But we can't put the genie back in the bottle.

There is nothing I despise more than someone who doesn't care.

I remember reviewing code once, a C++ class that allocates new objects on the heap, but was lacking cleanup code to delete these objects.

"It doesn't matter if the memory leaks. Those methods rarely get called."

And he was right, during the lifetime of the application it would've likely leaked only kilobytes worth of memory. But it would've taken very little effort to write cleanup code.

I believe those that take no pride in their work will never amount for anything more than mediocrity.

I will never not hate on Micropython.

This doesn't come from a position of gatekeeping embedded software engineering.

I just hate Python.

It originated from when floppy disks were still widely used, yes.

Nowadays, people associate the icon of a floppy disk more with "saving locally" than the floppy itself. Changing it will just cause confusion.

Another example is how the icon for Database was chosen to resemble an old-timey stack of hard drive platters. Everyone knows what it means, even if your database isn't stored on HDDs, so there is no need to change it.

Even the telephone icon on your phone resembles an old-fashioned telephone horn, despite these getting less and less common.

A proper execution of a cubicle office is actually quite decent.

But for a good workplace you also need to have good colleagues, including managers. That's universal, whether open plan or cubes.

I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.

The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.

Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.

The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.

Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.

That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.

You mean phone coffins?

Someone who finished a bootcamp might be able to write a simple program in Python, but that doesn't make them a software engineer.

I've said this out loud before and have gotten told I'm an elitist, that my degree doesn't make me better at software than those without one. That majoring in computer science teaches you only esoteric knowledge that can't be applied in a "real job".

On the other hand, the industry being less strict about degrees can be considered a positive. There definitely do exist extremely talented self-taught software engineers that have made a great career for themselves.

But I definitely agree with the need of some sort of standard. I don't care if some bootcamper gets a job at the latest "AI on the blockchain as a service" unicorn startup, good for them. I'd rather have people with formal degrees work on something like a Therac-25, though.

I worked as a tech at a stage for a short while. We always used XLR5 for lighting and XLR3 for audio.

I've used MicroPython for prototyping. It's quite nice with its REPL.

However, for more than a simple proof of concept I wouldn't use MicroPython at all, on any platform.

My personal gatekeepey opinion is that if you want to learn embedded, you really should go for C. (C++ or Rust also exist, but C should be the first)

It's a tiny satellite office.

But whataboutism is basically SOP for the CCP shills.

And let's not even get started on Taiwan...

What does the middle class even mean nowadays?

By Marxist definition, the bourgeoisie are the business owners, the landlords. The class that owns the means of production. If you need a salary to survive, you're working class.

A lot of people in tech are salaried employees. They might have some money in investments, but not enough to live off of. Many tech workers are just highly compensated members of the working class.

They are not slow, but it's faster in Japan, still. At least in the Taipei MRT.

The Taoyuan Metro is way worse, though. If you keep walking while going through the gate and the card doesn't scan fast enough, it'll error and tell you to step back outside of the gate area (the in-between part) and scan again. It slows traffic down quite a bit.

For example: You'd explain to the staff that you want to use the toilets, and they'll hand you a plastic NFC token coin, limited to enter and exit at the same station. You use that to enter the paid area, go to the toilet, then deposit the coin in a special slot to exit.

>Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.

That was done in the past, but it's quite nice that they just hand you a token now.

Alternatively, train stations in the Netherlands have done away with fees for entering and exiting the same station altogether. Toilets within stations often charge a €0,70 fee, though.

When I started compsci, it was the first year of a all-new curriculum for CompSci.

Literally the first week: We had to program an Arduino to play a song on a speaker by toggling GPIO, within a week. No assembly or any of that high-level mumbo-jumbo. We had to read the datasheet, look at the instructions and write the hex representation for each instruction in a txt file.

We had a "linker" tool: It took a basic bootloader (containing some helper functions for GPIO), turned our hex-txt file into actual binary, then just copies that to a set address. The bootloader did nothing more than init the GPIO pins and jump into our code.

We were given the locations of where these helper functions lived, nothing else.

It was to give a quick and intimate understanding of how CPUs actually work and why we use compilers and stuff. It worked really well, but it was so much of a pain that they changed it to allow students to use asm a year or two after.

You should come to Taiwan! They've never considered non-Chinese names.

If you something online and pay by card, you can choose to ship it to a 7-Eleven or other convenience store, so you can pick it up at your own convenience. They'll ask for the name on your ID card/Passport, which the store will check before handing the parcel to you.

The problem? Many online stores do not accept names longer than a handful of characters. Chinese names are almost always two or three characters long, rarely four. Five or more characters exist according to a quick Google search, but I've never seen them myself. Good luck with western names, where even a short name like "John Doe" will be considered too long (The space counts as a character).

If you're a foreign resident, you can choose to get a Chinese name to deal with the parcel issue. Now you have two legal names: The name on your passport and the Chinese name. If you deal with public institutions, they'll prefer to use your Chinese name. Private companies have their own policies: Banks, for example, prefer to use the name on your passport. I've had issues with my insurance claims being rejected because the name on the government-provided documents did not match the name they had on file.

As someone who sometimes listens to music digitized from analog sources, this has been my experience, too. Tape hiss, cracking/pops and distortion are easier to notice on my headphones+DAC than on my (somewhat cheaper) IEMs.

At that point, it doesn't matter whether you have FLAC or MP3.