Completely agree! It’s SO much easier to lighten the mood and keep things upbeat and productive in an actual conversation vs. just text-based feedback. For example it makes it easy to throw in self-deprecating anecdotes of your own when discussing mistakes / needed changes, which can really help put juniors at ease. It’s just worlds better in >90% of scenarios.

Completely understand the frustration here. Mistakes happen, even competent people sincerely trying to do a good job can overlook things, etc. But if it’s a pattern of just copying and pasting code without really even trying to understand what it does, that’s a big problem that needs to be addressed. And frankly they should feel embarrassed if it happens more than once or twice.

OTOH, delivering criticism in a way that winds up productive for all involved is difficult at best, and the outcome depends on the junior as much as it does the senior. What good is being right if it ultimately just alienates you from your team? Tough situation for sure, and one of the many reasons it’s so important to hire carefully (which is itself a whole huge can of worms too!).

Can you simply ask them to walk through their submission line by line with you, explaining what it’s doing? If you’ve never asked that before it might come across as a strange request, but if you phrase it well it’s possible this causes them to notice their poor understanding without you ever seeming to point it out.

Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.

Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.

Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.

I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.

Actually after a re-read, you were constructive and made reasonable points throughout. My bad, I dunno why I interpreted that last one so harshly, wasn’t really my business anyway.

What a dismissive, reductive response. As if your point of view is the only one with any merit.

Just want to back you up here and say the deeper ethos sometimes DOES matter. People need to stop acting like a piece of generally good advice applies to every situation ever. The “stop gatekeeping” pendulum has swung a bit too far (although the principle is great and, incidentally, punk as fuck!).

When did we decide everything has to be for everyone, and everyone has a right to participate in everything, just by virtue of existing? What would these folks say to someone who walks around in - e.g., Sikh cultural accoutrement - but has zero interest (and even a snobbish disdain) for the underlying religion? “Good for them, we shouldn’t gatekeep”? Fuck outta here.

On the one hand, all culture and art is syncretic, full stop. I’m not saying punk rock is off limits in any way, that’d be absurd. But at this point it’s got what, like 40 years of maintaining a broadly consistent ethos or spirit? That’s remarkable, it’s valuable, and it’s only been possible because of gatekeeping - passionate community members putting forth effort to maintain the community identity. In a time when every damn thing of cultural significance is being hollowed out and commoditized for profit, we should all celebrate punk rock staying punk.

I’ve noticed this too.

I like it, very succinct way to get the point across.

That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.

I just don’t agree that most folks mean the middle panel. It really depends who and where you ask. A lot of people have - for example - a big problem with Affirmative Action because it looks like the middle panel - different help given to different people.

I think it depends a lot on the people using the words. People who don’t believe that the systematized slavery as practiced in the US produced long-lasting generational effects, for example, might say that treating people equally moving forward is best. Under that belief system, everyone starts on ~even footing and gets the same opportunities, so actually it’s less fair to make special cases for folks!

In my view those folks are starting from a deeply flawed premise (and usually one they’ve arrived at in order to justify the worldview they already hold), so their conclusions are worthless. But I think they’d meet the criteria of advocating for equality and against equity, and sincerely mean it. It’s not hypothetical either, I’ve met people like this - depressingly many, in fact.

Excellent work, and thank you for sharing. What a win! I’m always heartened to hear about straightforward open source wins against leeches 👍

Hey, thanks, that’s a useful (and probably fairly accurate) distinction and I’m happy to find that a positive shift in my viewpoint, if minor. The corruption might be a really big problem or it might be one guy who’s an aberration for being wildly outside the court’s norms, really unclear on that part. But I needed a solid reminder that it’s not quite yet another ruined and hypocritical institution we once held dear.