From dé- + merde + -er, literally “to remove oneself from the shit”.
System D
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: System D
#62I might be dense, but I really have little idea of what System D _actually_ is in practice after reading this. Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?
> Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ? Broadly speaking, it refers to one's capability of being smart in a "handy man" field. Your tire is flat and you have nothing to fix it? Take a toothpick and hot glue. That's system D. You have a bottle of wine but nothing to open it? Put the bottom in your shoe and rub it against the wall. That's system D. N…
In other words, a ‘hack’
Re: System D
#63"System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricasse of Lobster Thermidor — for which only fifty portions were available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know."
Presumably they would reuse the lobster shells and stuff them with something like crab or fish. Amazing!
Re: System D
#64I might be dense, but I really have little idea of what System D _actually_ is in practice after reading this. Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?
An example from the software world:
Back in the misty days of Not Too Long Ago, there was a Jira add-on called nFeed. It allowed you to hook external databases to Jira using SQL queries and display the query results for users. Note I said display but not search for, which became a sticking point: The nontechnical users could see all the data from the Microsoft CRM internal database (and getting data out of that was another saga, but not quite of this kind) but not search for it using normal Jira search functions.
(Before I go on, I'll state that nFeed is now Elements Connect, which supports this use case natively. Basic search is a "use case" which must be explicitly "supported" because Jira.)
This was intolerable. This was not something you could fix from within nFeed. This was something I had to fix.
Fortunately, I had an Idea.
The Idea: I could create shadow fields to mirror the contents of the nFeed fields, such that those fields would be normal Jira text fields which Jira could search. I just needed a way to automatically synchronize the nFeed fields and the text fields, and a way to hide those shadow fields from the nontechnical users.
The System D stuff: nFeed used the Velocity template engine to allow you to generate the HTML to display in the Jira tickets. Velocity didn't know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript from Sweet Fanny Adams. Therefore, I could inject all three of those things directly into the ticket using the templates. I used JavaScript to read the text field from the displayed page, compare it to the text from the fresh SQL query, and, if they didn't match, use XMLHttpRequest to update the backend using the published REST API, which succeeded because it ran in the security context of the user viewing the page. A bit of inline CSS to hide the shadow text fields as long as they were beneath their corresponding nFeed field on the page and I was done.
Mostly done. I still had to ensure I wrote the JavaScript without curly brackets, as those were sacred to Velocity, and I fought with correct text quoting and unquoting for a little bit. Something I couldn't fix was Jira's own logging functionality: Every time a user with permissions to edit a ticket viewed it, the JavaScript might trigger and Jira would record that as them editing the ticket. That got me some confused support calls, but it was still better than what I would have gotten had I thrown up my hands. After all, I was the one who suggested nFeed to begin with.
Pretty good for something I cooked up the day I found the original problem, in the period of time between finding the problem and reporting it all to my manager.
Re: System D
#65I might be dense, but I really have little idea of what System D _actually_ is in practice after reading this. Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?
In practice it is to come up with a solution to a problem and follow through with it regardless of what it takes to do so or how unconventional the solution may have to be.
Think of it as a philosophy or a resolve as much as a verb.
Re: System D
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ? Broadly speaking, it refers to one's capability of being smart in a "handy man" field. Your tire is flat and you have nothing to fix it? Take a toothpick and hot glue. That's system D. You have a bottle of wine but nothing to open it? Put the bottom in your shoe and rub it against the wall. That's system D. N…
In other words, a ‘hack’
A hack has connotations of laziness though. This is the opposite.
The constraints of the situation may call for a ‘hack’ but it’s not an expression of laziness. It is a necessary action provided the circumstances.
Re: System D
#67Vaguely related: 3K: kitanai, kiken, kitsui. (dirty, dangerous, demanding). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty,_dangerous_and_demeaning
and Mike Rowe, presenter of the shows Dirty Jobs and the series Somebody's Gotta Do It
I'm reminded of that Canadian Mike Row who started a Mike Rowe Software, which was subject to legal action from Microsoft. :)
Re: System D
#68Anthony Bourdain... recently started watching his show from time to time. Really a bummer that he's gone.
There was a documentary Roadrunner (2021). I haven't seen it. I'm curious if anyone besides him knew why he did it. Existential loneliness, lack of love, distance from family and others, and purposelessness? Mostly middle-age and older American men, skewing towards white and lower in income, are dying early by their own initiative. It might explain a fraction of drug overdose and mass murder events.
There has been a lot of discussion about Bourdain’s suicide. Speculation.
The stress of fame and constant travel. Drinking constantly and avoiding problems in your own life. These are possible contributing factors. I don’t think you can really know why someone did it, most of the time. I don’t think we can even assume that he knows why he did it. We do things without understanding why.
Re: System D
#69> In recent literature on the informal economy, System D is the growing share of the world's economy which makes up the underground economy... This just seems like word salad to me. What am I missing?
All of the 'underground' things desperate people do to stay alive, i.e. prostitution
You mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”. Prostitution is not the only thing people do outside of the purview of the government for income.
A more mundane example is working for a restaurant under the table.
Re: System D
#70I might be dense, but I really have little idea of what System D _actually_ is in practice after reading this. Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ?
> Can anyone ELI5 what it is in practice? What are some of the ideas that allows one to débrouiller, etc... ? Broadly speaking, it refers to one's capability of being smart in a "handy man" field. Your tire is flat and you have nothing to fix it? Take a toothpick and hot glue. That's system D. You have a bottle of wine but nothing to open it? Put the bottom in your shoe and rub it against the wall. That's system D. N…
I applied some system D earlier tonight. I needed about 1.8V to feed into a level shifter IC. I ended up connecting three diodes in series with a resistor, then connected it to 3.3V.