While I agree that “SQL Enjoyer” seems like a weird category, I personally love SQL. I’ve been using it professionally for over 20 years, and I’ve yet to encounter a more elegant, efficient, and practical language for handling data in a relational database. Every attempt I’ve seen to replace it with something simpler has fallen far short.

Which database systems were you dealing with, that didn’t allow variables? My personal favorite is PostgreSQL, which does allow them on scripting languages, such as PLPGSQL.

I experience this sort of thing myself. I’m capable of deep focus, and strongly prefer it over switching tasks frequently, exactly because of this phenomenon. Getting yanked out of deep focus and asked to do something else is disorienting to the point of pain, and it will be a minute or three before I can put aside the original task enough to actually give the new task my full attention. This sort of thing is useful for my work, a lot of the time, but it can require some careful management, in terms of how I engage with other people.

I’m really not; I was just genuinely curious.

What if the other party is recording the phone call? Which would you prefer in that scenario?

While it is absolutely possible to learn the skills required to pick up on these things, my personal experience is that it’s a very slow, very painful process. I first realized that there was information most everyone around me were getting that I wasn’t (i.e. social cues) at around 8 years old. I didn’t come up with anything resembling a solution until I was 12, when I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It took me the better part of three decades to devise and implement my workaround. The essentials are that most people appear to have an intuitive grasp of social cues, including but not limited to the ability to recognize, identify, and interpret emotions in other people. I do not have this intuitive grasp, but I am now able to glean a largely overlapping set of information by consciously reading body language, micro-expressions, voice intonation, common patterns of phrasing, etc., and also by creating a mental model of common patterns of thinking, which I call “mental archetypes”. Note that these archetypes are neither intended as nor appropriate for comprehending or predicting any specific individual, but rather illustrate general patterns into which many people frequently fall, to aid in navigating social situations. For me, it was a lengthy, tedious, painstaking process, but it was effective.

Is it? I’m genuinely asking. I haven’t seen statistics on how much storage people looking for cloud backup solutions use, but to me, anything under 1TB seems too small to be worth it, these days.

I’ve been using rsync.net for a while now. It’s been stable, fast, and relatively inexpensive. There’s also the benefit that it’s easy to script automated backups directly to it. For more Dropbox-like functionality, I have a Nextcloud instance that uses rsync.net as external storage. It’s been great so far!

In my experience as a software developer (not games) for nearly 20 years, I’ve gotten the strong impression that most people really don’t know what they want until they have it. My ideal client (i.e. person who intends to use the software I’m about to write) for a new project would have a clear idea about what they’re trying to accomplish, and what problem(s) they’re trying to solve. In my entire career, I believe I could count the number of times I’ve encountered such a client on one hand. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the client has a vague notion of automating some things that currently take them longer than they’d like, and initially provide very few details about the actual problems and goals. The result ends up being a series of updates, with feedback between, until the client is finally satisfied. Interestingly enough, it isn’t that these people are in any way stupid, or that they simply never bothered thinking about it. Rather, it seems to be because they’re a little overwhelmed (the reason they came to me in the first place), and focused more on relieving the burden than on what kind of solution might accomplish said relieving. This isn’t unreasonable; it just happens not to be particularly helpful.

All of that said, I do believe there is a lot of merit to providing feedback that focuses on what we want, rather than what we don’t, largely because, in my experience, people tend to have more specific ideas when thinking about what they’d like. When thinking about what they dislike, many people will naturally focus on their own emotional reactions to things, rather than how said emotions were actually triggered. When thinking about what they want, there’s still a focus on the emotions one wishes to experience, but most people tend to imagine something that will trigger those positive emotions, and state that, rather than talking about the feelings themselves, resulting in higher specificity.