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.”

Wouldn’t that… just make me stop visiting YouTube instead of making me stop using Firefox?

I mean, my first reaction when a website is slow is not exactly “maybe I should change browsers”. It’s closer to “maybe I’ll visit a different website”.

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.

You know, that’s an interesting question. It looks like the answer is probably 1, but it might be 2.

It’s not entirely clear to me, but it looks like Ulysses S. Grant may have been arrested in 1872, while he was still in office. For speeding. On horseback. The practice of taking mugshots on arrest began in the 1850s, but the officer apparently did not take the president into the station, so while I bet no mugshot was taken, I haven’t been able to completely rule it out either.

Then after traveling for some time, Grant did attempt to run for office again, but failed to obtain the number of required number of votes for nomination, and a compromise candidate was chosen (Garfield, who got assassinated), but he did technically run.

Apologies if I’ve used the wrong terms or gotten some bits wrong. My knowledge of the US political system is vague at best, I’m nowhere near you guys, I’m just having a terribly slow day and work and wondered if this particular situation actually had happened before. Then I found an unexpected rabbit hole of weird historical half-truths.

Yeah I was pretty impressed by how awful the air was in Beijing some years ago. Glad to hear it’s getting better.

Suddenly, living in a sprawling Asian metropolis doesn’t seem so bad. Today’s AQI was mid 50s, which is pretty good for my city.

Right now it’s rainy season so it’s not that smoggy. Gets worse toward the end of dry season though.

The first time I flew over a vast expanse of red dust that was once part of the Amazon, I wept.

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)

For some of us at least, the solution was just… to move on to another country. If there had been problems with guns and socioeconomic divide in Canada, I would have exited even earlier! (I actually left for the fairly boring reason of career progression)

Although spoiler alert: immigration is difficult, miserable, and a pretty massive commitment overall.

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

Looking at the one in the top left… imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.

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.