this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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I preferred the Facebook group "If 2,147,483,648 people join this group, then an integer overflow may occur" back in the day.
That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.
It is one of the xkcds of all time.
Drag likes the punchline here, but the setup doesn't make sense
"So you're saying I should get a licence so I can drive a car, and I can drive a car because I have a licence?"
Having a qualification isn't tautological just because it can be phrased in two different ways
(a <=> b) <=/=> [(b => TRUE) <=> a]
This is a critique of honor societies which do not serve a point in proving someone's "honor". The college requirement is essentially: Join this club to prove you have joined this club. Anyone can join an "honor" society without demonstrating anything related to honor, meaning:
([Joining an honor society] => TRUE) <=> [Being allowed to join college]
Being allowed to drive a car implies having a license and having a license implies being allowed to drive a car. Neither of these implies TRUE - in an ideal world at least.
By the way, TRUE is a tautology because it is always true, which is the definition of a tautology. Unnecessary repetition is not a requirement of a tautology.
I’m surprised I’m the first comment saying this, but all I see is a user who needs help expressing their needs but who is not getting that help. Sure they don’t have our experience with decomposing problems and anticipating technical issues, but that’s normal and expected.
All I see is 5 minutes of the protagonist not listening (yadda yadda) to expressed needs, then getting upset at the word active being used again.
People bitch about the existence of Project Managers (I have myself) but then you see shit like this. Breaks in communication and one side needing the ability to express to the other. Some devs can bridge it, some can't.
I was thinking Product Owner, but same idea.
You don't need to know what they consider active, just give them a toggle so they can decide.
This so much. If you can't articulate it I'm going to make sure it stays your problem, not mine.
And what does it toggle?
The "active" status.
Any project with it set is active, any project with it not set isn't. And you set them all to active when you create the toggle.
If the users complain, you make them tell you an specific rule that can you can use to auto-change a subset of the projects in a cron job. Expecting anything like this to have a complete objective definition is delusional.
What the fuck, is that a rage comic in the grimdark future of 2025?
I want more
Prefect modernized rage for the new era.
Might use a big red (hd) FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU at the end imho.
Also ... will AI be sorting projects by active (with data from screen-watching everybody)?
What a grand new world.
This is why "sure" or "yes" are not part of my IT vocabulary. "Should" is king. "We should be be able to do" or "that should work."
In the idiocy of stakeholders that want IT to be a magic wand to fix their ineptitude instead of a helpful contributor to their well thought out process, you have to coach everything in the polite "no" that is "maybe" or "should."
One of my managers told me that I need to use words like "will" instead of "should" when talking discovery with clients. I told him only Siths deal in absolutes, which he didn't like as much as I did.
I'm not a yes man, and I'm not going to lie about something I can't guarantee. If something goes wrong, I'm the one that looks like a lying failure and gets to fix it. My clients are internal business users, not actual external customers. Words have meanings, and it's important to use the correct ones when communicating important information.
Fine. You WILL give me a 20% raise.
How to piss off management with one simple word.
Am manager, hate should.
Should presumes an ideal set of conditions with perfect context.
Could is a much better term as it implicitly accepts real world conditions and a lack of total context by couching the affirmation as contingent upon only the discussion (and prior references) at hand.
In my experience, people want "it will work." They will not accept "it could work" at all.
"It should work" is the perfect amount of hedge, even when you know "it will work," because all of us have been burned by simple assumptions that were right 1000 times before and were somehow wrong this time.
Getting a bit in between the lines, "should" more often than not reads to me as "it's expected to work and we're working towards it".
While "could" sounds like a shrug: "it may work, but I/we have little to no control over it".
Dump to an Excel sheet and ask them to make a formula for "active". A client that can't use Excel deserves to be teased and be charged extra.
This is how you end up with an excel sheet running the entire company.
But it's pretty fun when the customer says your program does it wrong and you pull out that old Excel, plug in the data and their Excel does exactly the same as your program. It makes the discussion about billable hours a lot easier.
You’re way smarter than me. I’m sure you can come up with something.
Then you implement it.
Not like that. Obviously!
You should really put a PTSD trigger warning on that quote.
If it's Jira, the answer is always yes, it can do that, but good luck figuring out how.