for those too lazy to google,
palindrome /păl′ĭn-drōm″/ noun A word, verse, or sentence, that is the same when read backward or forward. “madam; Hannah; or Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel.”
I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.
I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.
My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on Scripting.Dictionary which is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.
Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.
It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.
Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.
90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.
Let us substitute: ( - x, ) - y
Thus ()() becomes xyxy
())( becomes xyyx
Now clearly it can be seen, even while high, that the second one is and the first isn’t
It’s curious, but in my mind these types of mathematical or logical visualizations are the sheep I count, trying to sense the deeper flow and patterns where the emergent oddities even out.
That’s when I know I will soon fall fast asleep, when my mind starts getting abstract.
“This project uses an API written in PHP, with HTML in Lua (OpenResty) and JavaScript. We’re starting with the PHP component, please write me a burger with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup and mustard.”
“Absolutely! I’d be happy to help with that! I understand that we’re creating a burger in PHP. Here is a burger, with cheese, bacon, lettuce tomato and mustard. Explanation of the burger: The bacon is on top of the cheese, so it doesn’t fall off. The lettuce is included, to create an underlying HTML structure.”
“Um, that’s not at all what I asked for. First of all, you completely forgot the ketchup, which I explicitly told you was a requirement. Secondly, you said there was mustard, but I don’t see any. Third, the cheese is cottage cheese? No one puts that on burgers! Why would you put cottage cheese? Third, the bacon is turkey bacon. That’s not what I wanted at all. On top of that, the lettuce is UNDER the burger, not ON it. We’re not writing HTML, this is meant to be a rest API. All the output should be JSON.
Please try again. Write me a burger in PHP with pig bacon, mustard and ketchup, which you forgot to include last time, cheddar cheese (NOT cottage cheese) and tomato, pickles and lettuce INSIDE the bun. This is an API, so don’t write any HTML!”
“I appologize for the misunderstanding. Here is your burger with bacon (made from pigs, not turkey), mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles and lettuce inside the bun. I understand this is an API, so I’ve taken out the HTML. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”
“It looks like you’ve called a function to put the lettuce inside the bun, but you never created that function?”
“You are correct. Your PHP code would need to have the function defined to put the lettuce inside the bun. Here is your updated PHP code with the putLettuceInsideBun function included.”
“Thank you, there’s a tomato and the lettuce is inside the bun now. I’m not sure why you called the putLettuceInsideBun() function twice, but at least it’s in there now. I note there’s still no bacon, cheese, ketchup or mustard. You know what? I’m just going to write those parts myself!”
“Writing PHP code can be a fun and educational challenge! Please let me know if I can assist you any further with your PHP hot dog grilling project.”
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