There are a lot of procedures that are too expensive to do if the likelihood of negative results is high.

I was having a lot of problems with my ankle and my martial arts instructor's personal PT did a workshop which showed me what was wrong. Later on I screwed up my opposite hip hopping around like someone younger, and the exercises from the second PT fixed most of my remaining issues.

A lot of joint pain and some back pain is posture related. If you stop walking and standing like an idiot a lot of these problems go away. Particularly with the spine, muscle guarding can seize up a muscle so hard that it overcorrects and pulls things out of position in the opposite direction.

Be warned though that the cumulative pain your PT might inflict on you during exercise might rival the pain of the surgery your doctor prescribed. But you won't have scars, more money in your pocket, and a set of exercises that you can try to remember when you relapse in five to ten years.

Every professional has their peeves and once set they imagine them everywhere. I suspect part of taking your car to a second mechanic is finding one who is neutral on the exact problem you're having. I had a car fail emissions and the diagnosis was a new set of injectors for a good fraction of the value of the vehicle. My fiancee got a recommendation from a coworker for a shop near our apartment. Replaced some worn EGR hoses for $200 and I passed with flying colors. Same shop talked me out of another repair I thought I needed. Kept going to that guy for several years after we moved to the opposite end of town.

I should have gone for a second opinion before letting her drill. Now I have a mouth full of composites but we find 0 cavities every time I go in for a checkup.

She also fucked up one of the fillings and that did get a cavity under it, during Covid. Cost me a tooth.

In it a dentist comments on how dentists hate the work of every other dentist and want to rip it out and do it over. I thought about that scene a lot while refactoring garbage code from other people. Especially once I started finding garbage code authored by myself.

My current dentist has very little bad to say about my existing fillings. So maybe they have matured.

I would have sworn it was Disney, because I recall seeing it at least twice and walking away from a decision to watch it another time or two, and that was very on-brand for Disney at the time. However, Wikipedia is telling me that it was made by ABC in 1980 and starred Anthony Michael Hall. I suppose ABC must have done reruns during the summer.

'A' would never map to 'A'. So any message with a known plaintext of local weather conditions, or like in The Imitation Game, "Heil Hitler", you could test the plain text at each position of the encoded message and know that the message did not contain the known plaintext because none of the letters could match in sequence. If 'ei' or 'e_____t' existed in the cipher then the input could not contain the same. So selection of the candidate messages for cracking first culled any messages that definitely did not contain the known plain text.

Additionally, the breadboard part of the cipher was static throughout any given day, and reciprocal. That is, if A was currently mapped to B, then B also mapped to A, which is not usually the case with Caesar. That caused the breadboard stages between the wheels to cancel each other out, because A at the output of wheel 1 would change to B and then back to A for the input to wheel 2. That dropped the number of substitutions per character on the 3 wheel Enigma from 9 to 5, and thus reducing the exponent of the problem space, and the complexity of The Bombe.

We had some SSR that followed up with JavaScript listeners to do interactive updates instead of loading a whole new page. But the team responsible didn’t add nofollow and some bots ignore it anyway. Some significant fraction of our cluster size was answering those requests. But one deployment someone broke the fuck out of those links and it showed up immediately in our 4xx error statistics and we rolled the change back within a week.

Three years later I was still seeing those busted URLs being submitted.

Then the fix for the nofollow got implemented and declared done but the flag never got made permanent. We were pretty peeved when someone learned that in some offhand comment in a conversation between teams.

We were already identifying “good” and “bad” bots at the border and telling them to fuck off, so all of this was coming from our supposed friends. And that’s when I realized that a company owning a search engine and a cloud service provider is a protection racket. Google cloud is selling you servers in order to be talked to by Google bots.

When that came out I wondered how many people have lost business or their jobs to accusations of wire fraud. Can to can’t is much in the same category. It changes the meaning profoundly.

There’s always two people at every company who refuse to set up auth automation though, so you end up handling it. They are very stubborn. Even when it trips them up in front of observers while executing an urgent task, I’ve only occasionally convinced them to agree to set up trust instead of typing a password every single time.

Which is to say, I have to support password prompts even though they drive me up the wall.

The thing is when you expect a task to take five minutes, you don’t watch it, you find something else you expect to take five minutes and do that instead. When that ends up taking ten minutes, or when you remember what you were doing before you started, you finally come back around ten minutes later to find that either the task completed four minutes ago, or it failed after ten seconds and you’ve wasted ten now.

The audio was the best out of band notification I had at my disposal 20 years ago.

My first thought when reading this was actually terminal multiplexing however, like screen or tmux. But I’m also always doing the terminal dance because I work on 4 FOSS projects and I keep 1+ terminal open per project so I can jump in and do bug fixes or pull PRs I’ve landed.

I didn’t intend to specialize in performance early in my career but it happened anyway. I tuned boring homework assignments to make them more interesting for myself. But I moved far away for my first gig out of school and when I showed up the UI painted so slow it looked like one of those videos of an artist drawing something by hand but sped up. I hid my panic at having my name associated with this stinking pile and as soon as I’d done a couple of challenging bug fixes to prove I wasn’t an idiot I got to work.

My first dozen changes needed no benchmarks, In part because I had the slowest machine in the office. I could literally count seconds in my head and tell that I’d taken >1/4 of a second off of an operation because I made it a syllable or two farther in the old version. Later on I used the stopwatch function on a handheld device, to catch 100ms differences. I was there for nearly two months before I needed to put console output of (end - start) into the code for the first time.

By the time I started running out of stuff I knew how to fix, the corpus of data had started showing a serious scalability problem in the data filtering operations, so we were back into classical architectural misdeeds. We had a 2n logn² intersection test that did two scans on different criteria and compared the results using a quadratic time comparison. This code was copy pasta’d in dozens and dozens of places around the project, with slight variations in variable names and parameter marshaling. I replaced all the copies with one function they did filter(filter(x)) over a long holiday weekend since I had nobody local. -500 lines of code and much much lower slope of call time on multi year data sets.