If a person asks you to step in, try to do the minimum to get them back in a known place. Describe what you’re doing, as you’re doing it — think of yourself as a tour guide, pointing out the sights. Ask for feedback to make sure your audience knows what you’re doing, and hand back control as soon as you can.
EFF Security Education Companion: A Word on Touching Other People’s Devices: Don’t.
Lately, you meet a couple of lost Linux buddies and they complain to you that you didn’t return their messages. You say you never received the messages, and shrug. You never have an idea why didn’t a message go through, maybe because they used the client that is not officially supported? But your buddies silently think that you’re a lying son of a bitch. What they don’t know is that you just want to be a Google fanboy.
Trương Nguyễn Hữu Huân: How did Google Talk change from a dream to a nightmare?
We leave checking C1 to C3 as an exercise to the reader — the proofs are very similar to those in part (i).
past-me, annoying now-me and future-me
I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts. Whenever I’d seen Jesry get it quicker than me, I had misread equations in a way that had seemed easier at the time but made things harder—no, impossible—later.
Fraa Orolo in Anathem by Neal Stephenson
