Bad Ideas

A collection of ideas that are somehow considered bad based on our unreliable experience, unrigorous trials, or sloppy thought experiments.

See also…

Great Impractical Ideas for the Far and Possibly Infinitely Far or Maybe Not so Far Future
Good Ideas

Training loss watch party

Thinking that for i in 3..=0 iterates from 3 to 0

@Windows making Em dash unreasonably hard to type

Triple nested f-string

Blackbox debugging

Internet

Touching code that works without being touched

Clicky switches

Forget to eat breakfast because you’re writing CSS

@Windows where’s Colemak support?

Electron

Implement a python typechecker

Use a game controller but only use it for this

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | sh

Proofreading right after a paper deadline usually leads to more errors being identified than proofreading before the deadline.

Code, make format, submit assignment, then git discard all changes from make format, repeat (actually a very good idea)

Deadlock your database

Prompt engineering

CJK fonts in LaTeX

#![allow(warnings)] in main.rs

Memory leak… 80GB of leak… but when coding in Python

E0072

Reading your code from 2 months ago, and having to figure out what columns there are in a 56-column dataframe

for d in ...:
	for p in ...:
		for g in ...:
			for a in ...:
				for s in ...:

cmake

C++

Trying to compile python programmes

// I fixed typescript
type Option<T> = {
    "type": "Some";
    value: T;
} | {
    "type": "None";
    value: sorry;
};

TypeScript

Eating pizza that’s been in the fridge for a month

Declare pub struct Thing {...

Forget you boiled water to brew tea and reboil the same water 4 times over 2 hours

Write if ... then ... else ... in Python, not run it, and commit to main

Start debugging and forget there’s something being cooked on the stove

Turn off bluetooth when all your input devices are connected via bluetooth

Design your programming language and capitalize true and false

Forget to call softmax

Index into a string by byte when there’s emoji in the string

Python environments

Write code that only works on Firefox

cargo clean then cargo build

Having to do NLP in Rust

Only water your plant when you’re not sad

Spell “pizza” as “piazza”

Sleep when you should be studying for a final

Leaking water onto your final exam

Pulling on your hair whenever you don’t know how to do a problem on the final

Write “coprima” instead of “coprime”

Recursion in Rust

Recursion in Python

Write CSS without looking at the output

Pointers

Going to recitation after skipping lecture

Banning yourself from doing homework for the rest of the day

Writing the calculus chain rule when the exam asks for the probability chain rule

Not drinking coffee before teaching an 8 am lab

Writing SML in 251 proof