Comment on Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 2 days agoWe’re seriously citing a population of 900 people on the Olympic Peninsula as somehow central to the RTO order?
I said “for a pathological example”
if you don’t know what that term means, you can look it up.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I know quite well what that word means. It’s just not the right one for this use case.
spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 1 day ago
no, if I meant hypothetical I would have said hypothetical. notice that I gave two hypotheticals - Brinnon-Redmond and Tacoma-Redmond. only the Brinnon one was pathological.
let’s go back to 9th grade Advanced English and diagram out my comment. that sentence is in a paragraph, the topic of which is “some shit about Seattle’s geography that people who’ve never lived here probably don’t know”. notice I’m talking about geography. I wasn’t saying anything about Brinnon’s population, or the likelihood of its residents working at Microsoft. that was entirely words you put into my mouth and then decided you disagreed with.
if you think pathological is the wrong word choice there, then no I don’t think you actually understand what it means, at least not in the context I was using it. from wikipedia:
there’s crow-flies distance and there’s driving distance, and obviously driving distance is always longer, but usually not that much longer. playing around with Google Maps again, Seattle-Tacoma is 25 miles crow-flies but 37 miles driving, for a ratio of 1.5. that seems likely to be about average. the Brinnon-Redmond distance, without the ferry, gives you a ~3.7 ratio. that’s an input that causes significantly worse performance than the average case. it’s pathological.
the closest synonym to pathological in this context would be “worst-case”, but that would be subtly incorrect, because then I would be claiming that Brinnon is the longest driving distance out of all possible commutes to Redmond within a 50 miles crow-flies bubble. you’d need some fancy GIS software to find that, not just me poking around for a few minutes in Google Maps.
(and this is the technology sub-lemmy, in a thread about something that will mostly affect software engineers, and planning out a driving commute is a classic example of a pathfinding algorithm…using “pathological” from the computer science context here is actually an extremely cromulent word choice)
there seems to be a recurring pattern of you responding to me, making up shit I didn’t actually say, and then nitpicking about it. recently you accused me of “trying to both-sides Nazis”. please stop doing that.