If you haven’t read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M’s backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):
# Assuming df is your DataFrame
# Show the plot
plt.show()
That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn’t actually think about the code at all.
What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there’s bigger issues to watch out for?
This is gonna be controversial.
When I find out someone is a Christian, I ask them about their favourite part of the sermon on the mount. If they don’t know it, they’re ‘cultural Christians’ who’ve never opened a bible. If they’re familiar with the sermon, it means they do the work. The sermon on the mount is the section of the bible where Jesus explained to people what values they should hold and how they should behave in order to call themselves his followers.
I’m an ex-Christian and so are a lot of people who just don’t know it yet.
What’s your favourite part? I’m agnostic. I always say I have faith but religion can fuck off. I’m big on what he said about prayer in that it’s a private affair. I also like blessing the righteous but then I feel people have polluted what being righteous is.
Sermon on the mount?
Tap for spoiler
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Aside from the sermon on the mount, I’m particularly fond of the parable of the sheep and the goats.
Its the single longest passage in the bible about who gets into heaven and who doesn’t. Surprisingly has nothing about accepting Jesus as your lord and savior.
Tap for spoiler
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
The part I repeat to myself most often is “blessed are the peace-makers”. Because there are so many situations where I shouldn’t say what I’m thinking. :)
“Blessed are the cheesemakers”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”
At least I think that’s from the sermon on the mount. Raised Christian, but I’ve been a self identifying atheist for about 15 years at this point.
You are correct.
Source: a different ex Christian
It’s a good test when working with people that you don’t know, contractors, etc. In the automotive industry we work with a lot of electronic system suppliers and they deliver embedded software in the form of ECU. Software in this form can hide a multitude of horrors so the only way to keep track of it is to make release declarations, implying testing has been carried out. If that’s not present, you can’t trust it.
When I first heard about the brown M&M thing, I thought it was just celebrities being petty, or maybe a joke. Years later, when I heard Roth’s explanation, I thought it was absolute genius.
This is really niche, but most organisations have a Microsoft Active Directory, or equivalent, that tracks users, their credentials, and their permissions. The sign of a bad AD admin: permissions directly applied to user objects without any intermediary objects or abstraction in AD.
Turtle.
My 11th grade English teacher would hand back essay assignments with grades at the top and no markings throughout. I tended to get high but not perfect grades, but the impetuousness of youth got the better of me. In my next essay, which I wrote normally, I wrote the word “turtle” in the middle of a sentence somewhere in the middle of each main body paragraph. Just somewhere in the middle of a sentence I turtle copy pasted the word “turtle.”
That paper made a 94. There was no mention of it. I’m pretty sure she just graded on who she liked and I wasn’t a problem.
I had a teacher who was rumoured to make up their opinion of a student in the first two semesters, then just eyeball it from there.
I submitted my final assignment hosted on a web server and gave them the link as my submission - saving the logs to see who connected to the URL. Anyway, no one outside me connected to that web server before it was graded.
83/100 which honestly feels about exactly what it deserves. So even knowing they just skimmed the source code on most of my assignments, I never found that the grades were out of synch with how I myself would have graded them.
I see what you did there
did you turtle?
He turtley did
In Windows XP/Vista times I used to be the “computer kid”, helping others in the neighbourhood with their computers, in exchange of some pocket money. My brown M&M was a huge amount of desktop icons - nine times out of ten it meant that the issue with the computer (typically “why is it so slow???”) could be easily solved by:
- uninstalling crapware
- updating and running the anti-virus
- updating the system itself
- running disk cleanup
- defragmenting the hard disk
And boom, as if by magic, the computer was over 9000 times faster!
The desktop icons themselves aren’t a big deal, but they show that the person is rather sloppy on maintenance of their own machine. And they probably can’t even move files here and there.
I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.
They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.
45 minutes? How many M&Ms were there? 🤨
Part of my job (fibre project engineer) is to oversee the building of fibre optic spine cables. Think of an 864 fibre cable snaking it’s way through town with various drop off nodes for local access networks to be built.
I also oversee the termination of the cable in the exchange, and the testing of the spine to make sure it’s within loss limits and that the right fibres are going to the right nodes.
I will often put a minor fault on in the exchange to see if the guys doing the testing pick up on the issue and report it back to me. Maybe a slightly dislodged connector, or fibre 275 crossed with fibre 276, for example.
Most of the time, the guys doing the testing will pickup on the issue and resolve it report it back to me. If it doesn’t get picked up on, I’ll make sure I keep a closer eye on the build crew.
I think this is pretty genius
I need VIM mode on my text editor.
The best vim mode is the one not emulating it.
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Reminds me of a time in elementary school when our class had a lesson on the importance of reading all instructions before starting a project, then we had a test with long, elaborate instructions. Of course, the very last sentence was something along the lines of disregarding all previous instructions and setting your pencil down. I think maybe one other kid besides me got it and was sitting there while the rest of the class was furiously working away, some of them wondering how we were already finished.
Same here. One of the instructions was “write your name on the board.” Hardcore shaming.
Had a similar teacher as my AP US History teacher. I figured out you could copy/paste anything so long as it met the length requirements for papers. I ended up just using the lyrics to my favorite songs for every one and never got below a A- on any of them lol.
I had a biology teacher that just looked for key words and if they were there you got credit. It didn’t matter I’d you used them incorrectly as long as they were there.
I don’t have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don’t have people who violate boundaries they don’t share, so if I said “Actually, I think I may be a woman” or “I have been thinking about leaving the country” they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.
My kids school used my kids photos in their community outreach pamphlets that went to tens of thousands of homes in the area.
We have a media policy contract on file with them to not do this. When it was brought up they acted like we were overreacting.
I told them I had history with a stalker in my past that still tries to reach out and make contact, and they have endangered my children because of their negligence. I asked them if they were ready to open themselves for a lawsuit should anything happen in the future and the Superintenant just sat there quietly with nothing to say.
IMO people don’t take their privacy seriously enough until someone is hunting them down to rape and kill them.
I leave a statement in each version of my resume, and see if a recruiter mentions it. It’s like “ask me about the western 5-legged salamander and how it’s linked to the Olympics” (hint: 5 rings) or something equally absurd but a little more relevant.
If they say the line, then I know they read it. If I ask, “so, did you catch the Olympics?”, and they still don’t pick up on it, they’re judged.
I used to work in serious sim. Think using game engines for realistic combat stimulation and training by the army. Systems had to interact and had different jobs rts, fps, driving simulator, etc.
So they each needed a unit database that was unique to that system. They also usually had a two versions a classified database and a less accurate non classified database.
A quick way to test was there was a unit type that was always set to invulnerable in unclassified databases. So drop one in the sim and drop some artillery on it. If it wasn’t destroyed you were unclassified.
Why
Some people can see classified systems and some can’t.
Seems like a really roundabout way to do this, surely a unit test (no pun intended) would’ve been a better solution?
We should have totally called it a unit test.
So the area for this was used for both training of soldiers and demos for people without security clearances. So it frequently had to be switched between the two. So you get everything setup and ready.
As a last test you drop the unit in and blam it. Then you go to each system and check the unit status. If it’s ok you are good to demo to civilians.
A unit test wouldn’t work because it’s a deployment situation and a lot the software wasn’t under our control. A lot of time it was just making sure the DIS HLA gateway was properly configured and entities remapped.
I need a towel hanging from the door of the oven or nothing is being done correctly.
When it’s time for my car to get an oil change I make sure my windshield fluid is empty. It’s a full service oil change and they claim they check ALL fluids. If it’s still empty I question how good or a job they’ve done and what else they skip
My friend bought an old BMW and was taking it to the dealer for maintenance.
Every oil change there was some overpriced small thing wrong that he had to pay for and then adding insult injury at the end they would charge him serious amounts of money for fluid top off. The amount they charged him for windshield washer fluid was enough to buy about five containers of windshield washer fluid. So tired of these antics he went out and he filled the windshield washer fluid 100% to the top there was no air in the jug whatsoever. He took it in for an oil change, they charged him for a windshield washer top off. He demanded the service manager and said that he had topped it off to the very top and there’s no way they added even a teaspoon of windshield washer fluid to it. The service manager refused to take the windshield washer fill off the bill and said they’d give him a credit for the next time he needed windshield washer fluid.
He never went back.
Honestly, the first mistake was a rookie mistake, to trust the dealer on maintenance. The dealer is always a vampire. The only reason to go to the dealer is when your trusted local repair garage recommends it when they do not have a real solution to the problem.
Good thing your friend never went back to the dealer.
Windshields. Unless you just want a generic from Safelite or wherever, OEM windshields are typically superior.
But yes, stay away from the Stealer
FWIW 3rd party companies (safelite in my experience) can get and install genuine OEM glass. Does not always have to be a dealer.
or a free recall repair
