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?
Including links to progress pictures and files associated with my drawings on my Internet Archive profile in the description. Formerly I used Imgur to post progress pictures, but migrated to Internet Archive after I learned that Imgur implemented an expiration policy. When people in the comments accuse my work of being AI-generated, it shows that people aren’t reading the description.
When I first heard about the brown M&M thing, I thought it was just celebrities being petty, or maybe a joke. Years later, when I heard Roth’s explanation, I thought it was absolute genius.
In a former job, I developed “software” (I clicked together some LabVIEW…) for custom designed scientific experiments, which many other researchers (mostly PhD students) would use. Wrote detailed SOPs for their usage, because everything was wonky and in constant evolution, and in some circumstances, data generated could be wrong. So I put a toggle switch with some cryptic acronym on the panel which was told to be flipped in the SOP when users reached the part where following instructions was really critical. The toggle switch did nothing but to log time and date and what user was logged in. When discussing weird data later on, first thing I did was to check whether that log existed, and if not heavily scrutinized the data with respect to errors that could be induced by not following the SOP.
I work in the event industry as a production manager, I get to write these things.
As is typical when you have a large crew there will be dietary restrictions, some of them can be deadly. So before me or any of my crew starts unloading the truck I need to have a cold Dr. Pepper in my hand. If I don’t, we doordash, we do not eat the food provided.
The first thing that came to my mind was car repair.
This one wasn’t one purpose. I went to a shop for an oil change and 10,000 point inspection or whatever they called it. I knew one of my headlight bulbs went out a week before, but when I got the inspection report, it said everything was fine. I went to the shop manager and asked him to confirm that the mechanic had checked everything on the report. I didn’t blame him for the oversight, but he was kind of a dick when I pointed it out and had him do everything again until they found the problem.
Also, my dad always wrote the date on his air filters when he put them in because mechanics would often keep a dirty one laying around just to show it to customers and tell them that it was their filter and it needed replaced. He always got a kick out of calling them out on that kind of bullshit.
I’m one who does all the basic maintenance on my car, so if I had someone push a filter at me saying it needed replacing my response would be I didn’t ask for them to remove it and I change my own filters. Then I’d demand they put it back in with me watching, because it’s probably not out of my car and it’s going to be very awkward when there’s a filter still in there.
Got to always find a shop that you can trust, random ones will eventually screw you even in small ways. I’ve caught missing lugnuts and 50 psi on a tire, and from a dealership for recall work they forgot to reconnect something and it was running terribly. On the flip side the guy I know has called me on the phone and explained exactly what he found and a range of options and prices and recommendations. It’s no wonder I return for his business when I need it, I don’t have to worry about being ripped off. (I do still check behind, can’t help the OCD when it comes to the car lol)
this happened this weekend, I had my transmission fluid changed at 125k miles, went in for oil this weekend at 134k, told me my trans fluid was “dirty and low”. I use the Drivvo app and showed him I did trans fluid when I got new tires, wtf are you talking about.
I use this VH trick at work occasionally for fun just to see if anyone reads my service report. “Your boilers are about to fail in the middle of winter but don’t worry I sprinkled pixie dust on them and did a rain dance”. Never heard from anyone not even my boss. One customer I used to write “Does anyone ever read these? If so call me at (phone number)”. I handed it to the man in charge, he pretended to read it, signed it and handed it back to me. The only one my boss called about was the one I wrote that simply said “I took a shit in the floor drain here”
Honestly, if it was me reading about the pixie dust, I would just find it hilarious and probably not mention it, since I got the joke.
Whenever I show up to a “mobilization project” which involves lifting and mounting shipping containers of machinery and IT equipment onboard ships, I check whether the containers have had their grounding wires attached, as well as checking if the deck welds have been spray painted with protective coating.
If not, I need to check if the cable runs are properly done, deck fiberoptics protected from crane operations, antenna mounted without obstructions, etc.Checking random coax cable connections whether they’ve gotten a proper dose of molycote inside is also a pretty good indicator, but the tech department has gotten really attentive in regards to that. The grounding wire is really the only brown M&M I have left on them.
I work in live production, and have actually encountered the Brown M&M’s clause in real life. It was a small 5 person band. We had the show’s producer sitting backstage, picking brown M&M’s out of the fishbowl for probably 45 minutes.
They showed up for sound check, and immediately went “holy shit you guys actually pulled out the brown ones? We added that as a joke!” The producer was in earshot, and I got to watch him take psychic damage in realtime.
45 minutes? How many M&Ms were there? 🤨
In Windows XP/Vista times I used to be the “computer kid”, helping others in the neighbourhood with their computers, in exchange of some pocket money. My brown M&M was a huge amount of desktop icons - nine times out of ten it meant that the issue with the computer (typically “why is it so slow???”) could be easily solved by:
- uninstalling crapware
- updating and running the anti-virus
- updating the system itself
- running disk cleanup
- defragmenting the hard disk
And boom, as if by magic, the computer was over 9000 times faster!
The desktop icons themselves aren’t a big deal, but they show that the person is rather sloppy on maintenance of their own machine. And they probably can’t even move files here and there.
When it’s time for my car to get an oil change I make sure my windshield fluid is empty. It’s a full service oil change and they claim they check ALL fluids. If it’s still empty I question how good or a job they’ve done and what else they skip
My friend bought an old BMW and was taking it to the dealer for maintenance.
Every oil change there was some overpriced small thing wrong that he had to pay for and then adding insult injury at the end they would charge him serious amounts of money for fluid top off. The amount they charged him for windshield washer fluid was enough to buy about five containers of windshield washer fluid. So tired of these antics he went out and he filled the windshield washer fluid 100% to the top there was no air in the jug whatsoever. He took it in for an oil change, they charged him for a windshield washer top off. He demanded the service manager and said that he had topped it off to the very top and there’s no way they added even a teaspoon of windshield washer fluid to it. The service manager refused to take the windshield washer fill off the bill and said they’d give him a credit for the next time he needed windshield washer fluid.
He never went back.
Honestly, the first mistake was a rookie mistake, to trust the dealer on maintenance. The dealer is always a vampire. The only reason to go to the dealer is when your trusted local repair garage recommends it when they do not have a real solution to the problem.
Good thing your friend never went back to the dealer.
I leave a statement in each version of my resume, and see if a recruiter mentions it. It’s like “ask me about the western 5-legged salamander and how it’s linked to the Olympics” (hint: 5 rings) or something equally absurd but a little more relevant.
If they say the line, then I know they read it. If I ask, “so, did you catch the Olympics?”, and they still don’t pick up on it, they’re judged.
With the advent of LLMs and access to anyone, there’s been repeated posts about instructors putting some oddball directions in white within the text of a question. Not perfect as a copy/paste into Notepad will show it, but it gets the laziest ones, especially the ones that don’t even review what the LLM gave them.
I don’t have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don’t have people who violate boundaries they don’t share, so if I said “Actually, I think I may be a woman” or “I have been thinking about leaving the country” they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.
My kids school used my kids photos in their community outreach pamphlets that went to tens of thousands of homes in the area.
We have a media policy contract on file with them to not do this. When it was brought up they acted like we were overreacting.
I told them I had history with a stalker in my past that still tries to reach out and make contact, and they have endangered my children because of their negligence. I asked them if they were ready to open themselves for a lawsuit should anything happen in the future and the Superintenant just sat there quietly with nothing to say.
IMO people don’t take their privacy seriously enough until someone is hunting them down to rape and kill them.
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.
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.”
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.
This is really niche, but most organisations have a Microsoft Active Directory, or equivalent, that tracks users, their credentials, and their permissions. The sign of a bad AD admin: permissions directly applied to user objects without any intermediary objects or abstraction in AD.
