If you haven’t read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M’s backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):
# Assuming df is your DataFrame
# Show the plot
plt.show()
That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn’t actually think about the code at all.
What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there’s bigger issues to watch out for?
Not me, but an old coworker used a similar trick to see if reviewers were actually reading his documentation. Before sending a large document out for review he would add a sentence to some random paragraph stating, “If you read this, come to my office and I will give you $20.” Surprisingly few people ever came for the money.
We joke about putting that in report cards or other special ed paperwork where we’re required to write paragraphs/pages of info that probably never get looked at.
I like to put my petty pop-cultural grievances in documentation because I know if someone reads it I’ll probably get an IM on the subject.
“Delete the file and it will disappear forever, like the show Other Space that was never seen again after Yahoo’s short lived streaming service imploded.”
I didn’t know until right now that Yahoo even had a streaming service.
They were most notable for producing the last season of Community and airing it inbetween buffering.
Season six of Community ‘aired’ there.
I’m still pissed at NBC for selling “Six Seasons and a Movie” merchandise and then canceling after season five.
(And the movie is still coming.)
It was such a funny show! Made me fall in love with Karan Soni.
Ha, that reminds me of Donald Knuth offering 0x$1.00 to anyone that finds a mistake in TAOCP, like this guy:
https://nickdrozd.github.io/2019/05/17/knuth-check.html