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”?

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.

Yeah that’s what I thought too. Needs a hundred more mouths filled with sharp teeth. All screaming at once in a shattering howl that will darken your dreams for decades.

And eyes, eyes everywhere. Rolling in pain, or the deeper ecstasy of madness.

Haha then there’s the other extreme: “It works, but I can’t explain how in a reasonable span of time”.