I was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people.
But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
Maybe it sounds like major redflag? It sounds a bit manipulative. People use it to lie and to get out of out of their obligations?
Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
I don't think people are upvoting this for the fact at the top of "say something surprising" [1], but it indeed surprised me:
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
The kind of person who "feigns surprise" has an insufferable personality that will leak out no matter what. You can't fix it "one weird trick" at a time.
After that one xkcd, I learned to follow up on "you don't know X?!" with "lucky you, you get to learn a cool thing today". It goes much better than before.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadI was really impressed with how successful RC is at maintaining an environment where people can learn and grow. Part of that is certainly selection effects- the point of center is self directed growth around programming, and there's an interview process that I assume filters especially hostile people.
But I think the social rules do a lot too, and have been trying to pay attention to the effects on others when someone breaks them at work. No Feigned Surprise is a particularly important one around people who are trying to learn and already a little insecure. It's great when they've learned a new thing, and you want to celebrate that, not meet it with denigration!
I feel like the "falsehoods programmers believe about [thing]" is a little similar, but about correctness and never about performance.
Typical "feighning suprise" is with pet attack. "It does not bite". What a big suprise when it does bite, it "never did it before, did you provoke it"? Later you find that thing send 5 people to hospital, and entire street has delivery services suspended.
They either meant to post https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/ or https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/ with a title that has any relation with it.
> I can write 500MB/s to a hard drive? that's so much!
Turns out a Seagate 2X18 can write at 528 MiB/s according to its spec sheet. [2] My rule of thumb was that HDDs could do like 100MB/s (aka 800 Mbps) but I guess between density improvements and this new "dual-actuator" class, it's gotten a lot faster. HDD seek time has basically been stuck for 30+ years and probably will remain so but capacity has increased a lot, and the throughput for sequential access probably should scale with capacity [edit: times rpm, thanks Retr0id]. For a while I think it wasn't increasing, but I guess they decided to fix that?
SSDs of course can do way more than 500 MB/s, and you can do better by compressing as you write (depending on your data), and you can stripe across multiple HDDs, but it turns out none of those are necessary.
[1] as I write this, the title "no feigning surprise" suggests <https://wizardzines.com/comics/no-feigning-surprise/> but the link points to "say something surprising" <https://wizardzines.com/comics/surprise/>.
[2] https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-2x1...