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What's a question you could ask to determine if someone is an expert in your line of work?
For example, I'm handy with a lot of stuff. I could change an outlet in the wall no problem. But if asked by an electrician what gauge Romex is safe for what amperage, or what color direct bury Romex is, I'd have no idea (from the knowledge I walk around with day to day).
I'm curious what other random facts people may know from their line of work that quality them as more knowledgeable than your average goose joe. Or to paraphrase, walking around knowledge people wouldn't know unless they googled it, or worked/were very knowledgeable in your field. And how many of them I (or others) might know.
To start from my job:
Q: Under what circumstances would one want to withhold the administration of vasopressors (Epinephrine) in a cardiac arrest?
A:
When the cardiac arrest is due to hydrocarbon intake, e.g. huffing spray paint
I work in IT and cybersecurity. If any tech guy says with a straight face that a technical solution will actually solve security, run!
I'm in cybersecurity as well. Lately, there has been a dilution of the scope of cybersecurity, and we now have people who memorized security frameworks (NIST/ISO) masquerading as "consultants" who wouldn't be able to explain the difference between RSA and ECDSA or explain how three-way handshake happens.
I don't trust any cybersecurity "expert" that doesn't know what nmap is.
Especially voting with anything except paper ballots :)
Obligatory Tom Scott videos on why electronic voting is a bad idea
I also work in cybersecurity. For me, I don't think there's a single question you can ask to determine someone's expertise - the entire profession is too broad and there's too much stuff to know.
But I can tell you that I can spot a fake IT admin from a mile away after just a few minutes of conversation.
Nonsense! Solving security problems with technical solutions is extremely straightforward: go into the basement and take diagonal cutters to all the uplink cables.
Now, solving security problems while keeping a bunch of oblivious pigheaded stakeholders happy (or at least, just sufficiently not mad at you not to take it up the chain), that's a much thornier problem. ;)
I've heard that Windows servers are the most secure. Can't hack a server that's offline.
To be fairer, so did.. 10%? of the medics I used to run with š
You can always tell an experienced medic by asking how many doses of narcan they've had to administer this week.
Never forget your ABC's:
Airway
Breathing
Can you walk to the truck
Interesting question, and one Iām not sure I have an answer to for my actual job. Linux is such a wide and varied subject matter; thereās not necessarily one thing I could ask to figure out exactly how much of an expert someone may or may not be. Maybe Iād ask how to find and replace every instance of a given string in a number of text files. Or like, their preference for SSH key algorithms or something.
For people opining about language I think Iād ask which of the generative and constructivist schools they fall more into. Every linguist I speak to has an opinion about it, and itās a quick way to sift the āI have opinions about language and here they areā type from the āI am a linguist and here are some cool factsā ones.
I use Linux and ssh every day professionally and at home and have for 15 years, have previously worked for Canonical, and I have no opinion on ssh key algorithms :p I just trust the distro defaults.
But the find and replace is a pretty good one. You're right that it's pretty tough to come up with something distro-agnostic that most Linux pros would know but few novices would.
Some more proposals:
answer
I think it's F10?
answer
cat /proc/cmdline, though iirc it's null-delimited so you might have to do something weird likecat /proc/cmdline | tr '\0' ' '- I'd have to play around with thatanswer
probably /etc/profile, I'm not sure how weird alternative shells (and maybe init systems?) can get
obviously the backspace key, duh /s
I will say most distro defaults are pretty crap because they're mostly optimized for compatibility and not security.
ssh-audit is a mandatory part of my toolbox.
It's a mess. Here's sh, bash, zsh. I have no idea about fish and friends:
Not mine, plucked from: https://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html
Wow, shows what I know about alternate shells! Thanks for teaching me :)
God asking someone if they're a generativist is such a boringly broad question to ask at the theoretical linguistics parties. At least ask about UG to get a real fight going.
I should go to more of those! Preaching the gospel of OG Sapir-Whorf might also get the blood suitably boiling.
Or failing that, just straight up Skinnerian behaviourism.
For undergrad, I attended one of the few US universities (perhaps the only one?) with a non-Minimalist focus when it came to syntax. I still remember how much fun it was when they invited a Minimalist from another university to give a talk -- I did formal semantics/pragmatics, so I didn't really care much about the finer points, but no one bickers like the syntax guys.
I ran RSA 2048 bit from my initial introduction to Linux, 2007, til about 3 years ago when I switched to ed25519. You lost me on the rest, though!
Profession is Linux security I guess? :p with that in mind, is there a distro you'd recommend as someone's first Linux system?
Not the parent commenter, but Ubuntu is pretty user friendly, that's what I used to get my toes wet when I dipped into Linux back in 2007. I hear Linux Mint and Pop_OS! are as well. Now a days I run vanilla Debian, as Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning "I was too lazy to install and configure Debian" š
Sage words from the ancients lol I'm probably going with mint later this year.... But still too intimidated
If I may make two suggestions:
Buy a second hard drive and just install to that.
Pay close attention to things when you install.
Something else you can do is focus on just using apps that support Linux right now so that when you do switch it's so much easier. Before I used Linux full-time I could count the Windows-native apps I use on one hand.
Linux Consultant, but close enough!
Distro-wise I like Debian for servers. Rock solid and with great compatibility. Itās rare that Iāll need something that isnāt already packaged for Debian on my servers.
For a personal computer that can depend on what youāre up to. Debian (or a derivative like Mint) is pretty good here too, but if youāre eager to try lots of new packages and applications that are in active development then you can end up with a pretty janky system that doesnāt update super gracefully.
I cut my teeth with Arch Linux, which was a brutal introduction where I made a lot of mistakes and had to reinstall my OS a ton. But for learning it was unmatched, and the Arch wiki is second to none. You have access to just about every package under the sun.
I'm in a weird place right now where I desperately need to upgrade my senior fathers home PC, but I really don't want to get him windows 11 and its bewildering environment. I'm probably going to get Mint for myself to try, just out of the box nothing fancy and only used to launch a safe browser to access online banking plus YouTube. Make it look like Windows XP. Install some sort of remote access between mine and my dad's (we live on opposite side of continent). Thats it.
Mint is a really good shout for this. Itās a familiar enough environment that your father should feel well at home :)
You could have a try with elementary OS as well; itās somewhat opinionated, but itās clean and simple, and a doddle for a less computer-savvy person to use.
As an ex-Mint user I'll second that Mint Cinnamon is a pretty good option for someone looking for a simple Windows-like experience for basic applications. I used it as my daily driver for a few years when I dropped Windows and it was a largely smooth transition up until I got deeper into power user territory. A random thing I miss that came out-of-the-box with it was the Windows-like updater down in the taskbar reminding you to do them.
The reasons I dropped it are unlikely to be relevant to anyone whose needs could likely also be satisfied by a Chromebook. I dropped it because I was finding that having a deeply derived distribution to be frustrating when I wanted to do things further from the tested path of Mint. The sort of territory where your options are to follow (with modification) either Ubuntu or Debian guides and hope for the best. As said though, I don't think that's a consideration that needs to be made for someone whose needs largely live in a web browser.
Meta-$, type what to replace, type new words, hit enter a billion times.
āSo youāre thinking of getting a French bulldog?ā
Iām a dogwalker of 33 years.
So what's your opinion on the French bulldog?
I love French bulldogs! They are funny and stubborn and have very strong opinions. Historically, they were bred to bait bulls and other animals as Court entertainment in France. They do nothing better than leap, bite, and hang. Nothing makes them happier.
In the 19th century they were used by the streetwalkers of Paris. The dogs would hide under the skirts of the sex workers, keeping them warm. But if they had trouble with any of their clients, all of a sudden this little goblin would come boiling up from out of nowhere and leap, bite, and hang.
That said, the modern French Bulldog is a walking tragedy. It is the most popular new dog in many places and for a dog breed, that is a death sentence. Unscrupulous breeders capitalize on every trend, selling every puppy, regardless of their fitness. It is called the Dalmatian problem after the incredible working breed who used to be known as firehouse dogs were exploited by Disney in 101 Dalmatians in the 50s. It started a craze that completely ruined the breed.
We have also seen it with Golden Retrievers, Dobermans, Doodles, and now French Bulldogs. As an expert, if somebody tells me they are getting a French bulldog, it means to me that they are making their decisions based on status and social media and that they have no idea they are about to spend $120,000 on medical bills.
Buford, one Frenchie I have been walking his whole life, just had brain surgery because a severe ear infection went misdiagnosed. He has had perhaps five other life-threatening medical emergencies in the last five years.
In a word, DONāT.
Is there a way to get the "old" dalmatians, retrievers, and bulldogs back? Like, isn't there anyone keeping the original erh, shapes, stubbornly or did everyone end up breeding for life threatening traits?
There are some heritage breeds but the wrong people are in charge of dog breeding. Health and disposition take a back seat to aesthetics for nearly everyone.
Even the most enlightened prospective dog owner, when faced with a choice, goes with the conventional option. Nobody wants to experiment with a 10-15 year relationship that will be among the most important of their lives.
Fairly certain the answer is "Hell no, what's wrong with you."
Based on how many questions I get about my job title, apparently I can simply ask "what is GIS?"
A more interesting gauge would be pointing at the nearest power structure and asking "what's going on there?" The one outside my window is a fairly simple case, I see a distribution pole carrying two voltages plus comm lines.
Then there's less interesting particulars where the question won't even mean much to folks outside our work, like "why do we weatherize las?" (Because our lidar is collected across multiple flights, the power lines have likely moved between flights due to wind and heat, we need one specific set to model off of.)
I only know what GIS is from my wife screaming at ArcGIS all day while working remotely.
Super interesting though.
Oh hey I use ArcGIS all day too. Our codebase is too entrenched in their libraries for us to be able to transition away. I especially dislike how they're dumping ArcMap when ArcPro lacks feature parity. It's very opinionated and doesn't want to tell you what it's doing either.
I love GIS. It's such a eureka moment to lay a map from the 1800s over a map from last year and see where the changes have been made and, almost more importantly, where they haven't!
The big kicker for me is if someone says 'Arc' vs 'q'.
I had no idea what GIS is. I am vaguely aware of what's happening on utility lines! Thanks to my time shooting the shit with the Georgia Power linemen back when I used to run 911 calls for wires down. But you totally lost me at weatherize las, though I appreciated the explanation that led me down a quick Google rabbit hole.
I'm glad your searches were interesting :) I found your Q&A interesting too!
For folks not searching:
GIS is Geographic Information Systems. Basically maps and map data.
Other terms I used include: lidar, this is radar but with light so we can get a whole lot of points and can model a thing. Las is just the file format for storing these points. Weathering/weatherizing is our process of selecting a specific flight line of points.
I have a degree in GIS.
I do not do anything with GIS.
Sometimes I wish I'd chosen a different path 20 years ago...
Itās weird to me that knowing what GIS is is enough to filter the wheat from the chaff. Iāve known what GIS was since before I was a teenager.
I am in the wine industry. It took me a while to come up with something, but I think this is a pretty good single question:
How do you make a sulfite free wine?
An inexperienced consumer will have no idea what sulfite is. A more educated consumer would know that sulfite is the primary preservative used in wine. It is often added in many different stages in the winemaking process. It is usually added as aqueous SO2, gaseous SO2 (for empty barrels), or Potassium MetaBisulfite (a powder). That educated consumer may say that you just donāt add any of those forms during the winemaking process. An industry professional should know that it is impossible to make a sulfite free wine. If someone tells you they have done it, they either have a novel process for removing sulfites, or they are lying. Yeast naturally produce sulfite during alcoholic fermentation, to prevent other microbes growing. So a wine cannot go through a yeast fermentation without having any sulfite.
I've been brewing beer for about 15 years as a hobby. I'm no chemist, but I've gotten a pretty good understanding of the chemistry over the years. I'm familiar with some of the byproducts of saccharomyces cerevisiae, but I've never known sulfites to be one in beer. Does wine fermentation use saccharomyces cerevisiae? If so, does the sulfur come from the grapes?
I just thought of another question: How do you spell Saccharomyces cerevisiae? It doesnāt work quite as well over text though.
Anyway, we do use Saccharomyces cerevisiae in winemaking as well. We do use other yeast species, but basically all fermentations are finished by cerevisiae, since other yeasts canāt handle the high alcohol content of a finished wine.
Iām no chemist either, but I am almost positive your homebrewed beers also have sulfites. The naturally produced sulfites are quite low, so they are mostly ignored in winemaking. I would imagine the same is true for beer brewing. The only real effect is that āsulfite free winesā are labeled as āno added sulfitesā and ācontains sulfitesā, instead of being able to remove the ācontains sulfitesā label. With a quick google, I canāt find the actual chemical pathways that create the sulfites, but I think it comes from the yeast using sulfur containing amino acids and discarding the sulfur.
I donāt know if it is reputable, but this website claims that sulfites are present in every fermented alcoholic beverage: https://brewingforward.com/wiki/Sulfite
Ah, yes, that makes sense. I guess my beers have contained sulfites. Diacetyl has been the only chemical nemesis I've had to fight. Fortunately, building a fermentation chamber made that an easy battle.
"Why are the pieces in a game of Go not the same size, and how does this relate to the Google logo not being a perfect circle?"
Answer
A white stone in Go will always appear slightly larger than a black one, so to compensate for this visual instability - that doesn't actually exist when measured - black stones are made just a tiny bit larger. This is in service of visual balance, a concept in graphic design that underpins most of typography.
You see, perfect circles rarely appear in nature. The earth isn't actually a sphere - it's a spheroid, slightly squashed at the top and bottom. So, perfect circles - especially when in a pattern with other non-circle shapes - often distract the eye and kind of unnerve the viewer without them realising why. Plain and simple, it looks bad.
This also applies to type. For example, the "o" in the word "Foxtrot" is slightly taller than the top of the "x". If it wasn't, the eye would see that as unbalanced, so we make it slightly taller to compensate for this illusion. It's called Overshoot, and it's a fundamental concept in graphic design that every designer needs to know about. So, to answer the question concisely:
Black stones look smaller than white stones despite being the same size, so you make them a bit larger to compensate. Similarly, the G in Google doesn't fit in a perfect square because it would throw off the visual balance of the entire logo.
What properties of white oak allow you to make boats or barrels from it, but not from red oak?
Lifetime woodworker here.
Answers here: Many woodworkers will simply say that the red oak will leak water through it, and that is a good enough answer actually. They understand that different types of wood have properties that make them uniquely appropriate for certain uses. Some will give a more detailed answer and say that both types of oak are coarse grained, with large pores, but white oak has an internal structure called tyloses, which fill the pores and make it water-tight.
As a very novice woodworker, I'm so curious to hear the answer from an expert
I added an edit with answers.
Hell, if someone knows there are different types of oak woods then there's at least a 50% chance of them being a woodworker or in some other type of trade that deals with wood. I'd wager most people just think of oak as a singular species.
For woodworking you could probably also ask something like "End grain or edge grain?" and the correct answer would be something like 'depends what you're building'.
Film major. Writer/screenwriter.
What is the most basic story structure and how old is it?
A lot of people had their minds blown by Dan Harmon's circle or whatever. That makes me think they're probably unaware of the fact that the basics of story structure were laid out by Aristotle who died in 322 BC.
And even then. Hero's Journey is older than that.
Not quite as old. Although Campbell referred to old myths, the description of the Hero's Journey took place in the 20th century.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written around two thousand years before Aristotle and has been the blueprint for countless tales since. Aristotle probably knew the story. He was famously a pretty well-read kinda guy and that would have informed his own writing.
But I reckon plenty of storytellers in the intervening time were well aware of the basic archetypes and structures used in creating an engaging narrative. This was likely true long before anyone figured out how to write stuff down, let alone invented literary theory.
So my answer would be "it's not Campbell's monomyth but it's close to that, and it's as old as people" (where 'people' isn't necessarily limited to homo sapiens)
Although quite a lot of my degree is English Literature so I guess that does make me fairly expert in the field.
Of course.
I was talking about treatises on story structure rather than stories which are themselves structured. It is clear that an understanding of stories existed before being registered for posterity.
By necessity (and also historical record) complex stories and an understanding of how stories work must have existed prior to Aristotle's Poetics.
I'm sure China did it first too. They always do.
Artistotle's rising action - climax - denouƩment structure ?
I am having horrific flash backs of high school English class where a less good type of teacher forced us to plot every single book we read into that format. Including non Western stories. I hadn't even heard of Hero's Journey until well into adulthood.
I studied Aristotle's Poetics in college and reread it two or three times. It was a good introduction. Not too annoying or orthodox. I have good memories of the class and of the Poetics. The idea was to take it as a source of valuable principles, not as something in which every single story must fit completely. Like most screenwriters, I was overly enamored with story structure for a while. But not through Aristotle.
I didn't study the Hero's Journey very much. After a point, obsessing over these so-called "universal rules" is a waste of time. There's so much more to a good story than structure. Some screenwriters spend way too much time on that. As if following a bunch of steps would lead them to the new Star Wars. They treat story structure as magical formulas that would remove all accidents, randomness, and anxiety from the writing process. Treating art like engineering.
Some theory is good. Loads of theory might make you a decent academic. Not a writer. At the end of the day, you just gotta write. And write. And write.
I like to see it as a cookie recipe. If you strictly follow the recipe, you'll make a good cookie. And it is probably a good idea to follow it a few times to understand how to make a good cookie.
But ultimately, if you want to make something unique you'd need to deviate from the recipe. That said, I'm a sucker for a good chocolate chip cookie. So you'll need to be really good if you want to beat the basic recipe.
I would add one thing: unlike with cookies, if you strictly follow the recipe, you won't even make a good generic story. That is because story formulas won't get you all the way there at all. They are incomplete recipes.
Why do we do <business function>?
There are no right answers, but there are plenty of stupid answers, and it always surprises me the number of people with no clue why their organizations spend an inordinate amount of time doing things like forecasting.
I, too, have no clue why my same day patch is still sitting in PR and why the CCB is mad at me for doing their work for them.
Should a place have processes, sure. Did I use a full day of my time to communicate with owners and present them with two solutions to the problem they should have never introduced in the first place, also yes. Did I get a lecture about how I'm interrupting their busy schedule, implying that my own time is worth less, you bet.
If I went through "the proper channels" for every fix I put out, I'd be about a month behind where I am now. So yeah, no clue.
As much as I want the answer to be "math," it generally isn't the math I want it to be.
Usually it's some combination of "executive's bonus" and "just following orders/not my job."
Here's one for a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, the one responsible for designing and maintaining the core functions of a Microsoft network. It's not actually called MCSE anymore, those have recently been retired for I think... nine? new certifications aimed more at specific job roles. It's the same stuff, just broken up so you have to pay for more certs to get the same street cred. :P
Q: Tell me about FSMO roles.
A: I'm not going to type out the full answer but I'll link to a nice summary. This is something no regular windows user should ever know anything about, and something that only a high level Microsoft engineer would ever encounter or manage. I'd be happy if the person answering could remember what FSMO means, that there were five of them total, and be able to remember what at least two or three of them do. These have hardly changed at all since Windows 2000 was released.
The funny part is you rarely need to touch these things unless you are making big changes to your active directory design or a domain functional level upgrade is coming down the pipe. A hard rule I know is you do not ever use any products that modify anything about these services under any circumstances, otherwise any future upgrade of your domain functional level is liable to blow up in your face. You break anything about these services, Microsoft support will tell you, 'sorry, rebuild your active directory from scratch.' click ;)
It's been a minute since I had to deal with Flexible Single Master Operations roles, but I did have to answer that one for a job interview. Ah, Microsoft AD controllers.
From your link:
Suddenly Iām imagining these incredibly technical roles as done by joyful woodland creatures, and that tickles my brain!
Vast majority of everything else in that link is completely unfathomable to me, even as a relatively competent computer end-user.
Oh that thought fills me with glee, thank you.
Software development is uniquely suited to this question- there are so, so many unique frameworks and tools it's easy to craft something that a junior dev can answer with ease but sounds like complete nonsense to everyone else.
What does the empty array in the useEffect do?
Did the CI/CD pipeline fail the deploy because of a compiler error?
I have a POCO I need to serialize before it lands in the noSQL DB- should I use the built in .NET System.Text or Newtonsoft?
I guess that depends on how you define "line of work". I'm a C++ programmer and have no idea how to answer #1 or 3. However, are we in the same line of work? I think that it would be super difficult to come up with a question that most software engineers could answer but a layperson couldn't. Though maybe your #2 comes close.
I recently came across the following interview question and I kind of liked it because it would allow any kind of software developer to show some knowledge:
"When I type something into the address bar and press the enter key, what happens? Be as pedantic as possible."
Some answers could go on about concepts like HTTP, SSL certificates, DNS, NAT, browser APIs, and other answers would be way more low level like "well, a keyboard interrupt happens, and the CPU...".
"A normally open switch is closed, completing a circuit allowing electrons to traverse the copper wire at approximately 1/3 of c..."
That's a better challenge. I think there's enough shared vernacular we can still generalize it to all dev fields (high level languages at least) and still confuse the pants off the lay person though.
This one needs some qualifiers to actually be true but I like the rhythm of it so I'm keeping it..
At least getting more specific, I know I can filter out a chunk of my own coworkers by asking them:
a) When should we write our own move operations?
b) When and how do you unit test move construction/assignment?
Because I have come across three different in-house libraries (so far) where these questions clearly couldn't be answered correctly.
We're slowly replacing Newtonsoft with System.Text.Json and I am a fan of using built-ins over pulling in libraries, especially with so many things going to paid licenses lately. Though the subtle differences have definitely bitten us when translating data between services that are on different libraries.
Note that I'm not against paid licenses but it sure ruffles some feathers when something goes from free to suddenly being paid. I've convinced management to pay for some that we've tightly integrated into our systems but I am not gonna win that fight for all of them.
I think to detect professional software developers you could ask: "How does the compiler make sense of programming language syntax anyway? I mean it's structured, but stored as characters..."
Answer
Mentions recursive descent parsers, parser combinators, LR parsers family. If they mention regular expressions, only in combination with other approaches. They should mention syntax trees or get into a long monologue about LISP/Scheme or Forth.This is obviously not bulletproof, but if they don't know, they are not interested in the tools of their trade. Which I guess tells you something. And it's taught in universities, so anyone with a degree should at least be aware.
To detect intermediate Linux/UNIX command line familiarity, a good indicator that the person is a system administrator: "What does
tar xfdo?"Answer
Tar is a tool to pack up and optionally compress files and to optionally decompress and unpack them. Name stands for "tape archiver". It is similar to zip. They should have opinion on "Why not use zip instead?" as there are important nuances. The specifiedxfoptions tell it to eXtract from File.$ tar xtract zee vucking file
If Tildes had gold, I would guild this. It's been quite a while since I read a comment on the internet that made me laugh out loud.
You're not using the a flag for auto? What kind of monster are you? :P
Why is silver/copper mokume-gane a bad choice for a wedding ring?
Answer
When metals that are electropotentially different enough are in contact and in the presence of an electrolyte to allow current to flow, galvanic corrosion occurs. Diffusion welding (part of the mokume-gane process) obviously causes contact, and human skin leaks electrolyte in the form of sweat a lot of the time.
So a silver/copper ring which is worn all or most of the time will corrode in a relatively short time - years not months - but a wedding ring symbolises forever and while the seamless melding of two metals into one beautiful form appears perfectly symbolic for a marriage, having that forever dissolve away in just a few years is perhaps not the best symbolic or practical outcome.
Anyway even if you don't work with mokume-gane - and most people don't, as beautiful as it is, that stuff is hard to make - I would consider this expert-level knowledge. You can see with a quick search on Etsy a number of manufacturers who do not have this level of expertise and I feel bad for their customers spending hundreds or even thousands of pounds on a ring which probably won't even outlive their current car, let alone their marriage.
I'd never even heard of mokume-gane before this, but damn it looks good. How long did you spend mastering that skill? Or rather, how long did it take before it felt like you had a decent mastery of it? How/where did you learn?
I'm not a master of it by any means. I did enough to learn how to do it using metals like copper and brass and silver, which took a couple of weeks of trying and failing. But for it to be a skill worth money to me as someone who mostly makes bespoke wedding rings, I need to learn how to do it with metals like gold and platinum and so on. Which, while being the exact same process in theory, makes it prohibitively expensive to upskill on - I can't afford to junk billets worth hundreds or even thousands of pounds.
"What percentage of the maximum nits do you think that Virtual Production LED wall over there typically runs at?"
About 10% - 30% maximum output.
When optimizing a 3D scene for Renderstream output, what is your target framerate and resolution?
A: 30fps absolute minimum, 60fps ideally - at 4K resolution
Some kind of display hardware engineer? I recognize the words, but not the meanings.
Close! I help create and display content used to film on a Virtual Production LED Volume.
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-virtual-production-definition/
Is the low average output due to most scenes simply not being very bright in the grand scheme of things and you just sometimes have something in the scene like a low sun that you actually need that much light, or is it due to trying to increase the lifespan of the LEDs?
The screens are usually set fairly low simply because they're to bright! If they were set at 100% they would also use more power, but it's mainly lighting reasons.
If a performer is on the stage, the more light coming off the wall, the more intensely you need to set the other lighting gear. Most standard portable lights cannot outshine a bright LED wall by themselves. So you either need more of them, or more expensive higher powered ones. All that lighting is not only potentially making it hard for your performer to see, it's hot! LED walls also make great radiant heaters. Even with a robust cooling system, the LED panels are radiating heat directly onto people.
For reference, your average desktop monitor will usually have a maximum brightness of 400nits. The panels on our LED wall max out at 3000nits, and there are some models that are used on the ceiling to simulate daylight that can reach 5,000-7,000.
why is a three-pin DMX cable not replaceable with a three-pin XLR cable?
answer
three pin DMX cables have a much higher impedance rating to avoid data loss as the cableās capacitance can degrade the signal. if you use a standard XLR cable fixtures could have flickering or other odd behaviour
and for fun: what was the first lighting console?
answer
an organ. no, seriously
The organ thing makes sense to me. The thing an organist actually āplaysā is just a fancy remote control for mechanical switches on the pipes. IIRC that part on larger organs is usually referred to as the console, as well.
I may or may not have a dream of making my own orchestrionā¦.
cool dream! and yeah itās the same principle, it was actually electric action organs from old cinemas that inspired fred bentham, the inventor :)
What....profession is this for? Something music and electronics related I think? But can't tell if organ as in instrument or inside of an animal? :)
Professional lighting. Organ as in the instrument
The other ones I thought of for lighting:
How many channels in a universe?
Using a RGBWA LED fixture, how would you mix a specific colour?
In what business scenarios might time decay modeling be more prudent than simplistic revenue attribution models?
This is open-ended, but generally longer term funnels benefit from time decay, or some combination of time decay as a modifier on other attribution models, whereas a more traditional first touch, last touch, W, or U model are easier to implement for buyers in a nominal decision segment. Although those buyers are more influenced by more difficult to track long-term metrics which brings me to my next one.When is it worth it to implement Media Mix Modeling?
Also open-ended. Whereas the first question might be more useful in a B2B context, MMM is much more useful in high volume, low consideration space. I have seen companies waste time on MMM when they're low-volume, high cost, long sales cycle businesses with low ad spend. It's not that it doesn't have an impact, but they typically don't have the volume of data needed to build a good model.Job
I truly don't know. Analytics, integrations/pipelines, implementations *stuff*, generally speaking in advertising, marketing, sales, and customer retention.In my old life I probably would've asked you to compare & contrast a Leitwolf vs a PB 600. Or about whether we should rent an SL 100 vs SL 260 vs SL 320 for the next show.
Oh fun!
Iāll do one based off of yours. Mine is probably a bit easier though, as Iām a nurse and Iām assuming you are a physician?
Q: Under what circumstances would one want to withhold the initiation of compressions in a cardiac arrest patient that is full code?
A:
Details
When the patient has a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD).
These patients have no palpable pulse at baseline because their blood is flowing continuously with the help of the device, instead of pumping like our regular hearts do. This could lead to calling a code when the patient is not under cardiac arrest. If they are arresting, compressions can dislodge the device and cause massive hemorrhage.
The way to help these patients is to assess the device, or try to fix the underlying problem (dysrhythmia, hypovolemia, etc). If you work through all your Hs and Ts in ACLS and all options are exhausted then you can try to do compressions as a hail mary but at that point theyāre probably not coming back.
Thanks for teaching me something! The kids in my neighborhood were notorious paint huffers of the gold variety. I never knew this!
First one I actually knew! I'm renewing my ACLS in a few weeks
I'm a paramedic, who had aspirations of medical school, but I wasn't smart enough to do well on the mcat despite trying to a couple of times. Currently I'm accepted to, and tentatively starting in January, an accelerated non-nursing BS to MSN program. Gotta do something that pays better.
My tidbit comes from AHLS ('H' for 'Hazmat'), a two day AHA course I took back in my firefighter/paramedic days, when the state of Georgia actually had money to pay for people to take such classes. Hell, they paid my gas to drive to and from Savannah, up to $160 for my one night hotel stay, and the cost of the course. I was one of two medics, it was mostly some PGY-1 residents and a couple of nurses. But it was one of the coolest classes I got to take back in the day. It was taught by the toxicologist running the Georgia Poison Center, dude was a frickin genius. Literally one of the authors of the material, so questions were extremely well explained and answered.
In the case of hydrocarbon intake, your telltale sign will be refractory VF that won't convert no matter how much amio, lido, or joules you throw at it. The hydrocarbons hypersensitize cardiac tissue to vasopressors, including those released by the adrenal glands. So in the case of, say, a kid getting high sniffing gas -- they hear the garage door opening of a parent coming home, freak out, adrenal glands kick in, and boom they've put themselves in VF.
The solution to treat is Esmolol, as it's titratable and with a short enough half life that you can just turn it off if their pressure is that bad on ROSC.
That's a good one. At first I thought it was going to be an ATLS question with a penetrating chest injury or something similar.
For me, asking the definition of chronic kidney disease would probably do it for the most part.
It took me a bit to think of a good one, but I think this is a pretty solid one to separate wheat from chaff for database admins in particular. Knowing the answer is the cornerstone of SQL tuning.
What is a cartesian merge, is it bad, and what is the most common way to create one?
Answer
It's when you join every row in a table to every row in another table. So a cartesian query of two tables with 10 rows each returns 100 rows. Two tables 100MB in size will consume 10GB of RAM generating that result. As such, it's the absolute worst for anything beyond a trivial size.
Say goodbye to everything in your cache, say hello to massive locks. A single Cartesian merge has the capability to grind a database to it's knees and kill performance across the board.
The most common way to create one is to miss a join condition. It's so common I have no doubts that huge quantities of database servers are massively overprovisioned because of them.
It feels bad that I couldn't answer that question because I actually have a professional certificate in Microsoft SQL Server, but I guess it has been a very long time since I've had to dust off the DBA hat.
Ooh, what a great question. I love your answer! For me, hmm:
What are the implications of getting contradictory-seeming results from an Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and a KPSS test (for example, each test rejects), and what, if any, action should you take to remedy this to achieve stationarity?
If a colleague could hypothetically answer this to me without needing to do some research, Iāll believe anything they say and come to them when needing help forever!
Job
Data scientist (in this case, time series forecasting)
Answer
An ADF rejection of its null hypothesis often suggests the presence of a unit root in the data while a KPSS rejection conversely will suggest the lack of a unit root. This can be caused by difference nonstationarity in the data; applying differencing and running the tests again should ameliorate this.
ā¦I think?? I am not an expert, and while Iāve come across this situation multiple times when doing time series forecasting itās given me a headache every timeā¦ I may be wrong with my answer (although I hope not as that would mean Iāve messed up data in the past!)
What are the Preventive Controls and/or Critical Control Points needed to control the physical hazards associated with this raw material? What are the limits and procedures to validate their effectiveness? What are the corrective actions to deploy when the material or the process doesn't conform to standards?
(the context is food safety / quality)
In which situation would you use an alpha clamp fabricated by TĆ¼nkers? Light deformable workpieces or heavy duty components?
(Mechanical design engineering - alphas are for heavy duty application due to the immense force they exert as they can bend the clamping unit, but also the workpiece as well.)
How do you handle ruleset versioning in large-scale enterprise environments with multiple teams working in parallel?
Uh... I have no idea. With caution?
What is the relationship between different conditional structures?
job
English teacher as a foreign language
answer
1st, 2nd and 3rd conditionals are linked by reporting their structure, you can form one from the other by going one step to the past.
If + present simple, will
If + past simple, would
If + past perfect, would + have + past participle
help
So, if I want candy, I will buy my own.
If I ate your candy, I would admit it.
If I had eaten your candy, I would have hidden all traces of evidence and denied it when asked?
Is "if + present simple + would" like "if I want candy I would have bought some" incorrect?
I struggle with tenses even after this many years of learning English as a foreign language :<
Those examples are great! The last one I would change slightly to: If I wanted candy I would have bought some. And that one is none of the structures I mentioned because it's a mixed conditional (a mix of 2nd and 3rd)
I'll do another one. Why is 'been' part of the formula for present perfect continuous?
answer
present continuos: to be + (verb+ing)
present perfect: have + past participle
present perfect continuous: have + been + (verb+ing)
(been is the to be for the continuous and the past participle for the perfect)
Not the guy, but yeah that's incorrect. It should be simple past: "if I wanted candy I would have bought some."
Your other examples were all correct.
"What code-cutting machine do you use?"
Their answer can give clues to the age of their lockshop, their specialty, and (potentially) their skill level.
I'm curious, has the locksmithing industry seen any upticks in people interested in the field from the past few years of lockpicking videos gaining popularity on YouTube/TikTok? Or even like a widespread distrust of certain brands? Lockpicking Lawyer in particular has completely destroyed my opinion of Masterlock's brand.
It's really hard to say with any certainty, but for myself I can say that lockpicking content got me started as a hobbyist picker before I became a locksmith, and that was largely before Lockpicking Lawyer was big. There's surprisingly little overlap in the two communities (smiths and pickers), kind of like how there are competitive pistol shooters and police officers, but overlap between the two isn't necessarily huge and large portions of the two populations deeply distrust each other.
If you're involved in IT (I know many Tilderinos are), picture how little people know about computer security. "Good enough" is good enough for most. I teach security managers, and I show them how to slap open a certain popular padlock that they still use. They're like, "huh, that's crazy." But I doubt they change it. If even they don't care, it's never going to sink in for the general population.
Just knowing who LPL is puts us in the tiny minority who even kind of care. I occasionally get people who are super proud of knowing how bad Master Lock is, but then they use it anyway because "locks just keep honest people honest." And it kind of doesn't matter much. Even the nice stuff opens to an angle grinder. Sure, I won't use Master on principle. Most simply don't care.
As evidenced by practically anywhere you can buy a lock: Masterlock is doing just fine. They still take up 70+% of the shelf space. The majority of people just don't have the capacity to care about which lock is the absolute best. In honesty, they aren't necessarily wrong either: most of your locks will never be shimmed or picked, if they are bypassed, they will just be cut. Criminals don't care about not leaving a mark on your padlock, they care about stealing your bike.
Exactly