My old lead hand Norm used to say the book numbers assume you got a brand new cutter and a spindle that runs true, which nobody actually has. When you bump the feed you start rubbing less and cutting more, so the tool stays cool and the chip carries the heat away instead of dumping it in the part. Same idea as Gary's notepad, the guys who ran it before CAM software had to feel it out by hand.

That Tuesday clip thing got me too. I spent like an hour zooming into a blurry license plate on some video once, only for someone to point out the timecode in the corner was off by a day. Felt pretty dumb. Now I check the original file hash and creation date before I even bother with pixels. It's wild how much we trust the visual layer without asking why the audio silence is exactly 1.4 seconds long or something weird like that. You're not alone skipping it, I think most of us start with what we can see.