Oh wow, you may have just solved the issue I’ve been having with email chains I pin coming back! I’ll have to give that unpin trick a try–thank you! That workaround shouldn’t be necessary, of course, but I’m happy to have another option to try to unpin some of the long-past-relevant conversations that have been pinned in my inbox for over a year 😅

And thank you as well for the info about Teams phones. Some folks at work floated the idea of switching to Teams phones instead of our current VOIP setup, but if they don’t show missed calls, I’m glad that idea never came to fruition!

Oh goodness, the Windows filepath limit has caused so many headaches at work. Even if you enable longer filepaths, not all applications pay attention to that, since at some point, Microsoft promised a specific filepath length and some applications hard-coded it in, so Microsoft is kind of locked in to supporting that being the default max filepath length. Not sure if any Office applications fall into that camp, but given that most filepath length errors I see are from Windows itself silently failing to finish extracting a zip archive, it wouldn’t surprise me!

Whenever I’ve read that passage, I’ve usually considered his underdog-ness to be from him deciding to not wear even the king’s fancy armor, and from him being the youngest child in his family. So he looked even more dwarfed by Goliath than he would have had he worn armor, and since he wasn’t one of the elder children in his family (despite being a teen or adult), no one in the culture at the time was expecting him to become a hero–much less a king later! But him eschewing the armor in order to keep his agility and range of motion for using a sling makes total sense–I think King Saul was just miffed that his offer of his own personal armor was rebuffed 🤣

EDIT: minor correction

Thank you for introducing me to Wirth’s Law. I’ll be citing that whenever I write code that takes forever to run even on powerful compute 🤣

Interesting! My last biology class is a tiny speck in my rearview mirror, so I’m not sure that I’m understanding it the way your class meant for it to be understood, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Too much of one kind of input to a living thing without an output to balance it out can be disastrous.

Those are good points! I can imagine positive feedback to be desirable in some situations and to some extent–a musician’s amplifier needs to have some positive feedback to amplify the frequencies they care about, for instance, but likely also needs some negative to cancel out frequencies they don’t want to amplify, either in the amplifier itself or in the sound booth. Or maybe for some chemical processes, where you always want to make more of product X, and you’re just adjusting the positive feedback to keep the production of X at a certain range of acceptable rates. It all comes down to the math and the desired output! My areas of work are mainly related to areas where negative feedback is desired, but it’s really very context-specific.

As for “more optimal,” I think I picked up the habit of avoiding that phrase due to grad school being my life for so long. A lot of my cohort was very controls-focused in their research, and several of the controls profs would correct presenting/proposing/defending students if they used that phrase, so we got used to either avoiding the phrase entirely or jokingly pointing it out if a fellow student said it. But in my full-time job now, things are much more relaxed with respect to that sort of thing. Maybe in a few years, I won’t hear those profs’ “can you tell me what you mean by ‘more optimal?’” didactic questions in my head when I encounter the phrase 🤣 And yeah, exponential growth is another good example! It’s clear in the colloquial sense, but my engineer-brain still thinks “wait a minute…” when I hear it!

Youtube Premium also includes Youtube Music, which allows downloading music-specific playlists for offline listening, but you’re stuck playing them in the Youtube Music app, AFAIK.

It’s the really cool bird from that catchy meme song! I love it! 😍

“Positive feedback loop” to indicate a situation in which circumstances feeding into each other result in more good things happening, or “negative feedback loop” to indicate bad circumstances feeding into each other to result in more bad things happening.

I have worked with enough controls folks to know that positive feedback in a control loop often leads to instability (bad), while negative feedback in a control loop can be used to stabilize the system (good). It just comes down to the math in the situation.

So people saying that they are in a positive feedback loop can, to a controls person, sound counterintuitive. E.g. “I’m in a positive feedback loop of working out, having more energy as a result, and working out more, making me healthier!” would be momentarily confusing.

I did grad school at an engineering/STEM-focused school, and the campus psychiatrist actually used these terms correctly when discussing anxiety attacks! As an engineer myself, that made my nerdy heart happy 🤣

Another control theory phrase issue: The phrase “more optimal” is incorrect and very well may earn the speaker an “umm, actually” from any controls folks in the conversation. Optimality is not a scale–either something is optimal (with respect to a specific metric), or it isn’t.

(EDIT: reducing verbosity)

I second this, and would generally recommend finding some people to talk to who are in jobs similar to those you are considering, even if you aren’t able to shadow them. And you don’t have to be in university to do this–ask people you know if they know anyone in jobs or careers related to those you are considering, and ask to pick those people’s brains. Ask them about what they like and dislike about their current job, what previous jobs/positions they’ve had and what they learned from those roles, what decisions they made that shaped their career path, what advice they would give to someone curious about or just starting in their field, etc.

I’ve found that people who are passionate about their jobs/careers often love to talk about how they got to where they are and what they wish they had known earlier along their career journey. Heck, most people enjoy talking about themselves in general, so don’t be shy! I did this with a couple of friends’ parents when I was trying to decide what to major in in college/university, and more informally along my early career trajectory with others I met, and it has been a huge help. One of the people I talked to even helped me realize how flexible a degree program I was considering could be, and she was absolutely right! And who knows–you may even meet someone who turns out to be a great mentor.

Picking a career path is intimidating, but it’s a path, not a label you’re stuck with the rest of your life! Even if you take a job that isn’t a good fit for you, it can teach you more about your strengths/weaknesses and what growth areas interest you. When you come to a fork in the road of your career path–you learn about a promotion opportunity, see a job posting at another company, or even just have a conversation with your manager at your current job–you’ll have the opportunity to make decisions that could help you find a role that’s a better fit for you (or even re-shape your existing role to fit your strengths and passions better). Learning about other people’s careers–especially the choices they made and what came of them–can be a huge help as you walk down your own career path.

Best wishes for your journey! It’s completely normal to be uncertain in making big career decisions, but you got this!

(EDIT: minor rephrase)

This is a great analogy! To build on these points and the analogy: I like to think of my coding in terms of inputs, outputs, and what needs to happen to the inputs to get the outputs I want: that is, inputs->how->outputs. So for this buttered toast analogy, your inputs would be:

• toaster
• electricity
• bread
• butter
• knife
• plate
• operator’s hands

The desired output: toasted bread on the plate with butter spread on one side.

The “how” is the sequence of specific instructions the instructor gives to the operator.

This approach is even more helpful as you start working on larger projects; as you think about a problem you’re trying to solve, try to break the overall input->how->output into smaller modules of input->how->output, and then you can use those modules (often called “functions” or “methods”) in the overall “how.” Let’s say you want the instructor and operator to prepare a full breakfast with bacon, eggs, and buttered toast. You’ll have some more inputs, of course (frying pan, raw bacon, shelled eggs, stove, in addition to the toast components), but since you already made a known-good make_buttered_toast function, you can incorporate that function into the pipeline to go from your more comprehensive set of inputs to the full breakfast outputs, and you can make separate functions for making the bacon and making the eggs. Finally, your overall program can then call your bacon, eggs, and toast functions to result in the desired output of a full breakfast.

Now here’s where breaking the problem down into smaller input->how->output chunks really comes in handy: one day, you are tweaking your breakfast-making code, and suddenly, your overall outputs have good bacon and good toast, but the eggs wind up dumped half-cooked on the stove. But since you made nice, modularized functions for toast, bacon, and eggs, you automatically know more where to start looking for the bug: the eggs function.

There’s a lot of good advice in the responses to this post! Overall, I just wanted to emphasize what I wish I had learned much earlier on in my career: the benefits of thinking in terms of inputs->how->outputs and modularizing sub-problems in the overall program’s “how” into subproblems that can be independently considered, debugged, and re-used on future projects. (A secret for you: those of us who have been coding for a while often don’t start everything from scratch–we’ll re-use some functions or classes we wrote in the past, tweaking them as necessary for new applications, but not needing to start from a blank text editor :) ) Learning to write applications in code is exploring a new way of thinking about problems and how to solve them, and personally, I find it very rewarding!

I wish you all the best on your coding journey!

Yes! Another fan of spicy sausage in stuffing! My mom one year made the stuffing (not cornbread-based–Stove Top brand with savory herbs, I think) with half mild sausage and half spicy sausage for younger me who didn’t like much spice. We also added pecans and dried cranberries in addition to onion and celery. We’ve barely ever deviated from that recipe since!

Even better: purchase an inexpensive strap wrench with a rubber strap (something like this) and keep it in the kitchen for stubborn jar lids. For the jar lids that even a strap wrench alone can’t quite open, I’ve had success by using the strap wrench on the lid while holding the jar itself with a silicone oven mitt (or oven mitt with rubberized grip–the rubber band trick might work here as well).