vibe-coding a new sharp memory lcd DRM driver for my now defunct beepy rpi zero W

is this.... research? will say, having claude write all my ML framework code is so nice - love emojis

I wish image models had a "no text" toggle - just like in Suno where I can choose instrumental or not. Sometimes the pain of dealing with text in an image generation is more than it's worth, and I'd rather just have the image and composite it myself or go no text - but seems

If anyone's read this far, hopefully this is a good counter-take to all of this 996 nonsense. People don't work hard because you force them to, people work hard because they are working on the right set of problems alongside the right set of incentives anyways .

Given the punishment dished out to parents in the US, without an ability to cut hours of commute out of my day, I would otherwise never see my kids. This was actually my experience growing up, immigrating to the US - my parents working in tech, I'd see them on the weekends /

I think what's missing in the bullshit silicon valley 996 rhetoric is the need to actually support people in the full spectrum of the needs of their lives. I'm lucky that I'm doing a venture at a time where remote work has now been normalized /

I made some friends with folks that both came to SZ to work from respective villages to make money, meet someone to settle down with - I even went to one of these weddings. I also met folks that grew up there /

As such, given every single person I worked with at the time was under 30 and had 2 kids (I was in my mid 20s at the time) I now appreciate just how they would find a balance between work and family, made possible by the very fabric of the culture of SZ /

I would constantly see young kids walking to school by themselves, or helped along by grandparents, and more often than not strangers that would look out for kids cross the street /

A lot of 996 relies on the flexibility afforded to people in China because of the full-spectrum attitude they have about work and family. I lived in SZ for some time, and my next door neighbors were a 3 generation family /

Given the magnitude of work I had to do, I often would not join for lunch or dinner. I was painfully reminded of these cycles, however, when the AC was turned off at exactly 6 pm in the skyscraper of an office building. This was true across every building I got to work in /

Sometimes folks would tweak out a few last things in this last part of the day. Sometimes they'd just play video games together in an impromptu lan-party in the office, since at the time the internet there was better /

Folks in the teams would usually go to dinner together, or in some cases head home to be with family for dinner. Again, dinner usually was a 2 hour thing - sometimes would extend into later shenanigans of course, but nominally we'd be back at the office around 8-9 pm /

Things were back in full swing around 2 pm usually, and again until 6 pm or so a lot of great stuff would get done. Then around 6 pm folks would again break for dinner. We'd often, again, meet partners or factories for dinner /

On average folks would go for lunch for 1-2 hours, and often people would come back in and take an after lunch nap under their desk using chairs designed for this. This kind of siesta was common across all teams / factories that I got to visit /

As a clean breakdown, we'd get into the office at around 8:30 am - most of the team was in the office by 9. Folks would work until noon, at which point it was lunch time. We'd often meet partners for lunch, but often I would stay back to work through lunch /

As a result, I was sort of interweaved into the actual culture - and I will say that 996 up close and personal is a lot kinder, wholistic, and understanding than even at the time the nominal 9-5 american working culture /

More often than not, Americans would come in and shit on everyone, not caring about the laws of physics or whether something was technically feasible or not. I would kindly explain to them, as an unbiased 3rd party, that no sorry - atoms/electrons don't work that way /

They'd often drag me into meetings with their other "western" customers which didn't treat them all too nicely, and didn't bother with embedding themselves with the team the same way I did. For me it was an adventure, and a lot of fun /

We'd be into the office by 9 am (often earlier). Days consisted of everything from schematic design, solid part reviews, debugging rigs/test fixutres, whatever /