schlowmo

At least we also have LLMs to generate our status updates during outages of our SaaS products while groping around in the dark.

I know it's mainly a joke but...

If I stop working at my desk to go out for some drinks and return to my desk afterwards, this hopefully also means that I stopped thinking about desk-problems for a while.

I found solutions to problems which we're blocking me when I left my desk countless times on my way back.

So there might be some kind of Ballmer Peak which isn't directly caused by alcohol consumption, but by a break from thinking about a problem.

And it's kind of obvious that I stop caring if I'm past "some drinks" and just go straight to bed. So there's definitely some upper BAC threshold to the peak ;).

Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules).

I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.

> Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real.

I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse.

Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium:

If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't.

If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't.

So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.

TIL bedbug sniffing dogs are a thing. I would never dare to train one, spilling the training material at the wrong place would be a very unpleasant experience.

After reading just the bedbug headline I couldn't imagine any non-shady use of living bedbugs besides science. I know some people which worked for or owned hostels - it's kind of a don't ask don't tell arrangement. This is why I would always take reasons which hostels give why you have to switch a room (pipe burst, issue with the electricity that needs immediate fixing...) with a grain of salt. You probably won't hear the word bedbug until you're the one reporting them to the hostel.

> Don’t use flowery prose.

I find this advice kind of ironic. The most people I know don't use flowery prose in their cover letters because they consider themselves some kind of overachieving artists, but because it appears to be expected. Writing cover letters is bullshitting time, although this is probably country/culture dependent. Fortunately I didn't have to write an applciation for a long time, but reading my own old applications gives me the chills, even though I got invited to an interview almost every single time.

If you don't want flowery prose, you have to set the expectation when writing the job posting. If your job posting appears to be written by your PR department you get cover letters written by your applicants personal PR departments. Or in other words: bullshit me in the job description and I will bullshit you in my cover letter.

This behavior is reinforced if you don't make it clear who will gonna read my application first. If I get the impression that my application will land on a desk of a hiring manager who doesn't know much about the job I might turn the BS to 11. If you communicate clearly that the person reading the application first knows what you are really looking for, I'll dial down.

> “The city teams only know how to use Excel, just make it like Excel.”

> “Why can you see the formulas?”

> “You said to make it just like Excel.”

I can't keep up with the espionage story that followed but I had this conversation more than once in my professional career.

The first time I sat as a junior dev on a multi-month project replacing a excel spreadsheet for financial controlling of data centers that only one person who was going to retire understood with a web-based solution.

They were quite proud that they were going to get a "modern" solution.

Then they wanted me to make it like excel. What followed was evaluating every fricking excel JavaScript library out there at this time, going for one and started duct taping all the missing pieces.

They were pleased but the look was off. It wasn't excel. I slapped some styles on it coming quite close.

I was not prepared for what happened during the next presentation: They hated it because they wanted a modern web based solution (their words, not mine) and what they got was a poor excel knockoff running in their Internet Explorers. Tables are so 90s.

I remember the pain so vividly that I regard "just make it like excel" as some kind of forming meme for my career till today.

PDF is such a weird format. Not so long ago I had to write some Java code for manipulating PDFs: find a string, remove it and place an image at the former string position. I should have known better as I thought "Well, how hard can that be?”

What followed was a deep dive down the rabbit hole, a lot of fiddling with the same tools the author of this gist is using trying to make sense of it all.

The final solution worked better than I thought while at the same time felt incredibly wrong.

I'm very thankful for all the (probably painful) work that went into those open source PDF tools.

I'm not quite sure what happened in my brain when I read the title (probably some kind of lost in translation, translating between my mother tongue and back again), but I didn't expect a spinning device.

But when I saw the first picture I immediately understood were this is going. Actually it's quite clever - as is the subliminal self-irony of the authors. The Swivel Chair Attack made me laugh harder than it should (someone here in the comments already rightfully called for an ig nobel price for that). And still this idea might be a unconventional but working solution.

It's kind of a refreshing read.

> Normal English: “Commuting to work”

> Death Metal English: “TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT”

I can see that one play out very well in a job interview after realising that the job isn't as remote as promised.

> What’s also important is not trusting a chiropractor

While I totally agree I would extend this recommendation to not trust anyone who does spinal manipulation without proper knowledge, since practioners of quackery use a lot of job titles.

This especially includes osteopathy (maybe with the exception of the US variant "Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine", I only know the european kind) - damaging the spinal cord or big blood vessels with slow motions doesn't make it less damaging.

As a rule of thumb: If it looks like a quack, swims like a quack, and quacks like a quack, then it probably is a quack.

There may be anecdotal evidence for it being some kind of miracle cure, but I can also tell anecdotes of people getting bonus stays at the local hospitals stroke unit after visting an ostheopath.

This is no powerplant-level story, but sometimes there are high startup currents were you didn't expect them:

On one of my first IT jobs at a big manufacturing company my team was tasked to find out why there are regular power outages in some printer rooms (there were rooms with shared printers on each floor of the office building). There were always some tripped circuit breakers and the facility management had to dispatch someone to put them back on. Between those incidents were always some weeks were nothing happened, but when it happened it affected a lot of printer rooms.

In the end we found a monthly cronjob on a central printing server which triggered a testpage print on all connected printers. Took us quite some time since no one ever saw those test pages. Never underestimate the needed current for a room full of colour laser printers coming to live all at once.

I guess that people who never hit a deer think you're just joking, but I know what you mean. It's not just that they blend so well in their surrounding, but if they're moving very fast they can jump quite some distances.

I hit my first deer during a night-time driving lesson. It just manifested itself in a turn right in front of the car. It happened so freaking fast that even my driving instructor didn't get right away what happened. (To be fair this was his first deer accident too). There were just something flying in front of the car, getting hit and flying away to the side of the road.

It was very different from my imagination which formed during my childhood hearing adults talking about split second decisions in case of a deer appearing in front of the car.