Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

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.

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:

Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "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.)

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.

> Implemented non-euclidean topology optimization for multi-dimensional data representation

Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London:

Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998

Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.

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.

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.

This is cool! I once made a project very much like this: https://github.com/svenstaro/genact

Check it out if you like this kind of thing.

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

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.

He was not happy.

The work is mysterious and important

Just installed this. Very amusing. I think on a glance it looks more realistic than those so-called "hacker terminal/screen/whatever"

:D

I'm so glad it's written in Rust! You know, for performance and safety and discussions at the coffee machine.

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".

[1] https://a.hollywood.computer/

Someone please make one that makes your computer looks like it's locked up for ransomeware, and see your stakeholder's face. Priceless.