their own shorthand way of referring to the programs.
It's one thing when you have pets, another when you have cattle.
A traceroute showing herodotus? Magellanic? Jesus fucking christ I can't even spell that into google to find out if it's a router or a firewall. I've worked at places like that and I can't figure out if the other people in the company hate each other, are super elitist (oh, you don't know who herodotus was? Did you even take ancient greek history at your public school?), or are some sort of double agent productivity saboteur.
I find it extremely disrespectful to get in the way of other people getting shit done, and some of these names are about as funny as wiping a colleague's hard drive (containing all their work in progress) for fun.
Don't make me spell empedokles when everything's on fire at 4am. That's insanely disrespectful.
You have three servers? Go nuts. You have at least 831 (per your example)? A thousand servers and your servers are still pets? I'd request a mandate to fix what is clearly broken culture and infrastructure, or quit.
At 4am the funny name is a joke at your expense, and shows that whoever named this machine does not respect you.
You can go on the other end of the extreme with this. One dude we hired came in and started immediately yelling about the naming convention of 3 machines. How unprofessional it was. This was when renaming a machine was kind of a pain, and reinstalling took 2-3 hours (plus patches). "you want it fixed you reinstall them" (they were never fixed). We were naming them after cartoon characters. He refused to install any machines himself and would regularly rename half the vars in a project because 'they did not feel right'. One time he spent 2 hours ranting about a comment in the code that was a movie quote that fit what was going on. The next box he wanted but would not install himself was named Kyle after the whiny char from south park. When it came time to scale to about 200 machines I chose a convention that made sense (something like city-rack-machinetype-number) and could help someone find the box quickly. He still did not like it and wanted to still rename them all.
In the 80's at Boston University, some CS labs had their own small computer networks, plus various devices like tape readers, film scanners and such. The naming convention was aquatic life. Mainframes were named after species of whales. Called minicomputers then, we call them servers now, were named after species of shark. The Thinking Machine at MIT was aliased to be a killer whale. And the various output devices like printers were named after common edible fish, while the input devices like film scanners were named after edible sea plants. We had one special minicomputer that had special hardware (of the day) that did dot products in hardware, the CPU had a dot product op code (it was a Celerity), and that was named 'dolphin' - the only system with a general name rather than a specific species.
I still think/visualize aquatic life when I envision a network.
There's a nice RFC on machine naming - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1178 - but sadly the practice of giving machines memorable and distinctive names has largely died out at workplaces.
I knew a guy (extremely smart, a PhD physicist) who, apart from writing Lisp in the style of Occam, who was fond of using synonyms - so a variable holding a stream would be called brook etc.
I also knew another hyper smart chap who used to argue passionately for meaningless identifiers - his argument was that you couldn't actually represent anything meaningful about what an identifier was for in a short name so why try? Mind you, he was a MUMPS developer.
In the 1980s I was handed a piece of code to maintain; one of the coding conventions they had followed was that all variable names began with the letter "O" followed by three numeric digits. This was FORTRAN 66 code, so no excuses except the code was originally written by the system administrator's girlfriend who was a brilliant engineer.
I worked on a project that involved building a constraint-based system that diagnosed short circuits in complex and expensive analogue circuit boards. We named many of the relevant variables after short people (e.g. Ronnie, Corbet, Napoleon, etc etc).
We would have got away with it due to the general lack of external code reviews but our boss heard us discussing a bug that involved one of them.
There is a very large crypto currency project, holding 9.3 billion dollars, that believes that variable names should be mostly meaningless, and furthermore that all nouns should be three letters long, and all verbs four. Here's the start of the method "frob()", from the file "vat":
Urn memory urn = urns[i][u];
Ilk memory ilk = ilks[i];
// ilk has been initialised
require(ilk.rate != 0, "Vat/ilk-not-init");
urn.ink = add(urn.ink, dink);
urn.art = add(urn.art, dart);
ilk.Art = add(ilk.Art, dart);
int dtab = mul(ilk.rate, dart);
uint tab = mul(ilk.rate, urn.art);
I used to work on an accounting system and for internationalization purposes we dealt with generic "debit units" and "credit units". We had a developer who shortened "debit unit" to "dunt". Want to guess what he shortened credit unit to?
Also, if the person exclusively talks on the 3rd person and does weird demands that would have been a non-hire or quickly dismissed as soon as they would start making eccentric requests
The 90s thinking was that a smart person who isn't a weirdo would have chosen a respectable profession like lawyer, doctor, accountant or similar. So it was kind of expected that programmers are weirdos.
I think it also has something to do with consciousness. Eccentrics are aware of their weirdness, they just don't care what others think.
Weird people don't know that they are weird.
Well, a panic arose on Twitter when conservatives discovered their crashed smart TVs started demanding the sacrifice of children... must have been all the daemons possessing our computers:
How about someone in 2022 describing something taking place in the 90s? That part was not in the dialog taking place in the 90s but the author describing the scene.
According to my Ukrainian co-worker, back in 90s Kombucha was known as a horrible traditional delicacy similar to surströmming, hákarl or casu marzu.
And yes, I have had a co-worker who drank weird smelly herbal teas and was obsessed with vitamins among other things. And a different one who had a mug that was covered with thick black crust inside and who insisted that it must never be washed.
Based on my experience reading TheDailyWTF for a couple years now:
I bet there was indeed a guy at a company who spoke about himself in the 3rd person, took off the lighting bulbs from his office (Masters of Doom talks about something similar, after all), used female names for his variables, and was fired. I would also bet that the "thanks for the tip" part is also true. I'm on the fence about the tea.
Everything else is probably poetic license to help the story flow better.
Yup. And that concept is still alive. If you act uncomfortably, there are people will assume it means you are better. (Had collegues express pretty much that believe a two years ago.)
It led to being strange cool in the "in-group" which led to perfectly socially aware people acting strange where it would them cool points.
I am not complaining here, I enjoyed it back then. Only later I realized what went on and how much of the "strage" were actually "very high social skill being used".
Common trope in certain walks of life. The primadonna idea itself is from performing arts (ballet?), and there are loads of stories about musicians requiring special attention. Sports as well, lots of stories about stars with odd routines or demanding behaviour.
The thing that links them is you have someone who ostensibly creates so much value everyone else is supposed to live with their demands.
It can be minor things. We had a trader in an firm I worked for who made the company hire a car to take him to work each morning. Certainly not a strange thing but it wasn't exactly something the couldn't pay for himself, nor a benefit that everyone enjoyed.
Yep, literally translates as the first lady, but means the leading lady. They were the headliners that brought the crowds. If a show lost the primadonna, it lost the audience (and ticket sales) so they had much more bargaining power than the other performers.
In my experience, many musicians and artists in general are weird people. Art is often a way to try to express how we don't fit in the world, or an attempt to express that which we can't express in other ways. And when I say "we can't express in other ways", that can mean that it's impossible, but also that the specific individual has trouble expressing it in the usual ways that other people turn to. So, they are kinda related. It's kinda tragic if you are that type of artist yourself and then realize that great part of what drives your art is... disconnection from the rest of the world. How your art might be a cry in some form, the result of your helplessness.
I could imagine that this presentation sells better. Someone who is highly talented and good with women might appear threatening to his manager. Like this, there's no challenge to the manager's higher social position.
Lonely, socially awkward programmer guy who works in a darkened broom closet and writes unmaintainable, cringeworthy, slightly creepy code is not remotely comparable to pimps selling child prostitutes to the world’s social/financial elite.
The place I recently stayed at in Umbria, Italy for New Year helpfully tolled bells 1-to-4 times each 15 minutes to describe whereabouts in the hour we were. All night long.
Pretty common for church bells in Austria too. 1-4 times for 15 min intervals, and then on the full hour, after the four chimes, the number of the hour.
Sorry, I didn't make this quite clear. At the full hour it first chimes four times, to denote that it's a full hour, and then, after a small pause, the number of the hour.
They used to at least. Since I live in the city now I can't tell personally but I just called my mother and she says the clock tower in her town also rings during the night.
Edit: From what I could gather in a couple of minutes it still seems to be pretty widespread. There have been some court cases about it, to get specific churches to silence the bells, but not in general.
From various anecdotes, I'd expect that the locals slept soundly. But if the bell mechanism somehow broke during the night - a fair number of them would wake up, wondering at the odd silence.
It’s the same here (our 2km² city center has 5 churches, so you are never far from one), and I can confirm. You sleep easily through those, and I only hear them subconsciously. When someone is visiting and complains about how loud it is, I sometimes have to ask what they are talking about.
They’re rather more melodious and smooth-toned, and typically quieter at the point they’re heard. Not harsh and jarring like those awful beeping watches.
I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.
> I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.
I don’t think I ever experienced more than two or three, and that was bad enough. Say you’ve got thirty children, thirty watches, spread over five minutes, that’s an average of one every ten seconds.
It was most pupils in my classes. Kids got kudos for having fancier/louder chimes than others. Then came the rush of calculator watches, so everyone started getting watches confiscated before exams, and that other teacher's favourite: the TV Remote watch. Our school admistered masking tape and/or TipEx over the IR receivers to tackle this.
The Elizabeth Tower in Westminster chimes a song every 15 minutes, progressively adding a new verse for each quarter, until on the hour you get the full song followed by a bong for each hour that it is.
As a child it fascinated me, but as an adult (who had a job in the area) it got tedious really quickly. 15 minutes is not that long.
If you're lucky. I used to live very near to a cathedral that started practicing change ringing Christmas carols in about October, generally with more enthusiasm than skill.
At one point I had my laptop reading the time every 15 minutes, because I can be absent minded. It didn’t make me focus. But I always muted my laptop when I wasn’t wear headphones so it didn’t annoy anyone.
Could be worse. See the short story "Chronopolis" by J.G. Ballard.
It is set in a future where people's lives became so dominated by having to constantly use their watches and clocks to coordinate every aspect of their day that their health, sanity, and productivity were being serious harmed.
As a result clocks and watches were outlawed. Having one became a serious offense that would earn you a long jail sentence.
Instead of clocks and watches to coordinate people were assigned to groups, and there were public chimes or bells or something (I forget which) that would signal when it was time for your group to do various things. So for example if you are in the red group and want to go grocery shopping, you just wait until you hear the bell that signals red shopping time is starting.
And yet, reality is following along. Plenty of shops started to have special opening times for e.g. the elderly and disabled during the pandemic - annoyingly, it was often in the early morning, if you're in those categories you may need more time or help to get up in the morning so you'd miss the boat. There was also one where they reduce sensory input during certain times (dim lights, turn off music, etc), but similar thing of a 'block of time' for people in a certain category to go grocery shopping.
And of course there's working hours / clocking in and out.
> reduce sensory input during certain times (dim lights, turn off music, etc)
I intensely hate music at supermarkets, especially just before Christmas. They would also need to ban children during “spectrum hour”: I avoid shopping just after school is out to avoid screaming kids or kids on the loose.
Wouldn’t it feel like you were participating in a movie genre if everybody was on the autism spectrum at a particular time in the supermarket?
That feature (complication in mechanical watch parlance) is older than digital watches. Some of the fanciest mechanical watches in the world will play a chime on the hour/quarter/minute. It’s called a repeater complication. They were useful for the visually impaired or when the time was needed before artificial lighting was readily available.
My dad, end 80s, had a watch which, if he would press a button, it would mention the time (in British English, him being native Dutch speaker). It would also beep every hour and mention the time (or just short beep depending on settings). He'd set it ahead of time a few minutes, so he could quickly go for a toilet break, for example. He'd use this information for all kind of things: to remember him to press the button for the time, to wake up, to go to toilet, to watch the news, to watch his favorite TV program. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: he was legally (but not completely) blind, and had MS. At one point he couldn't get the watch around his wrist anymore, so he hung it around his neck. Also, this watch taught me some British English and it taught me about AM/PM as a kid (we use 24H here). It probably helped me with 'clock reading'.
Ouch! For many years I had my watch do this. It's very handy. It's not loud like an alarm - just a quick beep and that's it. No one complained to me, although I stopped it long before I entered the workforce.
That’s one thing i am willing to defend to death lol.
I have a cheap casio watch that has this feature, and i love it. It doesn’t beep like an alarm continuously, it just does a singular beep at the top of the hour. It isn’t obnoxiously loud, and it helps me being mindful of time, as it is too easy for me to get engrossed in something and lose track of time.
No one has expressed a concern so far at work (back when we were in the office), and it has imo been even appreciated. Meetings started running over much less, and no one takes offense, as people by now know it is an automated beep and not me trying to push them “please end this meeting soon, it is running too long for my liking.” It isn’t super loud, and is easy to ignore (as it sounds like a random singular faint beep somewhere, cannot even pinpoint the direction it came from, but by now I have told everyone already what it was).
Note: years after I started using that feature, Apple introduced a similar feature for Apple Watch, except instead of a beep it does a single vibration on your wrist that only you could feel/perceive. That only vindicated my belief in usefulness of such a feature lol.
*One* person with an hourly beep is almost tolerable. More than one in an office? Completely intolerable.
I have had a quiet word with colleagues who set their watches to beep, then a slightly louder word with their manager when they persisted. The Apple Watch vibrate is different -- it's not going to disturb anyone else. It also wouldn't be quite so bad were it noisy, because at least smart watches should have accurate (and matching) time.
I'm glad for you that you have understanding colleagues :).
I think I missed an important point in my original comment, my situation wasn't an open-office setup. It was private offices + conference rooms. If it was in an open office where everyone is constantly subjected to that, that would absolutely be an annoying situation.
And fully agreed with your point about that feature on Apple Watch being all-around better due to only notifying you and not bothering anyone else around.
I used to wait for minutes for my grandfather’s German cuckoo clock to chime the hour. Noon was of course the best because it did a song and the dancers in lederhosen came out and danced while the wise cuckoo bird nodded. But even one o’clock with a single cuckoo was special.
I've never met anyone that speaks about themselves exclusively in third person in any walk of life. It seems like something that could get semantically challenging fairly quickly. I also wonder if eccentricities are independently distributed. Is a person hosting one eccentricity more likely to acquire another? I wouldn't have thought so personally. To wit, finding a guy that seems to have at least 4 -- at least by my count -- strikes me as very likely fictional.
Ditto here. A friend's girlfriend uses her first name instead of "I" in every instance. She's even got the friend to start doing it for her too. eg firstname instead of "you"
No major concerns about it though, it doesn't negatively affect things.
I'm pretty sure if you use "the" to refer to yourself, you're also obligated by law to wear shades at all times, do finger guns at least once a day and use the term "rad" at least once every hour.
I strangely acquired this habit at home shortly after my first son was born for some conversations...
"I need to do this now" became "Daddy needs to do this now"... It is weird, and entirely unnecessary, kids acquire understanding of "I" and "you" quite fast. It just came and never went. I think I was trying to be less ambiguous when conversations did not involve only me and the kids, but also Mum and others, or when I somehow want to emphasize the context and my role (?) I have no idea and it is fading, only a lot of company present might trigger it - or recounting stories to others.
But maybe I just never realized how weird it is - I would raise both eyebrows if a colleague at work would talk like that in a "normal" context.
Friend of a friend knew someone. The person in question went on Apprentice in the UK, and spoke like this (Felipe for those unfortunate souls like me who watch it).
My friend confirmed that Felipe speaks like this.
The funny thing is, apparently until the Apprentice, and this being pointed out, he didn’t even realise (???), and then found it impossible to keep up.
Nope. I know somebody who mostly refers to herself in the 3rd person and has a ton of other quirks.
If anything, people with underlying oddities might develop several quirks on top of them. Or they realise that one can get away with strange behaviour and don’t even try to suppress ever new and interesting patterns.
Indeed, pronouns are a pretty challenging skill for toddlers. Similarly, for their sake, you will often refer to yourself in third person as well, saying Daddy or Mommy rather than I or me.
I have online. I think they are still around one of the groups I’m in. It’s rather confusing.
As far as quirks go… it depends why someone has a quirk. If someone isn’t neurotyoical, they can seem like they have a lot of weird behaviors. Once you know the underlying cause, it makes sense and you stop thinking about it. (Or at least I do.)
Fun fact: in Japan, from what little I've seen, quite a few young kids (think till lower elementary school) tend to speak in third person, and is generally seen as "cute". However, it sounds just as much unnatural (or even annoying unless the person is known to have some sort of issue) to speak in the third person for other age groups, especially working adults.
That’s funny, the same is the case with small children in China. Instead of “我饿了” (I’m hungry) they could say “人家饿了” which is something like “people are hungry”. This is also seen as cute and naturally goes away as they get older.
Kids talk in third person about themselves in slavic languages too. It is normal as they are learning to talk. They switch to first person by themselves later.
It depends on how you define childish, and also the age of the person in question, but in general: Yes.
Also, in case of adult women, if they speak in third person, to me it sounds あざとい(azatoi). I am sorry, I don't know how to phrase it in English without ruining the nuance. It's a mix of calculating, cunning, and a bit flirtatious? Either way, you also need to consider the tone of their voice, body language, and the contents itself. (Maybe if they want you to carry the shopping bag because it's a bit heavy for them, they might use this way of speaking.)
That being said, I do not have any real-life examples to back this up so take it with a grain of salt.
I see where you are coming from with that one. However, this acting doesn't often have that strong of a negative connotation as insincere seems to have. To me, it's a more light thing, a bit of playful acting, atleast for the scenario I mentioned in the previous comment.
This is, I think, a quirk of the Japanese language. It famously has many of what we would consider first person pronouns, which have a feeling to me of kinda being third person themselves. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they don't have such a strict delineation. Occasionally one can even hear someone use, for example, 'boku' as a second person pronoun. It's maybe kinda like in a casino a dealer might say that "the house" wins, or a judge might say "this court" regarding a decision. Only many such 'role' pronouns exist in Japanese.
One can imagine growing up as a child and hearing Japanese with its variety of first-person pronouns, which also are not used as much as we use them in English, and choosing to use your name as it is consistently associated with you.
That said, I've had only a smattering of Japanese study, so definitely take all of that with a grain of salt.
Whoa, how on earth could boku be a _second person_ pronoun? Admittedly I don’t speak any Japanese, but referring to myself, when I actually say “you” sounds confusing.
Thinking of it as 'I' or 'you' is misleading. That's kinda what I'm trying to say in my post: it's more like these are all third-person roles. If you think of 'boku' as more like 'this boy' than 'I' or 'me' it becomes easier to understand I think.
I usually use boku and my girlfriend sometimes calls me boku, whether she's talking to me or about me to someone else. There's no confusion because she couldn't be using boku to mean herself.
I'm not a linguist, but it seems like there's no grammatical difference between first/second/third person in Japanese - you can consider all the sentences to be in third person.
My Japanese knowledge is even more limited, but Japanese seems to use a persons name in conversation far more often than English. Like in English we would say "it's nice to see you" but Japanese seems to say "it's nice to see Anidiot."
When you're regularly calling everybody else by their name, calling yourself by your name makes sense.
Ah! Thanks for this comment. It reminded me of another case where someone speaks in third person: in business settings. For example, I have seen this in code reviews when someone is disagreeing with a change in a pull request in a company: " Since <<reason>>, ABC thinks this change is unnecessary."
However, do keep in mind this is anecdotal so I don't know how much it applies to more broad settings.
> seems to use a persons name in conversation far more often than English
Actually, calling the other one by their name + san/chan/kun is the most common way. Using "anata" (= you) can even be considered rude under certain circumstances. My wife never calls me "anata". Also, pronouns are often omitted if it is clear who is being meant (a bit like in Italian).
I'm currently formally learning Mexican Spanish in Mexico. In day to day life here it's very uncommon to hear the pronoun. The only exceptions I can think of are 'Usted/Ustedes' or 'Nos'.
Using or not using the pronoun has the same emphasis as saying to someone:
'You're drunk.' versus pointedly saying 'You, are drunk'.
----
Soy Latte, por favor! (In Spanish this translates literally as 'I'm a latte. please.')
If not their first name, then their title "younger brother/sister" (adik), "older brother sister" (kakak). Interestingly, when the second child is born, the "adik" becomes the "kakak", which you would think would be confusing but the switch happens pretty naturally.
This is not uncommon in the West either. A lot of parents talk to themselves by title in the third person to their children, e.g. "Daddy doesn't want to play right now, daddy is working". It's even worse if they refer to each other by a 'parental' name. Just makes me wince.
To people that actually do this, do not erase yourself; you are a person, you have needs and an identity of your own. You can express your needs, not a mythical 3rd person parental figure.
When my wife calls me 'dad' or 'daddy' I know she might be talking as well to one of our kids instead of to me. It gives it context, and it also does something with me by increasing my responsibility instead of slacking. After all, if you are once a dad or mom, you're always one.
Honestly, I think its a great way to get some perspective (but I am on the spectrum). I also find it plain fun, and -sometimes- cute. Doesn't mean I always do it in family circle. Its just that, in a work environment, there's an etiquette, and this one isn't part of it. If you're too different (e.g. weird in this context), they don't want you, and one way or another you'll get cast out. Goes for weird people too.
You are not just ”a person” when you are a parent. You are a person with a very special role and you spend a lot of time acting in that role. As I see it, the border is fuzzy and the overlap large, but the role and the person are not the same.
> Is a person hosting one eccentricity more likely to acquire another?
Absolutely. In life, most people are "normal", almost by the definition of normal, but there's a big penumbra of people who don't habitually and reflexively conform to normal. If you're a little bit odd, you spend effort suppressing it and actively conforming. In autistic circles, this is called "masking" for behaviors deemed autistic; in LGBT circles, this is called "passing", and so on. But once someone has fallen sufficiently far from the middle of the normal distribution that they can't pass, or can't be bothered to pass (it can be a lot of work), they stop trying to pass and you can spot all their non-normal behaviors.
(What is "normal" is of course culturally determined and varies by your local culture, social class, etc, and covers all sorts of things. Americans and Brits are told to hold forks differently, for example)
"When I was young, I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my 50s I was considered eccentric. Here I am, doing and saying the same thing that I did then, and I'm labeled senile."
Most people want to be considered normal, but few people want to be considered average. But the two words really denote the same thing, though the connotations are very different.
Those examples are the opposite of an increasing probability of "acquiring" eccentricities-- they are examples of expressing or masking behaviors.
And that's not a truism-- people of all ages make the mistake of coupling the potential expression of some behavior X with an entire group of behaviors they are afraid they will catch like "cooties." Then they decide not to publicly express behavior X for fear of that.
Perhaps that's not what OP meant by "acquiring," but there's a high probability some HN'er read it that way. Hence, my comment here.
Is there a difference between "acquiring" and "expressing" an eccentricity, from the point of view of an independent observer? Either way, if a person has an eccentricity, it's an indication that they're less likely to understand or care about conforming with "normal" ranges of human behaviour than average (unless the average person has an eccentricity, I guess...) in which case it seems reasonable to assume they're more likely than the average person to be eccentric in other behaviours.
Which doesn't mean the example isn't fictional, it just means I would expect someone who's entirely comfortable with referring to themself in the third person to be considerably less likely than the average software developer to worry that a variable-naming scheme that amuses them might be seen as a bit odd by the rest of the team.
The masking thing has a subtile but real cost. It works great, I have (apparently) high natural charisma, it allows me to mask my peculiarities somewhat easier - but at some point when I'm tired enough, or hungry enough, or stressed enough, or some combination of those thought enough, I lose that ability to mask - then all hell breaks loose.
it's not traditional masking for me when i do this, i find it to be more of a limit to my ability to control the abuse responses I have. i'm not trying to 'pass' as a normal person, i'm trying to prevent myself from being the monster that raised me.
when i get exhausted by it, i too can crack! luckily it's gotten better, and i now just kinda sit in my abuse response. knowing that keeping my cool is the only thing that can prevent my parents generational trauma being passed on.
it's exhausting, and you're doing a great job to be able to recognize it! i too started my journey with a list of situations in which i got shitty like you have, and ended it realizing i just need those in my life to give me the same pass i give them if i regress. good luck to you on finding a solution that helps!
Hrm, yes, but not always, sometimes I just turn into a.. emotional mess, or I get so overwhelmed I cannot decide anything, and need help to even meet my basic needs.
It means the mask drops, and people see me getting angry, being less than composed, not being polished.. whatever it is I don't want them to see.
I will make sure to conform in some low cost ways to preserve my ability to bring out my eccentricities when I find hem particularly valuable. So I make sure not to leave the people I talk to feeling weirded out by hints, and to ask questions about how they are doing and so on, but I won’t use a chair with a back or stop coding in order to have a better on time record for meetings.
I often use my name instead of I in e-mails just in case the context who wrote it will be lost. I also often CC everyone I mention in the @-mail for transparency.
My friend does something similar for majority of online communication, every time he refers to something potentially illegal/ immoral/ shares some weird experience he uses "my friend" instead of "I"
We're in the same boat. And for a few month I've found it pretty annoying and I've tried to stop, but I haven't manage to do so. What's wrong with our brains?!
The error with your brain is that it thinks that a behavior which has been genetically engineered over millenia to be the most effective way to interact with your children should be consistent with/follow the same rules as you use in adult conversation.
I think parents do this as a (subconscious?) way to help frame things from the child's perspective, knowing that the kid is terrible at taking on anyone else's perspective.
Zlatan ibrahimovic does it sometimes. Although I have not met him. I can't translate it to English however, I don't know what that type of third person grammar is called. I think the closest translation would be something like "one feels very determined to win this match"
What if he died and nobody knows it. Half the Bitcoins are in his wallet and nobody can get them out without the password, named after several of his girlfriends no doubt.
Yes. My first thought was "Initrode is real?!" It's not real. Whether that means the whole story is not real or not, I don't know. I know Initrode from Office Space.
DailyWTF changes every company name to Initrode to protect the guilty.
A related story: a friend of mine submitted a story to DailyWTF, with a lot of detail removed so that the company or developers in question could not be identified. The story was published, the editors made up a lot of details to give the story some color and some of them just happened to exactly what happened in real life.
The conclusion of him being let go for not being able to produce code as rapidly as the rest of the team was not a surprise given his naming conventions.
I've given a lot of thought about this in the past, and I do agree with you but it's not because of Pluralis Maiestatis. From the reader's perspective, the team developing the product that I'm selling is simply a set of people. Whether the cardinality of such set happens to be 1 at this particular time, that's an implementation detail.
I guess it depends on the particular text and it's purpose, but if you are trying to run a business, using a singular I in marketing text would be weird, perhaps even a little narcissistic.
There are places were randoms, but related, names make sense, but not as random variables. Naming machine comes to mind: you may want to group machines on a same LAN with names from one constellation, then machines on another LAN with names from another constellation. Or have a little network cluster which is "neptune" and name your few machines after Neptune's moons. Stuff like that.
One of the craziest "naming frenzy" though was revealed during the Enron scandal, where they had created countless shell companies to hide their crimes. They'd name the companies using names from the Star Wars universe: "Chewco investment" after Chewbacca, etc. Hundreds of them.
I prefer to name them using related hotel room numbers. Machines in one lan get numbers from one floor, machines in another get numbers from a different floor. It’s not as romantic but when we trade places for a day you’ll at least be able to make some sense of the network structure, meanwhile I’ll still be trying to read the almanac.
I mean, naming machines is cute on the one hand, but on the other, once you scale up / out, who will remember that Neptune is from finance and the Pleiades is management? Like with microservices, it's probably better to name things for what they do or where they are instead of coming up with aliases, else you have to maintain a translation table.
When scaling up - hard- or software - it's better to be clear than clever.
Best scheme I've seen for a small fleet of development boxes (hardware, not VMs) was naming them after elements. Very easy to determine the IP address on that subnet.
I've seen this multiple times, and there seems to be a pattern emerging.
At first, people name the machines after the software they install on it. Then, when you get to about 4-5 machines, you start finding a "cute" naming convention (Constellations, Star Trek ships, mythological figures). As long as there is only a handful of machines, it's easier to remember which machine does what.
Then, as you start to scale up, between a few tens to a hundred, finding names gets harder, so you switch to a more standard naming conventions. Something that communicates the physical/logical location and the organizational unit, as well as an index for duplicates / replicas / redundant machines.
So I think it's fine to be clever as long as it's manageable. The moment it's going to start getting out of hand you can switch to a more scalable approach.
yes, of course, we had a small legacy cluster where I named our 36-odd machines after star trek ships. Knowing full well that when we went to a "real datacenter with real racks", the names would be rack-number/slot-number. My big mistake was zero indexing the slots. Never again.
If you're the only person who works in the rack, no problem. I worked as a tech and wired up machines once upon a time, ran fiber to core infrastructure, was boots on the ground for any physical access to the rack that was required, etc. I would not be surprised to hear a story of someone counting from 1 from the back of the rack and unplugging machine "7" or something.
Which makes sense, as there can't be "negative" objects, mostly.
Building floors are more ambiguous - there can be basement, ie "negative" floors. So, floors in continental Europe are generally indexed 0-based (basements ..., -2, -1, ground floor = 0, upper floors 1, 2, ...). A German friend of mine caused some confusion when she checked into her student dorm at a US college, and having being told that her room was on the first floor, asked whether there was an elevator, as she had heavy suitcases.
You can have multiple basement levels, which get numbered again. 1er Sousl-sol, 2eme Sous-sol etc. The ground floor might not be explicitly labeled as zero but the number between "one up" and "one down" is still zero.
We had a guy zero index a stack of shared Colo racks in one of our DCs a decade ago.
I sent remote hands to pull a server for a customer that was done with their contract and another for failure not pay.
Got the wrong boxes, disconnected two customers, put the servers on the shelf and left for the weekend.
So I cut a ticket to the next remote hands guy and tell home to get the boxes back up and running and we'll deal with it Monday.
Cut another ticket to a third text Monday to pull the boxes. Yeah, you guessed it wrong boxes again. Same customers, what the fuck.
Have the boxes reracked and drive out there to do it myself. Count the servers, wrong label, do some digging around, 'OH'. Pull the right server. Loose two customers. Cut tickets for all racks to be relabeled starting from one.
People don't expect 0 index in the physical world. It's just too clever by half.
Confirmed. Cute doesn’t scale.
At google, a building I was in had conference rooms named after craters on Mars. This didn’t work as well in practice as it sounded on paper.
But then people go from the memorable “Ebola” cluster to asynccompletionloggernodeweb where even with names that supposedly explain the function all the name parts are utterly generic and related to implementation not purpose. Not that people should keep Ebola. It should name services with a little skill and based on purpose not implementation. “Log4JarScanner” not “goAsyncFilerTreeScanner”. Tho the repo name is go-tree-jar cause I suck at names. Another cost of rushing is names it becomes hard to refactor out. At least we have hierarchical dns and longer names now, so it can have he data center/as and not be 8 chars. God bless the people that have name rules like Us1aesas02 - ProcessPostEventNodeDaemonServ-0322.Dallas.internal.example.com is more legible.
At the last job I had, there were a dozen or so microservices named after Greek/Roman mythology. The names were all quite clever if you knew the stories behind them... Eurybates handled inter-service communication, Stentor yelled at Hermes to send out emails, Hephaestus handled our cloud infrastructure, Janus handles some frontend pieces. The problem was that not everybody knew the stories behind them so it got really confusing.
At some point we got tired of it and made a very firm "all services going forward must have normal, descriptive names" rule and ended up with such shocking names as "Metrics" and "Authentication".
Switching jobs to other startups, it seems like "cute" microservice names are going out of style. Thankfully.
This is classic "pets" vs "cattle". At small scale, it's "Frank the frontend is down, let's get him working again because otherwise our users can't do anything", up to "front017.xxy is down, take it out back and shoot it".
I wonder if the notion of machines naming conventions being just about where to locate it on the rack, or which AWS data center it lives in, require further levels of abstraction about "pet" and "cattle".
I wish people would stop talking about cattle and pets. If you have or know someone who has worked in animal husbandry, you know it's a fragile metaphor.
My uncle owns a dairy farm with ~50 or so head of cattle.He gave each of them names and when one gets sick, he takes care of it.
Of course this is not a big industrial farm, but even so... not even actual cattle are as "cattle" as we're expected to treat computer-cattle -- and thanks to virtualization, computer-cattle are largely pretend anyway.
It's not only a shaky metaphor from the sentimental aspect, it's a downright bad one from the economic point of view. Individual cattle are expensive, and as a result, it makes economic sense to invest in their care. Even a ruthless person would not let a sick cow go without having a professional take a look to see if there was a way to restore it to good condition, but heartless or broke people often do decline to pay for veterinary care for a pet.
Fun story, my employer once had a contract with a huge pig farm like that and whenever we went on site we had to strip nude and shower off and then dress in clothes they provided, so we didn't contaminate the pigs with anything.
IIRC this was litigated by k8s years ago, hence we don’t have pet sets. But the metaphor is still in use because it’s so vivid and memorable. Is there a recommended replacement metaphor?
I actually think that garden vs farm is a good choice. The others are a bit funny to me :)
Another thing to consider is international cultures. There’s been concern around calling servers cattle and saying to just shoot them in the head during work meetings. Some cultures may have issues with that.
Only sorta. Software devs can and should treat their machines as cattle, yes. But the guys actually maintaining the racks shouldn't. They have finite space, definite machines, and when one is down they have to identify it and go fix it.
(Meanwhile moving further down, if the hardware guys are having to name ethernet or power ports on the wall due to their various temperaments, something is wrong. And moving up, it's reasonable for devs to name their services, but a signal of an issue if the VP has to know them)
There's a level of abstraction underneath which you should not be aware of to do your job...but someone likely has to (it's not quite turtles all the way down, but it probably ends with physicists and theory rather than cold hard fact).
It is still better to have a clearly descriptive name policy than pet names. Maybe if you only have a half dozen machines. But with physical machines its better to have something like Region-Datacenter-Row-Rack-shelf-vendor-OS or something like that, so you are looking for EPNYA13CDL and not Dionysus. So that location and attributes of the machines are readily apparent. That way you immediately know its an External Facing, Production server, in New York, Row A, Rack 13, Shelf C, Dell Machine, running Linux.
So I'd view "descriptive names" as a separate discussion.
The point with the analogy is not how you name them, but whether you identify them at all. I really don't care about the name of the machine that died while running my distributed service; I shouldn't ever have to know it. It should automatically be culled and replaced.
The person working in a datacenter really does care about the name of the rack that is faulty; they have to find and replace it. That rack can be named "RM22-R3-5", a super descriptive identifier, or "Tennyson", because the whole room is Elizabethan authors and poets; point is, he DOES need to identify it.
The whole cattle vs pets is about identification and uniqueness, not about whether the identity is self-descriptive or not.
A name generator makes the cattle herdable. Humans may remember zombie-wombat-kitten but not 3991. You might not ever interact with the machine directly but if you are hunting down an issue from log files it reduces cognitive load.
The important thing is cognitive load is the key thing, as is the possibility of confusion. Zombie-Wombat-Kitten is going to get shortened to ZWK, and hopefully there's no Zombie-Wombat-Keeper (or Zebra-Wagon-Kelp or Zombie-Wombat-Cat for those that just remember zombie-something-small-furry-animal). There's also little/no semantic meaning from that name. api-box-3-991 lets you know what type it is, and the relative vintage, so at a glance, it's not a version 2 box (which would be named api-box-2-991), and it's fairly late in the series, #991 vs #100.
Personally I like the second since we're having cattle not pets, but it's your fleet and this is rather bike-shed-y. :)
That type of naming drives me crazy. A server name should be descriptive and easily understood without context or documentation. For example, "api_1" makes a lot more sense than "proteus".
Have we? There are certainly no shortage of interviews for all the jobs I interviewed for 6 months ago. None have requested anything less than a full day of leetcode interviews.
I now wish there was a code sample. I searched github with a query that included both "ingrid" and "zaria", but couldn't find any results, at least not in a programming language from the 90s.
I don't care that he named his variables after women. What I do care about is that he named very temporary variables longer than a single character. 'n' and 'i' suffice and anything else is just pretentious.
I used to use i, j, and k; but at my last job single letter variables were frowned upon so I started using ii, jj, and kk and now much prefer those for simple loops. Searching for "ii" yields the loop much more reliably and quickly than "i" which is often a partial match to other words.
I developed the same habit after working on numerical code in Matlab. `i` can sometimes be sqrt(-1), but `ii` is always a variable. For greatest disambiguation, it's best practice to write `1i` for the complex number and leave `i` unused.
This is generally regarded as bad programming practice. The standard recommendation is to always use descriptive variable names. Especially since your IDE will help you type them (you are using an IDE, and not trying to bro it out in unadorned vim or Emacs, aren't you?).
Sure, but do you really write loops as (int counter = 0; counter < maxloop; counter++ { printline numberArray[counter] } ? Because that's kind of bonkers.
I think "idx" is superior to the other suggested options for this case.
It's still short but it describes what the loop variable is for, i.e indexing into the array.
Neither counter nor idx strike me as an improvement over i.
If you want to be descriptive, name the purpose of the loop variable. If it's an array of foos or an array named foo, then use something like fooIx. Then when you loop over an array of bars, use something like barIx. If you're counting retries, call it retryIx or retryCt (or something that describes what you're retrying, like loginAttemptIx).
Depending on the context, i may be fine. However, a single-character name like that is bound to be reused, which is a bad smell.
I clicked to the next most popular story at the site. It talks about how a developer wasn't allowed to use NuGet, and had to write packages you would normally import from it from scratch. At the bottom of the article, there's an ad for a product which wraps NuGet with permissions.
1) What a perfect way to deliver an ad.
2) Is the whole story fake, in order to deliver it?
3) What a perfectly "corporate" product, to further exacerbate developer frustrations in large company environments.
Please don't tell my company (Initech) about the existence of this product. I think there are several mid-level managers who would experience actual arousal at the thought of implementing it.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadThat said, even as shortly back in the 90s, mental illness was still ridiculed and something to be ashamed of, at least we've made progress in that area these days.
Whew, savage.
The code was at times almost poetic, but a nightmare to debug.
At least some of this sounds very plausible.
So you need to know if some obscure name is the name of a star, galaxy, or a nebula, in order to know if it's a router, firewall, or server.
Still better than naming shit after greek philosophers.
I thought I was being quite daring when the lab where I worked got a load of DEC Alpha workstations and I named them after Martian surface features as I'd just read Red Mars.
But there's still a difference between SET HOST RIVENDELL and naming all your variables after hobbits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion
All of my WiFi networks begin with Aardvark (shows up first in the network list) and all of my iOS devices are Aardwolf (shows up after Aardvark when used as a hotspot).
Variable names on the other hand can carry a lot of information, and naming them arbitrarily misses that opportunity for clarity.
"server three" actually does give you information. It's a server. Not a router. Not a firewall. Not a load balancer. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. Not your HSM. Not the telco gear. Etc... etc...
If "well I don't have any of those things", then sure, whatever. If you have three servers, then it doesn't matter.
But then you grow a bit. And now you have 20 servers, and kinda matters that you have a pattern that IS NOT "greek vs roman gods", but maybe "diskfulls" and "CPU-monsters". At a previous company we named these "db<n>" and "quick<n>". And did not reuse numbers, because then we could also infer the hardware generation (lower number means older hardware).
db<n> wasn't even running any relational database. We could have named them "storage<n>", and it wouldn't have made a difference to the fact that the name was incredibly useful.
Sometimes you can save the company your entire year's salary by reducing an outage by the few minutes not making typos or misunderstanding about "is this part of prod or not?". Communication is important, and coming up with the "funniest" name is not so funny when the site is down and you're trying to figure out the problem.
I do get a bit tired of the Everything is Enterprise approach to software. We aren't all trying to scale to the moon, and enterprise tooling has it's own costs.
Your laptop? Barely matters. Won't show up in a traceroute.
However, the internal applications I maintain at my day job have fun, easy to spell names. The servers they go on are prefixed with that name with their function after it. e.g.“snowplow db”. Everyone knows (or learns) that snowplow is the custom UI for the big SNP printers.
I’ve found having a name that’s short and relatively related in some way keeps different departments from coming up with their own shorthand way of referring to the programs.
Sitting logged in to server00831 from laptop firstlastname2016 all days is just soulcrushing.
A traceroute showing herodotus? Magellanic? Jesus fucking christ I can't even spell that into google to find out if it's a router or a firewall. I've worked at places like that and I can't figure out if the other people in the company hate each other, are super elitist (oh, you don't know who herodotus was? Did you even take ancient greek history at your public school?), or are some sort of double agent productivity saboteur.
I find it extremely disrespectful to get in the way of other people getting shit done, and some of these names are about as funny as wiping a colleague's hard drive (containing all their work in progress) for fun.
Don't make me spell empedokles when everything's on fire at 4am. That's insanely disrespectful.
You have three servers? Go nuts. You have at least 831 (per your example)? A thousand servers and your servers are still pets? I'd request a mandate to fix what is clearly broken culture and infrastructure, or quit.
At 4am the funny name is a joke at your expense, and shows that whoever named this machine does not respect you.
MU-TH-UR 6000, HAL 9000, Multivac, Deep Thought, Earth, etc
https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
I guess Minds count as "fictional computers" ;-)
I also knew another hyper smart chap who used to argue passionately for meaningless identifiers - his argument was that you couldn't actually represent anything meaningful about what an identifier was for in a short name so why try? Mind you, he was a MUMPS developer.
We would have got away with it due to the general lack of external code reviews but our boss heard us discussing a bug that involved one of them.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x35d1b3f3d7966a1dfe207aa4514c1...
(kiddng, do whatever you want, but I wouldn't work on that code)
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/24g6al/i_have_...
The 90s were weird I guess?
(for the sensitive, this is a joke about class naming convention, which didn't seem subject to female variable names in the article).
https://play.rust-lang.org/?code=fn%20main()%20%7B%0Amatch%2...
How would you feel to be locked up and separated into discrete units, only to be used up and thrown away?
The "Feed me a stray cat" of kernel error messages.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/p4v7q3/the...
Here's a random article i found from forbes that goes into it a bit: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinatroitino/2017/02/01/ko...
And yes, I have had a co-worker who drank weird smelly herbal teas and was obsessed with vitamins among other things. And a different one who had a mug that was covered with thick black crust inside and who insisted that it must never be washed.
I bet there was indeed a guy at a company who spoke about himself in the 3rd person, took off the lighting bulbs from his office (Masters of Doom talks about something similar, after all), used female names for his variables, and was fired. I would also bet that the "thanks for the tip" part is also true. I'm on the fence about the tea.
Everything else is probably poetic license to help the story flow better.
It led to being strange cool in the "in-group" which led to perfectly socially aware people acting strange where it would them cool points.
I am not complaining here, I enjoyed it back then. Only later I realized what went on and how much of the "strage" were actually "very high social skill being used".
The thing that links them is you have someone who ostensibly creates so much value everyone else is supposed to live with their demands.
It can be minor things. We had a trader in an firm I worked for who made the company hire a car to take him to work each morning. Certainly not a strange thing but it wasn't exactly something the couldn't pay for himself, nor a benefit that everyone enjoyed.
Opera
Conflating pathetic with evil is a bad habit.
I have a bone to pick with whoever came up with this and thought it would be a good idea.
Edit: From what I could gather in a couple of minutes it still seems to be pretty widespread. There have been some court cases about it, to get specific churches to silence the bells, but not in general.
I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.
That was my classroom throughout the 80s and 90s.
As a child it fascinated me, but as an adult (who had a job in the area) it got tedious really quickly. 15 minutes is not that long.
On a more everyday note, it's very useful if you know you're approaching top of the hour and you've got a task or a meeting due precisely at :00.
It is set in a future where people's lives became so dominated by having to constantly use their watches and clocks to coordinate every aspect of their day that their health, sanity, and productivity were being serious harmed.
As a result clocks and watches were outlawed. Having one became a serious offense that would earn you a long jail sentence.
Instead of clocks and watches to coordinate people were assigned to groups, and there were public chimes or bells or something (I forget which) that would signal when it was time for your group to do various things. So for example if you are in the red group and want to go grocery shopping, you just wait until you hear the bell that signals red shopping time is starting.
And of course there's working hours / clocking in and out.
I intensely hate music at supermarkets, especially just before Christmas. They would also need to ban children during “spectrum hour”: I avoid shopping just after school is out to avoid screaming kids or kids on the loose.
Wouldn’t it feel like you were participating in a movie genre if everybody was on the autism spectrum at a particular time in the supermarket?
I have a cheap casio watch that has this feature, and i love it. It doesn’t beep like an alarm continuously, it just does a singular beep at the top of the hour. It isn’t obnoxiously loud, and it helps me being mindful of time, as it is too easy for me to get engrossed in something and lose track of time.
No one has expressed a concern so far at work (back when we were in the office), and it has imo been even appreciated. Meetings started running over much less, and no one takes offense, as people by now know it is an automated beep and not me trying to push them “please end this meeting soon, it is running too long for my liking.” It isn’t super loud, and is easy to ignore (as it sounds like a random singular faint beep somewhere, cannot even pinpoint the direction it came from, but by now I have told everyone already what it was).
Note: years after I started using that feature, Apple introduced a similar feature for Apple Watch, except instead of a beep it does a single vibration on your wrist that only you could feel/perceive. That only vindicated my belief in usefulness of such a feature lol.
I have had a quiet word with colleagues who set their watches to beep, then a slightly louder word with their manager when they persisted. The Apple Watch vibrate is different -- it's not going to disturb anyone else. It also wouldn't be quite so bad were it noisy, because at least smart watches should have accurate (and matching) time.
I'm glad for you that you have understanding colleagues :).
And fully agreed with your point about that feature on Apple Watch being all-around better due to only notifying you and not bothering anyone else around.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.nadolski.bl...
No major concerns about it though, it doesn't negatively affect things.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watcher...
"I need to do this now" became "Daddy needs to do this now"... It is weird, and entirely unnecessary, kids acquire understanding of "I" and "you" quite fast. It just came and never went. I think I was trying to be less ambiguous when conversations did not involve only me and the kids, but also Mum and others, or when I somehow want to emphasize the context and my role (?) I have no idea and it is fading, only a lot of company present might trigger it - or recounting stories to others.
But maybe I just never realized how weird it is - I would raise both eyebrows if a colleague at work would talk like that in a "normal" context.
My friend confirmed that Felipe speaks like this.
The funny thing is, apparently until the Apprentice, and this being pointed out, he didn’t even realise (???), and then found it impossible to keep up.
If anything, people with underlying oddities might develop several quirks on top of them. Or they realise that one can get away with strange behaviour and don’t even try to suppress ever new and interesting patterns.
My 2.5 year old daughter does this. I suspect she'll grow out of it at some point before she gets a job, though.
As far as quirks go… it depends why someone has a quirk. If someone isn’t neurotyoical, they can seem like they have a lot of weird behaviors. Once you know the underlying cause, it makes sense and you stop thinking about it. (Or at least I do.)
Edit: Corrected book title.
Also, in case of adult women, if they speak in third person, to me it sounds あざとい(azatoi). I am sorry, I don't know how to phrase it in English without ruining the nuance. It's a mix of calculating, cunning, and a bit flirtatious? Either way, you also need to consider the tone of their voice, body language, and the contents itself. (Maybe if they want you to carry the shopping bag because it's a bit heavy for them, they might use this way of speaking.)
That being said, I do not have any real-life examples to back this up so take it with a grain of salt.
The closest word I can think for what you describe is insincere. See also: almost every influencer on TikTok.
Going between languages is hard. :)
One can imagine growing up as a child and hearing Japanese with its variety of first-person pronouns, which also are not used as much as we use them in English, and choosing to use your name as it is consistently associated with you.
That said, I've had only a smattering of Japanese study, so definitely take all of that with a grain of salt.
I'm not a linguist, but it seems like there's no grammatical difference between first/second/third person in Japanese - you can consider all the sentences to be in third person.
When you're regularly calling everybody else by their name, calling yourself by your name makes sense.
However, do keep in mind this is anecdotal so I don't know how much it applies to more broad settings.
Actually, calling the other one by their name + san/chan/kun is the most common way. Using "anata" (= you) can even be considered rude under certain circumstances. My wife never calls me "anata". Also, pronouns are often omitted if it is clear who is being meant (a bit like in Italian).
Using or not using the pronoun has the same emphasis as saying to someone:
'You're drunk.' versus pointedly saying 'You, are drunk'.
----
Soy Latte, por favor! (In Spanish this translates literally as 'I'm a latte. please.')
If not their first name, then their title "younger brother/sister" (adik), "older brother sister" (kakak). Interestingly, when the second child is born, the "adik" becomes the "kakak", which you would think would be confusing but the switch happens pretty naturally.
To people that actually do this, do not erase yourself; you are a person, you have needs and an identity of your own. You can express your needs, not a mythical 3rd person parental figure.
Honestly, I think its a great way to get some perspective (but I am on the spectrum). I also find it plain fun, and -sometimes- cute. Doesn't mean I always do it in family circle. Its just that, in a work environment, there's an etiquette, and this one isn't part of it. If you're too different (e.g. weird in this context), they don't want you, and one way or another you'll get cast out. Goes for weird people too.
Absolutely. In life, most people are "normal", almost by the definition of normal, but there's a big penumbra of people who don't habitually and reflexively conform to normal. If you're a little bit odd, you spend effort suppressing it and actively conforming. In autistic circles, this is called "masking" for behaviors deemed autistic; in LGBT circles, this is called "passing", and so on. But once someone has fallen sufficiently far from the middle of the normal distribution that they can't pass, or can't be bothered to pass (it can be a lot of work), they stop trying to pass and you can spot all their non-normal behaviors.
(What is "normal" is of course culturally determined and varies by your local culture, social class, etc, and covers all sorts of things. Americans and Brits are told to hold forks differently, for example)
Aka, someone that’s homicidal is abnormal but not necessarily eccentric.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079384/characters/nm0122675
-I've heard the quip -'Being considered normal just means you are as weird as the national average.'
And that's not a truism-- people of all ages make the mistake of coupling the potential expression of some behavior X with an entire group of behaviors they are afraid they will catch like "cooties." Then they decide not to publicly express behavior X for fear of that.
Perhaps that's not what OP meant by "acquiring," but there's a high probability some HN'er read it that way. Hence, my comment here.
Which doesn't mean the example isn't fictional, it just means I would expect someone who's entirely comfortable with referring to themself in the third person to be considerably less likely than the average software developer to worry that a variable-naming scheme that amuses them might be seen as a bit odd by the rest of the team.
when i get exhausted by it, i too can crack! luckily it's gotten better, and i now just kinda sit in my abuse response. knowing that keeping my cool is the only thing that can prevent my parents generational trauma being passed on.
it's exhausting, and you're doing a great job to be able to recognize it! i too started my journey with a list of situations in which i got shitty like you have, and ended it realizing i just need those in my life to give me the same pass i give them if i regress. good luck to you on finding a solution that helps!
I can't tell if the abuse was was made worse by my peculiar brain malfunctions, or gave me better skills for coping. I think it it might be both.
> all hell breaks loose
mean that you get angry?
It means the mask drops, and people see me getting angry, being less than composed, not being polished.. whatever it is I don't want them to see.
[Edit] Several other chat services copy that behaviour.
It’s papa that is tired, not me.
We're in the same boat. And for a few month I've found it pretty annoying and I've tried to stop, but I haven't manage to do so. What's wrong with our brains?!
Other than that, you're fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_avoidance
[Edit] The autistic kid in Mercury Rising referred to himself by firstname (can't remember his name).
Sten has been through the dotcom bust. And 2008. And the crypto mess. And a pandemic.
Sten’s blog would be mesmerizing.
But this answer just leads to more questions.
A related story: a friend of mine submitted a story to DailyWTF, with a lot of detail removed so that the company or developers in question could not be identified. The story was published, the editors made up a lot of details to give the story some color and some of them just happened to exactly what happened in real life.
It sells way better.
One of the craziest "naming frenzy" though was revealed during the Enron scandal, where they had created countless shell companies to hide their crimes. They'd name the companies using names from the Star Wars universe: "Chewco investment" after Chewbacca, etc. Hundreds of them.
When scaling up - hard- or software - it's better to be clear than clever.
At first, people name the machines after the software they install on it. Then, when you get to about 4-5 machines, you start finding a "cute" naming convention (Constellations, Star Trek ships, mythological figures). As long as there is only a handful of machines, it's easier to remember which machine does what.
Then, as you start to scale up, between a few tens to a hundred, finding names gets harder, so you switch to a more standard naming conventions. Something that communicates the physical/logical location and the organizational unit, as well as an index for duplicates / replicas / redundant machines.
So I think it's fine to be clever as long as it's manageable. The moment it's going to start getting out of hand you can switch to a more scalable approach.
It's still likely bad. Your brain is simply not wired to zero index physical objects.
Building floors are more ambiguous - there can be basement, ie "negative" floors. So, floors in continental Europe are generally indexed 0-based (basements ..., -2, -1, ground floor = 0, upper floors 1, 2, ...). A German friend of mine caused some confusion when she checked into her student dorm at a US college, and having being told that her room was on the first floor, asked whether there was an elevator, as she had heavy suitcases.
I sent remote hands to pull a server for a customer that was done with their contract and another for failure not pay.
Got the wrong boxes, disconnected two customers, put the servers on the shelf and left for the weekend.
So I cut a ticket to the next remote hands guy and tell home to get the boxes back up and running and we'll deal with it Monday.
Cut another ticket to a third text Monday to pull the boxes. Yeah, you guessed it wrong boxes again. Same customers, what the fuck.
Have the boxes reracked and drive out there to do it myself. Count the servers, wrong label, do some digging around, 'OH'. Pull the right server. Loose two customers. Cut tickets for all racks to be relabeled starting from one.
People don't expect 0 index in the physical world. It's just too clever by half.
At some point we got tired of it and made a very firm "all services going forward must have normal, descriptive names" rule and ended up with such shocking names as "Metrics" and "Authentication".
Switching jobs to other startups, it seems like "cute" microservice names are going out of style. Thankfully.
I wonder if the notion of machines naming conventions being just about where to locate it on the rack, or which AWS data center it lives in, require further levels of abstraction about "pet" and "cattle".
My uncle owns a dairy farm with ~50 or so head of cattle.He gave each of them names and when one gets sick, he takes care of it.
Of course this is not a big industrial farm, but even so... not even actual cattle are as "cattle" as we're expected to treat computer-cattle -- and thanks to virtualization, computer-cattle are largely pretend anyway.
Restaurant vs Cafeteria
Espresso vs Drip
Cafe vs Starbucks
Backyard BBQ vs McDonalds
I actually think that garden vs farm is a good choice. The others are a bit funny to me :)
Another thing to consider is international cultures. There’s been concern around calling servers cattle and saying to just shoot them in the head during work meetings. Some cultures may have issues with that.
(Meanwhile moving further down, if the hardware guys are having to name ethernet or power ports on the wall due to their various temperaments, something is wrong. And moving up, it's reasonable for devs to name their services, but a signal of an issue if the VP has to know them)
There's a level of abstraction underneath which you should not be aware of to do your job...but someone likely has to (it's not quite turtles all the way down, but it probably ends with physicists and theory rather than cold hard fact).
The point with the analogy is not how you name them, but whether you identify them at all. I really don't care about the name of the machine that died while running my distributed service; I shouldn't ever have to know it. It should automatically be culled and replaced.
The person working in a datacenter really does care about the name of the rack that is faulty; they have to find and replace it. That rack can be named "RM22-R3-5", a super descriptive identifier, or "Tennyson", because the whole room is Elizabethan authors and poets; point is, he DOES need to identify it.
The whole cattle vs pets is about identification and uniqueness, not about whether the identity is self-descriptive or not.
Personally I like the second since we're having cattle not pets, but it's your fleet and this is rather bike-shed-y. :)
* Only referred to themselves in the third person.
* Apparently thought they lived in the 17th century.
* Wrote software at work but intentionally had no computers or electronics at home.
* Lived in one of the buildings at work.
The 90s were indeed a unique time in the software development industry.
foo
bar
baz
In that order
If you want to be descriptive, name the purpose of the loop variable. If it's an array of foos or an array named foo, then use something like fooIx. Then when you loop over an array of bars, use something like barIx. If you're counting retries, call it retryIx or retryCt (or something that describes what you're retrying, like loginAttemptIx).
Depending on the context, i may be fine. However, a single-character name like that is bound to be reused, which is a bad smell.
1) What a perfect way to deliver an ad. 2) Is the whole story fake, in order to deliver it? 3) What a perfectly "corporate" product, to further exacerbate developer frustrations in large company environments.
Please don't tell my company (Initech) about the existence of this product. I think there are several mid-level managers who would experience actual arousal at the thought of implementing it.