I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers, and the time spent wasted sitting in office chairs whiling away hours to meet some pointless proxy of worth: time and physical presence.<p>A worse experience I had previously was a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work. I'd see a little icon pop up in the menubar which would tell me he was there, so I'd make haste to busy myself with the appearance of grokking hard code. May he find a never-peace in purgatory.
That reminded me:<p>Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (<i>Terminate and Stay Resident</i>) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)<p>My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal.<p>Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either.<p>However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy.<p>"Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.
Amazing! Finally, the design of Rust is being used not only for interviews but also for bureaucratic reports, which is what it was designed for. Now, the bureaucracy within the team has improved and the bosses will be very pleased. A very useful tool.<p>I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
My rule has always been very simple: If you are goofing off, don't hide it. The worst thing you can do if you work for me is think I am stupid and pretend you are working. I'd rather someone say "My head just isn't in it right now", which is honest and something that happens to all of us.<p>I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.<p>BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
Isn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble
> Implemented non-euclidean topology optimization for multi-dimensional data representation<p>Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London:<p>Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data:<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998</a><p>Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.
Seriously, they should use something like this in movies when showing hacker screens. Those are so ridiculous, sometimes I think it’s a deliberate inside gag to display an HTML page on a terminal when someone purportedly „hacks“ into a government computer.
This is a cool project! Reminds me of `hollywood`[1], but specifically geared towards programming. It'll be a useful tool in my arsenal of "things to run to impress non-terminal-users".<p>[1] <a href="https://a.hollywood.computer/" rel="nofollow">https://a.hollywood.computer/</a>
This is cool! I once made a project very much like this: <a href="https://github.com/svenstaro/genact" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/svenstaro/genact</a><p>Check it out if you like this kind of thing.
This reminds me of my time as a professor at a business school, where I worked in an open space with my screen visible to everyone. I spent a lot of time coding, so my IDE was always in plain sight.<p>Yet, it was only when I had the terminal open, running a few basic commands, that people would stop by and say—impressed—"Oh, I didn’t realize you could code."
This is hilarious, at work sometimes I need to catch up on some friend through irc and use weechat so as not to draw any attention, most non devs simply ignore anything terminal related. I even tend to use the hn-text cli for hacker news just to not give anyone a reason to think I’m slacking.
Notepad++ has a "sticky note" mode (F12 key): it removes all borders from the window, only the text box itself being left.<p>Some years ago I used to copy reddit threads in Notepd++ and move the window on top of Visual Studios output window tonread reddit half on the day.
Just installed this. Very amusing.
I think on a glance it looks more realistic than those so-called "hacker terminal/screen/whatever"<p>:D
In my twenties I played nethack (with the ascii tileset) in a terminal window while working. It only took my boss a couple weeks to catch on.<p>He was not happy.
In all satire there is some truth. The coder running nix, neovim, and a terminal heavy workflow will stand out compared to gui and ide heavy workflows. The thing is both sets of tools create essentially the same output with very similar time consumption.
The amount of time I spent getting <i>asciifx</i> and agg to work with syntax highlighting because IPython now has only Python Prompt Toolkit instead of deadline.<p>In order to leave Python coding demo tut GIF/MP4 on <i>their</i> monitor(s) at conferences or science fairs.<p>stemkiosk arithmetic in Python GIF v0.1.2: <a href="https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fbb29eccd265ded80dfb9c59de/docs/topics/math/arithmetic/arithmetic.py.cast.gif" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fb...</a>
I worked one place where a co-worker advised me to move my workstation against the wall so my screen could be seen to the rest of the space. That way the boss could walk by and tell if I'm just surfing the web or working.
I had this literally happen to me a couple of months ago.<p>Slacking off while waiting for some performance tests to run (Shoutout to Locust.io!) with my big 27" screen full of terminals for each runner, server logs etc.<p>...And then on my laptop screen I honestly was just slacking off and reading Reddit.<p>'VP Of Technology' comes over "I dont know what you are doing, but it's the most impressive thing I've seen in a while".<p>...Yes sir!
Years ago I made up a script that would incrementally output from random files in a given directory at configurable speeds. Then I'd run a few instances of the script in a bunch of tmux panes so I could make my second monitor look eternally "busy."<p>I was _actually_ busy enough, and the cubicle walls were high enough then, that I virtually never used it as a real "boss key." But it's fun to make this kind of thing.
I run i3wm (poorly :P).
Does anyone know whether it would it be possible to trick i3lock (or something similar) into showing the output of this "tool" instead of a static image?<p>Would be a fun look, with the added bonus of some colleagues potentially being tricked into thinking they have an opportunity to mess with my machine. :D
Ah yes.. The good old "boss key".<p>I first discovered this in a sierra quest game and as a kid didn't know what it meant. I found out only years later.
Good fun to write these tools. In practice but simply rolling back a git repo and deleting a JavaScript vendor folder or simulating a CI run would have the same effectiveness I think.<p>Or helping understand people that engineers need thinking time.