SilasX

I know it's tempting to put this consent-banner anti-pattern all on toxic ad-driven platforms, because their motives are bad.

The problem with this view, though, is that even the very agencies propagating these rules do the exact same thing! You can go to any site from an EU arm and get the same banners.

At this point, you can't really blame it on bad-faith actors, you have to accept that it's a bad rule. Which is not to say I know a better one!

I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.

Okay, the biggest confusion I have is the part about the time your candidate got to correct you on TDD[1].

This seems like something you could and should have caught in the moment, without having to use your feedback technique. If they answered, and only mentioned the high-level tests, and you expect them to have low-level tests, then just ask, right then, if that was all of their tests, rather than silently assume the worst and move on.

Heuristic: if a remark seems outrageous, double-check before making a major decision on it.[2] This is not just in interviews, but life in general.

Example: Your friend says "Hey can you toss me through the window [of this skyscraper]?"

Your version: Call their family and 911 to report them as suicidal. Give a long speech about why they shouldn't kill themself. Then explain why you did what you did and ask if you misunderstood anything.

Sane, heuristic version: You reply, "You... want me to throw you to your death?"

Friend: "Oh jeez, no, that's just an expression we use here. I want you lift me up onto the balcony."

[1] Quoted in full:

>I gave one candidate feedback along the lines of “when you explained the app that you built, you talked about the testing that you did at only a very high level, so I’m worried about your depth of testing knowledge, particularly around Test Driven Development (TDD)”. The response was along the lines of “Oh. You’re right. I didn’t really delve into detail, but here’s how I went about doing the testing and here is my general approach in other examples”. The candidate then went into significant depth explaining how they had done TDD over the last 10 years, which clearly demonstrated their understanding and maturity of the practice. Misunderstanding corrected.

[2] Which, to be clear, you are doing by using your technique ... it just feels oddly delayed and lets a misunderstanding accumulate much longer than it needs to; my example is an exaggerated version of the failure mode.

Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.

That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.

Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.

To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".

You don’t have to apologize, I don’t like it either.

>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.

But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.

I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.

I avoid making exceptions to the rule, but in the vernacular, people definitely break from it! You'll see e.g. "an historic event", usually justified because the first syllable is weak and close enough to being vowel-started.

FWIW "an Nvida employee" sounds better than me an "a Nvidia employee" because the latter has two vowels with no consonant separating them ... and I don't get repetition there because the vowels are different.

I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.

Sure, but you generally those are separate conversations in which you don't need to appeal to the duality of encryption and authentication or apply the analogy to the latter.

Yeah, that always bothered me about the terminology. My fix would be to call it a lock -- everyone understands that you can share those and it doesn't make them any easier to open.