If you haven’t read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M’s backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):
# Assuming df is your DataFrame
# Show the plot
plt.show()
That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn’t actually think about the code at all.
What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there’s bigger issues to watch out for?
I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.
They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.
The first thing that came to my mind was car repair.
This one wasn’t one purpose. I went to a shop for an oil change and 10,000 point inspection or whatever they called it. I knew one of my headlight bulbs went out a week before, but when I got the inspection report, it said everything was fine. I went to the shop manager and asked him to confirm that the mechanic had checked everything on the report. I didn’t blame him for the oversight, but he was kind of a dick when I pointed it out and had him do everything again until they found the problem.
Also, my dad always wrote the date on his air filters when he put them in because mechanics would often keep a dirty one laying around just to show it to customers and tell them that it was their filter and it needed replaced. He always got a kick out of calling them out on that kind of bullshit.
Partner and I once test drove a car that had “passed” a something something-point inspection at the dealer. As partner turns onto the highway he realizes it doesn’t have a rear-view mirror. We were not impressed with that dealership. (Partner later said that when he got in he made sure the mirrors were adjusted, but his brain didn’t clock that there wasn’t a rear-view mirror until he had to use it. TBF, the missing mirror wasn’t pointed the wrong way.)
Same dealership tried to badmouth my Prius in order to get it as a trade-in. Partner had introduced me as his roommate and driver, which made it even weirder.
I always used check the spare tire pressure and note of it was low. Nobody’s going to question your thoroughness if you’re checking the spare tire.
“this MF checked my spare, I’m not questioning whether he put washer fluid. you can if you want.”
In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.
This is really niche, but most organisations have a Microsoft Active Directory, or equivalent, that tracks users, their credentials, and their permissions. The sign of a bad AD admin: permissions directly applied to user objects without any intermediary objects or abstraction in AD.
Including links to progress pictures and files associated with my drawings on my Internet Archive profile in the description. Formerly I used Imgur to post progress pictures, but migrated to Internet Archive after I learned that Imgur implemented an expiration policy. When people in the comments accuse my work of being AI-generated, it shows that people aren’t reading the description.
I use this VH trick at work occasionally for fun just to see if anyone reads my service report. “Your boilers are about to fail in the middle of winter but don’t worry I sprinkled pixie dust on them and did a rain dance”. Never heard from anyone not even my boss. One customer I used to write “Does anyone ever read these? If so call me at (phone number)”. I handed it to the man in charge, he pretended to read it, signed it and handed it back to me. The only one my boss called about was the one I wrote that simply said “I took a shit in the floor drain here”
Honestly, if it was me reading about the pixie dust, I would just find it hilarious and probably not mention it, since I got the joke.
I work in the event industry as a production manager, I get to write these things.
As is typical when you have a large crew there will be dietary restrictions, some of them can be deadly. So before me or any of my crew starts unloading the truck I need to have a cold Dr. Pepper in my hand. If I don’t, we doordash, we do not eat the food provided.
This is gonna be controversial.
When I find out someone is a Christian, I ask them about their favourite part of the sermon on the mount. If they don’t know it, they’re ‘cultural Christians’ who’ve never opened a bible. If they’re familiar with the sermon, it means they do the work. The sermon on the mount is the section of the bible where Jesus explained to people what values they should hold and how they should behave in order to call themselves his followers.
I’m an ex-Christian and so are a lot of people who just don’t know it yet.
“Blessed are the cheesemakers”
What’s your favourite part? I’m agnostic. I always say I have faith but religion can fuck off. I’m big on what he said about prayer in that it’s a private affair. I also like blessing the righteous but then I feel people have polluted what being righteous is.
Sermon on the mount?
Tap for spoiler
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Aside from the sermon on the mount, I’m particularly fond of the parable of the sheep and the goats.
Its the single longest passage in the bible about who gets into heaven and who doesn’t. Surprisingly has nothing about accepting Jesus as your lord and savior.
Tap for spoiler
31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
I need VIM mode on my text editor.
I don’t have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don’t have people who violate boundaries they don’t share, so if I said “Actually, I think I may be a woman” or “I have been thinking about leaving the country” they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.
My kids school used my kids photos in their community outreach pamphlets that went to tens of thousands of homes in the area.
We have a media policy contract on file with them to not do this. When it was brought up they acted like we were overreacting.
I told them I had history with a stalker in my past that still tries to reach out and make contact, and they have endangered my children because of their negligence. I asked them if they were ready to open themselves for a lawsuit should anything happen in the future and the Superintenant just sat there quietly with nothing to say.
IMO people don’t take their privacy seriously enough until someone is hunting them down to rape and kill them.
It’s a good test when working with people that you don’t know, contractors, etc. In the automotive industry we work with a lot of electronic system suppliers and they deliver embedded software in the form of ECU. Software in this form can hide a multitude of horrors so the only way to keep track of it is to make release declarations, implying testing has been carried out. If that’s not present, you can’t trust it.
I used to work in serious sim. Think using game engines for realistic combat stimulation and training by the army. Systems had to interact and had different jobs rts, fps, driving simulator, etc.
So they each needed a unit database that was unique to that system. They also usually had a two versions a classified database and a less accurate non classified database.
A quick way to test was there was a unit type that was always set to invulnerable in unclassified databases. So drop one in the sim and drop some artillery on it. If it wasn’t destroyed you were unclassified.
I say howdy to gauge people’s initial reaction when I first meet them. Their reaction to the corny and outdated term is telling about their mental picture of the world. It is the only time I use the word.
Wow, as someone who says howdy to people all the time, I’m surprised you get any kind of reaction at all other than “hi” back.
I go to peoples’ homes as a part of my job, and it’s often remarked that how messy someone’s home is seems to correspond to how their life and state of being fares overall.
Everytime with a project when you ask a document that says what has been agreed with the customer and the estimate for a planning and they look at you like a deer in the headlights to then forward a document from the sales guy that just says “we’ll do everything” and a phone book sized map with “a few additional demands from the customer.” Yeah, that project is auditioning for a role as the Hindenburg.
