It makes them funnier the next time I hear them, in a new context though :)

Ah, missing the 7th panel:

“Wait, why are you in my house? You laid me off last month.”

Eh, sometimes the IDE from a chip manufacturer is bad enough that I go back to using a text editor.

Glares at Microchip Studio

Their on-chip hardware is great though. In everything else I’ve found tons of bugs. Even the cables that come with their dev kit have bugs.

For B2B emails, “The invoice should be paid by Friday” means don’t hold your breath, the invoice won’t be paid by Friday and you need to set time aside to call and follow up like 20 times over the course of the next month.

I’ll see you in Valhalla!

It was the best scene in Mad Max.

I make them in a factory. I buy the raw bits at a bulk discount, and then workers assemble them into numbers by hand. Then we export them to people who need manufactured data, like elementary schools and consulting companies in North America.

It’s not super exciting, but it’s a living.

If you look at the numbers, the % growth in terminal multiplexers in the last hundred years has been absolutely staggering. Way more than just a fad!

(I love tmux)

Empires can only rise from chaos, and can only descend into chaos. This has been known since time immemorial.

Oh, yeah. My source code is like 60% comments by weight (or more). Although I typically produce separate standalone documentation for management or semi-technical staff. You know, people who know enough to possibly break something, but not enough to fix it afterward. I find it useful when trying to train new people too.

I’m usually on the documenting side of things. If something like this starts unfolding, I produce text or HTML files anyway, they go on github/lab/whatever, and I wash my hands of what happens next.

In the end I write documentation mostly for myself. When the company can’t figure things out over Discord or whatever ephemeral chat interface they use, I get called anyway.

The darker version is:

1. Identify someone you don’t like in the organization.
2. Automate away their job by coding a script in a few hours.
3. They get laid off, the script never gets run. No one notices.

On the other side of things, don’t you love systems that return “invalid password: password is not unique”?

Hm, I wonder if I could make these students more miserable by introducing a CPU that permits static operation, then clocking that with a true random number generator?

So now it has output that is deterministic from the standpoint of the CPU but nondeterministic to an outside observer. Probably wouldn’t affect the O(n) notation though, come to think of it. It would be funny though.

To be honest, it’s an accidental lamp. I didn’t have many free GPIO pins on that ESP32 development board, so I needed to push some of the entropy bits though pins that were also assigned to an RGB LED.

The flashing light was giving me a headache, so I put a diffuser over it.

It flashes different colors wildly. Because of the nature of the underlying signal and it’s varying frequency, this looks pretty cool if you put a rolling-shutter camera (like on a smartphone) really close to it.

Haha, you got me there. So I guess you could more correctly say ‘a font with serif for titles only’.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don’t use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I’ll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

Yeah just jpeg. Always comes out perfectly legible.

Oh, it’s common in my country to use a smartphone to ‘scan’ documents by actually just taking a lousy photo of them. It’s so prevalent that when you tell someone to do a scan they usually do this instead.

I bought a cheap canon scanner for 50$ and it’s pretty perfect for legal documents. A little slow maybe. I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.

In rare situations I’d then post process the PDF to even worse quality using ghostscript, for example when a foreign visa application form requires a scan of a really long document, but doesn’t accept sizes over 2MB.

I use JPEGs in a PDF. They can be mediocre quality. Using an OK scanner makes a big difference. It’s good enough!

I’m required by law to keep physical paper copies for 35 years. So my parallel solution is a cursed filing cabinet, and several crates that describe the content of the filing cabinet. Its ugly, but saves me tons on data archiving, I guess?