> Found this comment rubbed me the wrong way - seems insane to me to judge the boringness of a person by the price of their sunglasses
You must be responding to how you feel, because you sure as hell aren’t responding to what I wrote.
Allow me to explain my position.
Clothing is a form of communication. When you wear particular clothing, it communicates which group you identify with or want to associate with.
Let’s suppose that we were having a conversation and you said to me, “I don’t like to stand out, I like to blend in with the crowd and avoid being noticed.” I might think that you were a bit boring. You can communicate the same thing by wearing boring clothing.
What I’m doing is judging you based on the things that you communicate to me. If you are bad at non-verbal communication, don’t worry about accidentally coming off as boring—it’s very hard to communicate “boring” with your clothing, and it doesn’t happen by accident.
> You must be responding to how you feel, because you sure as hell aren’t responding to what I wrote.
I'm just responding to that quote from your last post.
> When you wear particular clothing, it communicates which group you identify with or want to associate with.
Agree to a point, but I don't think "Boring" is generally a group someone would try to identify/associate with (I'm assuming you're using boring as a derogatory term here). I also disagree that outgoingness is synonymous with how interesting a person is (in fact I'm sure you'd agree there are many instances of the contrary).
And outside of being "good" or "bad" at non-verbal communication you're forgetting another important direction: people who do not care.
Take you for example - I find you very interesting because you have strong opinions that differ to mine - It would have been a shame had I immediately categorised you as boring given the sunglasses you were able to afford or if you didn't care about sunglasses beyond their function.
> I'm just responding to that quote from your last post.
You said, “seems insane to me to judge the boringness of a person by the price of their sunglasses”
This is some kind of straw argument—to be clear, it’s not what I wrote, it’s not what I meant, it’s not what I implied.
> And outside of being "good" or "bad" at non-verbal communication you're forgetting another important direction: people who do not care.
It is a mistake to think of “does not care” as some kind of meaningful third position. It is not.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say I ask you, “Did you take the last slice of cake?” It’s a yes/no question with social stakes—maybe I’m upset that I didn’t get any cake. Is there a way that you can avoid communicating a response to my question? No, not really. You heard the question, I’m waiting for your response. You can say yes or no, you can change the topic, you can dodge the question, you can turn the question around, and you can even stay silent—but it is nearly impossible for you to avoid making a conscious decision to communicate a response.
Clothing is like that, but the question is implied and the response is nonverbal. Under ordinary circumstances, you must choose how to dress yourself. You can choose to grab whatever is on top of the pile, you can choose to pick out an outfit, you can choose to go outside in your pajamas or stark naked, but you cannot somehow choose not to make a choice.
Take a moment and visualize what “I don’t care how others see me” looks like. Do you pick average clothing to blend in? Do you wear whatever you like? Do you carefully observe gender norms when buying clothing from the store? Do you wear whatever has the most pockets? Do you wear the same clothing sitting around the house as you do when you visit a friend’s house? Do you wear T-shirts with characters from your favorite cartoon? Do you wear something from the pile of T-shirts I got for free from vendors at tech conventions?
The problem is—once you are aware that you are making a choice, you aren’t really in a position to abdicate that choice.
The beauty of programming is abstraction - you write a function to do one thing, do it well, and then you can abstract that concept away and reuse that abstraction. Although it's only an abstraction - a container is "like" a lightweight VM, and you can use it like that until it doesn't act like a lightweight VM. In which case, you have to dabble one layer deeper just to understand enough to know why the abstraction of your layer isn't a perfect analogy.
In which case, if you're looking for an expert in layer n, then basic knowledge of layer n - 1 might be a decent proxy for expertise
Imagine your basic Excel spreadsheet -> generating document files, but add:
- Other sources like SQL queries
- User form (e.g. "Generate documents for Client Category [?]")
- Chaining sources in order like SQL queries with parameters based on the user form
- Split at multiple points (5 records in a csv, 4 records in a sql result = 20 generated documents)
- Full Jinja2 templating with field substitution but also if/for blocks that works nicely with .docx files
- PDF output
- output file names using the same templating: "/BusinessDrive/{{ client_id }}/Invoice - {{ invoice_id}}.pdf"
All saved in reproducible workflows (for example if you need to process a .csv file you receive each morning)