[0781] me_irl
└ posted on Thursday, 28 April 2016, by Novil
Asking me for directions = Instant doom.
- Jack: Richard, I’m looking for the function to determine a Hamiltonian cycle. But I just can’t find it in our 10 million lines of code.
- Richard: Give me a second.
- Richard: Is it this one?
- Jack: Yes, it is!
- Jack: How do you always do that?
- Richard: I saw the method once in 2006, when I was working on our math module.
- Jack: Awesome!
- Driver: I’m looking for the company “A+B Tech.”
- Richard: Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……
I don’t get it.
@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
Also first I guess. Cool.
We need to take a moment to appreciate that the transcript line of “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……” actually has the same amount of ‘h’s and dots as the balloon in the comic.
@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
He can remember a line of code he glimpsed over years ago, yet never noticed the building next to his workplace.
@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
He can remember an algorithm he saw one time, a decade ago. But he doesn’t know what company is in the building next to him, despite seeing it every day.
Ah. My first thought was that the fourth panel was a flashback to 2006. But your interpretation makes more sense.
@ Visvires: He’s not working there, probably that’s why he doesn’t remember his company is next to another one.
He can recall more code than the average programmer will ever see, but he cant remember where he left his keys.
Actually, it’s the same for me.
But so what? You’ve got to focus on the important things. Directions is definitely not one of them.
Right?
Pony-kour wrote:
I didn’t mean that … and what keys? This is about directions.
Wow, Richard could be me. This kind of behavior must be endemic among software types.
@ AndiJN:
No, make a left here.
Their codebase casually contains a function determining a Hamiltonian cycle. Either it’s very slow, or a pretty bad approximation, or reveals ridiculously high level of computer science backing the company software (if it’s deterministic AND usable for cases with more than 20 nodes).
Feather Quill Inkpot wrote:
Look a the first panel. The Firm is literally next door from his place of work.
To be honest, even with know the firm was next door I could not describe the way. I always navigate by landmarks, not by street names. So at beast I could lead people there,.
Yeah, that looked like a flashback to me too.
@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
I know how you feel…that last panel makes no sense to me either.
Yellow wrote:
Good one. 🙂
Yeah, the change in the shading from a slant to a flat line going indoors to out really made it feel like a flashback at first. It took a moment to get over that and then look at what was really going on, but the joke should be pretty apparent (A+B tech is something he should probably know, where the knowledge of where that portion of code is would normally be very odd to know.)
Took me a minute, but I got it. 🙂
Now, Richard claims that he remembered the function from back when, but maybe just to spare Jack of the embarrassment of how he found it so quickly, probably in a way that Jack could have come up with himself. Like, if the function is properly named,
git grep -i 'hamilton' | ack -i 'circle'
or similar.Wow, you actually have a programming job that uses math :P. My math background has basically been useless to me in the programming field. LOL
das-g wrote:
Err.,
git grep -i 'hamilton' | ack -i 'cycle'
of course. It seems I wouldn’t have found the function either :-OWait, did he just solve P v. NP or something XD. Hamiltonian cycles is NP-complete
Is that the Earthbound game font I see in A+B Tech’s logo?
I don’t believe this comic.
Nobody asks for directions anymore, they just look it up on their smartphone.
LOL, I didn’t get the comic at first, I thought last panel was a flashback too. Then I saw the first panel again and saw the A+B Tech building next to his own company Locust Inc. Only then I smiled. He can find a pattern among millions of lines of code, but he can’t remember the buildings around his own workplace.
Even if you don’t remember street names, which I’m guilty off, you should at least remember the landmarks. Although to be fair, a name like A+B Tech is just so forgettable.
@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
A+B Tech is right next door to his own company.
It’s people like Richard – with irreproducible knowledge bases critical to the company’s operations and not uncommonly its survival – whom generic M.B.A. (pointy-haired boss) “management” clowns absolutely hate.
To those Wharton-School-worshipping “suits,” all human resources are entirely fungible. One I.T. geek can be plugged in to replace any other I.T. geek anywhere in the corporate table of organization.
Learning that they have a “subject matter expert” down in the cubicle farm who’s one of the only people in the house whose presence make the difference between the company’s success and failure gives these middle and upper management clowns attacks of the whim-whams, and instead of getting those geeks to “clone themselves” by teaching their expertise to other employees, the higher-ups try to “engineer” the need for those abilities out of existence.
Not uncommonly obliterating one or more of the special advantages that gave the company its competitive edge in the marketplace to begin with.
So you wonder how “scientifically managed” businesses fail so commonly, so catastrophically?
Talk about code I worked on over 10 years ago? Do it all the time. Tell you the closest other business to where I work? No idea.
And I’m the last guy still working on the legacy code started more than 14 years ago, code that is still essential to the company (though it’s slowly being replaced with more modern code). It seems I’Still, I’m not irreplaceable. Several of the other original developers still work for the company, just on different projects. If needed, they could take over for me.
Reminds me of the time I couldn’t find somebody on my own college campus while he was on the phone and describing where he was.
Then again, it’s not my fault he kept looking at street signs. Who even knew that the roads that run through campus have names at all, let alone what those names are?
This comic is even more confusing when you live near this A-B Tech. For a second, I was thinking, “Wait a second, that’s a college, not a company!”
Pretty much exactly that. Yup!
Would have been funnier if one of the buildings behind them said A+B TECH, but i got it immediately almost immediately.
We walk/drive to work by our own internal and totally subconcious navigation routes after we’ve been there a fair while, we just dont think about road names, if he had just started there he might have stood some chance.
This comic made me realize I need to re-study the difference between a Hamiltonian cycle and an Eulerian cycle
This is exactly me. Just not with code.
Heh. Especially in my youth, I could unerringly navigate to places once I’d been there at least once, but was totally useles in giving directions.
“Uh, go down the street with the big oil slick that looks like a person, then turn left where the buliding that smells funny is.”
This is exactly me in games xD
I can give detailed skilltrees in Ragnarok Online even after years of not playing it and remember a whole lot of stuff from other games ive played but dont ask me where to find anything IRL xD
I wonder to what extent the difference between people who got the joke right away and people who were confused aligns with programmers/techies vs. non-technical folks? I got it right away, even though (like Richard) I’d failed to notice the name of the company in the first panel, only spotting it when I glanced back to confirm that it was really a Hamiltonian cycle Richard was locating. Which made the strip rather meta for me. 🙂
@ Apostate:
I read the last panel as a flashback as well – Richard’s dialogue in the third panel reads like it’s setting us up for one.
Crazy Cat Guy wrote:
Same here. I remember 6502 machine language code I wrote for the VIC-20 in 1982.
At first I misunderstood the joke because I thought the guy was asking for the company’s “A+B tech”, whatever an A+B technician is. Authentication and Biometrics, maybe?
Want someone to remind you of something that was said verbatim 6 years ago? I’m your guy.
I also on three separate occasions, sent people asking me for directions down roads that were at best perpendicular in heading to where they should have gone.
I have trouble remembering code I wrote a month ago :< Unless I found it interesting, then I remember it forever.
His request wasn’t in the code.@ Feather Quill Inkpot:
I tend to remember a ten digit phone number after looking at it two or three times. I still recognise faces of people I’ve last met nearly a decade ago. But learning the name of the new guy in my handball team that trains once a week? It takes me months.
Unless I see the name written down. Then it takes me one look.
It’s amazing how a little bit of difference with how his eyes were drawn made Richard so unrecognizable to me. I was like, “Woah, is that one of Luna’s relatives…? No wait, that’s Sandra’s dad!” Since he’s lacking the usual eye marking.
That’s a very Asperger-y characteristic.
@ qwerytiop:
Hamiltonian cycle is NP, which does not mean it is not solvable at all. It is possible to get exact solutions no problem, but in embarassingly long execution time – if you were to do so by yourself, you’ll find that a computer will have hard time to finish for pretty small cases. That’s why people are going for heuristics (you have no idea how imperfect solution you’ll get), or in particular, special versions of the problem (such as a 2D map of a city for example) you can get approximations (the simpliest one will guarantee that solution you get is no worse that 2x the perfect distance, more complex one can go down to 1,5x).
@Krem
I think you’re talking about the TSP (travelling salesman problem) when you talk about approximate answers. There is no “approximate hamiltonian cycle”. The confusion probably comes from some trivial reductions from one to the other. Still you’re right: NP-complete doesn’t necessarily mean intractable.
qwerytiop wrote:
Nah, the solution for that is locked away in some coffee maker calibration software.
I love the people who read “Sandra and Woo” and “Gaia.”
These are the only web comics where I take the time to read the comments. The signal-to-noise ratio here is amazingly high, as are the displayed levels of intelligence and knowledge (not the same thing).
(Okay, he sez, as the rush of the first caffeine hit of the morning subsides, I’m through gushing for now…)