People often ask why I contribute to open source projects or otherwise work on building automated tooling. They see me spending hours to automate a task or fix a bug that take seconds to do or avoid manually, in a way that the original XKCD comic says won’t pay off. The disconnect seems to be that the comic and those people only consider time it saves me, not time it saves the tens to thousands to millions of other people who will use the script or patch or whatever when I publish it. So, here’s a version of xkcd.com/1205 updated for making decisions that benefit a thousand people instead of just one.
FYI: there is actually an XKCD font if you want to match the original more closely. https://github.com/ipython/xkcd-font
I’m just trying to think of anything that I do 50x a day that takes five minutes.
Not since I was a teenager.
…
Did you seriously see an xkcd from 3 or so years ago and get so angry that you felt the need to run and post in a forum about how they are wrong and you are actually the savior of humanity?
Heh, I can’t wait until the person who insists that detecting a desired action based upon CPU temperature is actually a very important workflow and an example of why developers need to be wary of fixing bugs
Ummm … are you ok?
It’s a good point to make and interesting to see how the numbers shake out … both of which come together to make the broader point that many people probably have bad intuitions for what these numbers look like.
