The only thing worse than that is emailing them a simple boolean question and then your phone rings.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Only valid in PHP?
That’s a closure
When you aren't feeling that async energy but you still get a callback.
I didn’t even register a callback. How the hell did code start randomly executing from here?
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Similarly it also grinds my gears when I ask an enum question but they return a bool. I gave multiple options and “yes” was not one of them.
Sounds like a problem in the question. "Yes" is a perfectly valid response to "Do you want eggs or cheese"?
Include or is the funniest answers when possible. I do it all the time to confuse neurotypicals.
I usually use yes/no for the first condition if it's XOR with 2 options (thus the second yes/no is implied).
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My relationship is the opposite. My wife asks me a boolean question but expects a string response.
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Also bad: When you ask XOR questions, but people think they're funny and give you OR answers instead.
Sometimes, (amongst friends who accept how thoroughly weird I am) I will actually say "XOR" when I want to make my intentions clear. It means that when they give the silly OR answer, I can jokingly chastise them for poor listening. The downside is that they relish the opportunity to give OR answers when I am not sufficiently specific in my question. I reap what I sow ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Personally, people tend to ask me XOR questions where the answer actually is "both"
Why not both?
True
"What's the error message?"
"I don't know, isn't that your job to figure out?"
"No sir/ma'am/other honorific
My job is to figure out what the error message means and how to repair it."
I like doing the reverse.
Like if someone asks me if I want A or B, and I'll say yes.
Logically, as long as I want one of those things, the answer is "true"
.... People hate talking to me.
Call your mother, she'd love a chat.
I should. We've been estranged for nearly a decade. I should just do it to be an annoying prick.
Are you sure?
65
People want a yes or no so they can generate their own hallucinated string based on it. The returned string is just trying to get ahead of that.
Sometimes.
In those cases, "there isn't a yes/no answer to your question because..."
I ask my jrs simple yes/no questions all the time.
Did you open a PR? Does it pass the CI pipeline? Did you write a test for scenario X?
I'm here to help you, but my time is unfortunately limited. If it takes half of our available time just to drag out of you where you're at we're all worse off for it.
Like LLMs
At work, I have a very knowledgeable colleague who is quite the Linux nerd. I have been moved into their department and I feel like they never had the chance to share all of their accumulated knowledge with someone, so they kinda dump it onto me and every little question has the chance to become a lecture. I am very thankful for it though, because I get learn a ton but sometimes you just wanna get a bool, without learning kernel internals that are absolutely not related to the question
I feel this. I've found that a good response in those circumstances is to say "sorry, can we put a pin in this? I feel like I don't have the capacity to properly process what you're telling me right now, so I'd rather we resume this conversation at a later point. Thanks for helping me figure out [bool question] though."
It's a useful response if one genuinely is interested to learn, but not at that moment.
"Have I done well?"
HTTP status: 200 HTTP data: "{'status': 'error'}"
the string:
"Yeah, no."
Or maybe "yeah, right"
Fukin tru tho
I'm throwing a stack trace, alright?
Is this why a bunch of us senior engineers have been forced into a product owner role?
Because we can somehow deal with string parsing better? Jesus fuck we're doomed
When you ask someone a linguistics question and they answer in COBOL
Simple javscript casting, if the string contains at least one char, it means yes ; else it means no.
The char: "0"
I think javscrpit caste the strings "0" and "false" to true, yes...
TypeError:
Type Boolean not used by Reality, please inplort module 'ImaginaryThings' to use type Boolean.
Warning: Use of module 'ImaginaryThings' may produce inconsistent results.
I was just about to say that I'd be raising an error, not returning a string.
I see you understand the code well.
Kash Patel when asked if trump is in the Epstein files be like
"Are you Kolanaki?"
"Y-E-S."
Or when you ask them to choose an index from an array and they give you their life story instead.
declare function permission(): 'allow' | 'deny' | 'always'
"JAVA solves this problem by ..."
- RIT in the fall, 2001
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