That’s kind of my point. Google started that nonsense of making job interviews into lateral thinking puzzles, then all managers latched onto that to make themselves look hip.

I want to see competence and practical problem solving skills.

So, the oldest cordless drill I have is this old Black & Decker 12v thing, my dad bought it in like, 2002. It has a quick detaching chuck, and under the chuck is a 1/4" hex collet. So you can load a phillips or torx driver bit in that, then mount the chuck over it and chuck in a drill bit, then you can drill your pilot holes, pop the chuck off and drive screws.

And other than that minor innovative feature it’s crap. The build quality on even consumer-grade power tools has increased a lot since I was in high school; I’ve got some of the new SB&D Craftsman tools that are a lot nicer to handle; that old B&D creaks and squeaks as it flexes in your hand, it’s not overmolded and the bare ABS slips around in your grip, the controls feel like you’re twisting lego bricks, the batteries are long out of production and it’s the only tool I have that takes that standard, and it’s a 20 year old brushed motor 12 volt tool; it’s the size of my 20v drills but less powerful than my little 12v mini Bosch drill.

You know, we’re talking about how pointless a riddle it is. “Why can’t I walk into the room more than once?” I’ve heard similar hiring riddles about things like “You’ve got ten ethernet cables that run the length of a long hallway. They’re not marked at either end, what’s the most efficient way of finding out which is which?”

And you know what? If I’m hiring a networking guy, I don’t want him to deliver me an “ooh I know this one” answer to that, I want him to tell me he’s got a cable tester with several remote probes so he can figure that out in a small number of trips. Maybe show me how he can hook a couple together with a coupler and use the cable length function to shave a couple of trips off. Not recite a memorized brain teaser answer.

The “premise” is detecting that a now dark light was recently turned on by feeling for residual heat. “Hot” is a relative term.

I don’t need four power drills, I want four power drills.

Let me ask you a question: What does the pro version of Zorin get you?

Autodesk.

Wow, your mom sucks. Get her out of your life.

I have only ever seen the phrase “don’t chase, attract” used by women to peer pressure each other out of actively participating in dating. Reminding each other to never express enthusiastic consent.

“Playing hard to get” is taking that line of thought to the logical extreme. “Want men to want you more? Always turn them down!”

It’s the opposite side of the “women want assholes” coin, it’s an incorrect premise taken to an extreme.

it’s the diet version of playing hard to get, and equally as bullshit.

LED bulbs do get warm, not as hot as incandescent bulbs but they do emit heat. You might have to run them longer than a minute to warm it up enough to be immediate about it.

The official answer to this riddle is turn switch 1 on for a minute or so, switch it off then switch 2 on. if the bulb is hot but dark, its 1, if it’s lit it’s 2 and if it’s out and cold its 3.

the adult answer is why do I have only one chance to walk in the room?

An AM4 computer is still pretty capable.

You mean the stripes coming from the corners of her eyes like every tabby has?

I reserve some time between ~Dec 20 and ~Jan 10 for bright colored sweaters, visiting relatives, exchanging gifts particularly for the kids, rich food and strong drink…I live in the Northern hemisphere, it’s the beginning of winter, it’s cold and bleak and the days are short, spend a bit of time doing something to keep your brain inside your skull.

Why are we selling 8 foot tall inflatable glowing candy canes in early October?

I’m kinda done with it taking up a third of the year. You start seeing Christmas decorations and shit hit store shelves before Halloween.

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you’d call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.

The original iPhone did not have an app store.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.