Many times I have wandered into IRC with a programming problem, and the very moment I hit enter to send it out and read it on the screen as part of the conversation, the answer occurs to me; the same answer I’d give anybody else in that room asking the question.
Maybe I should rig my IRC client to delay actually sending the first message to a room...
I was thinking that the message would appear to have been sent to the chat room as soon as I hit enter, but not actually be sent to the IRC server until later. If the hack is a matter of seeing the question as though it were someone else’s question, then that would work. If the hack requires that I genuinely believe that other people in the room have received the question, it wouldn’t work as well… but might still work somewhat, if the delay behavior were unobtrusive enough that I partially forgot about it.
I guess this is the reason why “explain your problem to the rubber duck before asking humans” works.
Many times I have wandered into IRC with a programming problem, and the very moment I hit enter to send it out and read it on the screen as part of the conversation, the answer occurs to me; the same answer I’d give anybody else in that room asking the question.
Maybe I should rig my IRC client to delay actually sending the first message to a room...
What makes you think that wouldn’t delay you coming up with the answer?
I was thinking that the message would appear to have been sent to the chat room as soon as I hit enter, but not actually be sent to the IRC server until later. If the hack is a matter of seeing the question as though it were someone else’s question, then that would work. If the hack requires that I genuinely believe that other people in the room have received the question, it wouldn’t work as well… but might still work somewhat, if the delay behavior were unobtrusive enough that I partially forgot about it.