Even knowing the “correct answer” to this riddle for as along as I remember, I don’t think it is right. For someone looking for how to handle this in an interview, I’d go with this:

I will fetch a friend or colleague to look at the bulb as I test the switches because:

• It is by far the most obvious solution that literally everyone faced with this problem actually would use. It is easy to understand and will be easy to explain to others (if you, e.g. need to present or document what you did).

• It is also a better solution: it is by far more robust against a large number of failure modes: e.g., if it turns out you are testing the wrong switch, the bulb is broken, more than one switch turn on the light, etc.

• It scales better: the same solution trivially extends to N number of lightbulbs controlled by M number of switches; and at large N it will save time not having to reach each bulb.

• It gives the opportunity to interact positively with a friend/coworker. Helping each other out with small necessary tasks builds team cohesion and work environment, and thus lowers the barrier for further collaboration, making us a more effective team in the longer run.

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It will be placed in a default folder under a default name until you rename it / and or move it somewhere else.

What a nightmare.

For this one aspect, compared to a program that implements autorecovery, there is barely any practical difference. Autorecovery has to imply some kind of autosave, just behind your back in some program-specific “hidden” default folder.

Maybe you really like the “old-school” document GUI with no recovery, where you train your muscle memory to, e.g., ctrl+s every minute; and when something crashes, that’s the point you go back to. But this is a punishing workflow for beginners.

And this is not “in theory”. I’ve countless times seen real, smart, computer-literal, people lose significant amounts of work precisely this way to software implementating this paradigm.

I don’t want some program choosing when and where to save something for me, because it is extra work finding all these garbage files I didn’t ask for.

I realize the tone of this conversation may make it sound as if I want to force this on you all the way down to, what can it be - vim? I’m mostly picturing LibreOffice, Inkskape, etc., software that to some degree try to appeal as “desktop software” to fairly normal users. I think in these cases the “you are editing the doc itself”-paradigm would be vastly more friendly to new users.

Didn’t you save your document? What does that mean?

It means I want to keep it. I don’t think that is a broken metaphor at all.

It will not come natural to people who are used to work with physical documents that you need to remember to “save” an edit, or the document reverts back to the state it was when you opened it.

in the real world I do not need to name anything to make scribbles.

No, but you need to have a physical document to scribble on, which, after you have scribbled will remain in the state you left it until you take the active decision to throw it away.

I also do not have a paradigm where there is a fork between versions and create a new document that goes off in one direction while the other document goes in another.

Have you never used a copy machine?

At the end of the other documents time, why can’t I just get rid of it if my what if scenario didn’t work out?

Just throw it in the recycle bin? Another real-life metaphor. Do you often find objects in your physical world disappearing without no action from you?

I also have to choose where to keep something if it is going to auto save

Following the typical cloud implementation, you do not. Just start editing. It will be placed in a default folder under a default name until you rename it / and or move it somewhere else. (These operations are usually provided in more convenient ways than in “save paradigm” software, e.g., the name is shown as a title, just click to change it)

They are taking a document that sometimes can take several minutes to load, and might take many minutes to process. They might be excel sheets, they might by python pandas projects, they might be painting projects or 3d renders.

All of these – except the Python Pandas project (see below) – could still (and probably should) work according to a “you edit the doc itself, no need to save” paradigm. The larger the underlying file, the less sense does it make to forcibly have to work on a copy; either in RAM (if it fits) or if it doesn’t fit, the software has to create an on-disk copy of your huge file behind your back, in case you decide to not save. Leading to all these messy “recovery semantics” that no one likes.

Now, the context of this whole thread is IMO GUI software. When it comes to programming/programmatic tools, e.g. Python Pandas, R, Matlab, etc., that is a different thing. There you have a choice to work in RAM or on disk depending on your needs.

Comparing with the physical world makes sense when we have built these applications on physical world metaphors: “documents”, “folders”, “desktop”, etc. We use those words precisely because they convey meaning based on the similarities with their real-world counterparts. Broken metaphors are both more difficult to learn and tend to trigger incorrect assumptions leading to operator error (“Didn’t you save your document? What does that mean?”).

What is worse is that, like it or not, the world is increasingly moving towards cloud services. The “edit + save” paradigm is less suited to that environment, so there we almost exclusively see the “you edit the doc itself (no need to save)” paradigm. It is difficult to see the gain of insisting on keeping both these quite different paradigms around, when the “you edit the doc directly” is no problem to implement also offline.

Now, about the practicalities: I also get fundamentally annoyed when presented with the “document recovery” dialog that brings me out of my flow. However, I interprete the situation differently. Had the software used a “you edit the doc, no need to save” paradigm, there would never be a need for “recovery”. The edits I did are stored in the file I edited.

As for “I just want to scribble”. Why don’t you just scribble in a file called “Scribbles”? Why is that concept so offensive? You’ll be happy the day your computer loses power while you are in the midst of scribbling, since you will be able to pick up exactly where you were.

“Saving” is a legacy that was introduced because of limitations related to storage in the early days of computing and makes no inherent sense within the metaphors most software operate. Broken metaphors makes things difficult to learn.

When was the last time you scribbled onto a physical document and the changes “didn’t save”? Do you also hate “autosave” in the physical world?

There should be no save button. All software should auto-save continuously while you work. There should be a “duplicate”-type menu item or button that allow you to make a copy of the document into a new file.

Almost all cloud software already works like this.

Just posting my appreciation for the title: chef’s kiss

What kind of nerds do you claim to be in this thread?! Despite being late, I see no mention of the xkcd color survey: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

As far as I can read just by eye, its “mustard” or “olive”, but funnily it also seem close to the one someone annotated: “really? this color again? i have nothing against colors personally, but this one just stands out from the rest as unusually unattractive. i almost feel sad for it, but it made the decision to be that color so it has to find a way to deal with it.”

But, someone, feel free to dig into the hex codes to give a more definite answer.

(Spoilers, obviously)

Nothing confusing about TENET at all, huh? In the very first scenes a guy gets reverse shot by a bullet embedded in the side of the stairs of an opera, and the bullet is “sucked” into the muzzle of a gun, and the ugly hole in the stairs goes away.

In our forward moving time: what is the origin of that hole? When did it appear? Has it been there since the opera was built? Did the people building these stairs do that with a big ugly hole in it, possibly with an embedded bullet? If not, where and when did it come from?

The thing is, the whole premise of forward+backwards moving things sharing the same reality falls apart if you stop to think about it for a minute.

Oh, that’s no biggie:

That’s On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low