Maybe your friends aren't that way (which is a good thing), but I can't imagine finding such hassling implausible. I mean, have you noticed how people have been about their phones for the last several years? It's ridiculous and the direction of the hassling goes both ways.
Interesting. I did a bit of work in that office too. I was treated quite well, but did not interact with enough of the organization to say much beyond that.
I was at an event recently where a man a few feet away was smoking an e-cigarette. After a while I noticed a sickly sweet smell coming (I think) from the cigarette. I found it very unpleasant. When I got home I searched for info about the smell, but mostly what I read was that e-cigarettes produce no odor, or at most a mild sweet one. Maybe I'm more sensitive than most to the smell -- it didn't seem mild to me -- or maybe it had to do with being in a confined space. If anyone else finds the smell repellent I'd be interested to know that I'm not the only one.
I agree that Command-R is a silly thing to remap to. Remapping to Control (which can be done through System Preferences) helps not only with bash and vim but with emacs keystrokes which are standard throughout the Cocoa text controls. This is one of the very first things I do when I set up a new Mac.
If you have Xcode you can reproduce the crash in a scratch Xcode project. Drop an NSSearchField into a window, run the app, enter you-know-what, and boom. (I used NSSearchField since that's what I found most easily crashes Finder, VoodooPad, and System Preferences. Maybe NSTextField works as well.)
The assert that fails is this:
assertion on /SourceCache/DataDetectorsCore/DataDetectorsCore-269.1/Sources/PushDown/DDResultExtraction.c:1576 "CFStringHasPrefix(urlVal, CFSTR("file://"))" failed :wrong extraction: File://
There's an extra slash at the end, but I left it out because it crashes Safari.
I'm intrigued by how long this thread has gone without anybody mentioning Heather Arthur's gender. Did her critics know she was a woman at the time they ridiculed her code? If so, did that fact embolden them or make them more prone to belittle her work? Would a man's friends have come so quickly to his defense, over a piece of code? Would the men who had made her cry been so quick to feel shitty about it and apologize?
When I first saw the part in Arthur's article [1] about sobbing, I thought it was tongue-in-cheek. Only after I realized Heather was Heather did I reread that section and realize she had shed literal tears. Not sure what that says about me, that I made different assumptions based on gender.