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 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)

Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.

I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.

I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.

Yeah… I couldn’t cope with that unfortunately (I’m a bit jealous, it sounds nice). I need to work long hours and make things, it’s a compulsion. “Taking it easy” can stress me out to the point where I end up in a hospital.

So I sold all my worldly possessions and immigrated to the developing world on an investment visa (where things are made). My timing was a few years early, but I had no path to a decent life left except having my own company in a growth economy – my entire industry vanished twice overnight in my home country due to changes in legislation.

Nowadays, looking at the local economy, there is no path to home ownership except for people who own companies, and maybe senior executives or senior software engineers. An average university-educated couple would have to save 100% of their income for their entire adult life to afford a nice home – if they don’t have kids. I think this kind of cruel equation is slowly coming to the West too – although you guys have more land so I guess it takes longer.

One of the sad aspects of my job (in IT) is building tools to eliminate less stressful jobs, especially ones that pay well (usually management or accounting, in my case). Design has definitely been a specific target in recent years though – off the top of my head I could at least imagine two approaches to writing a tool that automates color and font selection with results comparable to human expertise.

This is one reason it’s a good idea to regularly study new things (IT or otherwise). I have to retool every few years as whatever I know becomes obsolete – this used to mainly be a frustration in IT, but is rapidly becoming a necessary process in other fields. It won’t be necessary to become an IT expert, but I would keep up-to-date on how to use the new tools technology provides… especially if I wanted to keep a job in say, graphics design or copywriting!

(Incidentally, my first job in this country was in marketing! It was high-stress and I did not earn 130k. I recall font and color choice processes vividly :D)

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”?

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?