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Furry artist, IC design engineer, hardware security & cryptography, 🏳️‍🌈🦊, occasionally NSFW. I post about engineering stuff here. My main profile for art and other fun stuff is @leaf (fursuits.online)
Linktreehttps://linktr.ee/leafdubois
Webcomichttps://raccoony.com
Birdsitehttps://twitter.com/Leafdubois
I uninstalled & reinstalled the app, now it works. Maybe "nuke the whole app and restart from scratch'" should be moved up to near the top of my standard debugging steps.
Every time i try to do anything related to vault management the Obsidian program just crashes. I thought this was a professional-grade tool!! UGH

I really want to start using Obsidian notes but I can't get my notes to sync across devices.

I tried to get them to sync with my google drive but no luck. DriveSync for android simply destroys my battery and also doesn't work at all, not to mention the privacy/security concerns. Neither iCloud nor Google Drive seem to have a nice consistent way to sync across devices or ecosystems.

So I subscribed to their premium sync service and that doesn't work either. Even though I'm logging into my sync account and the individual apps say my notebooks are merged, they still function as completely disjoint notebooks on each device.

People talk about a steep learning curve for using Obsidian but I'm not even there yet. I'm just trying to get the app to work, i haven't even started actually using it.

I'm going to venture a guess that basically EVERYBODY wants their notes to sync across devices so IDK why they don't make setting that up a streamlined process. I'll pay money (am paying money), I just want it to work!!

I'm doing all my tasks using boring old natural intelligence. If that makes me slower than everyone else then oh well. They can go hire someone who cares.

Mgmt: "Evaluate this new AI tool."

Team: "We tried it on basic tasks and got them done in about half the time."

Mgmt: "Awesome!" *lays off half of the team*

You're only gonna get that kind of speedup on basic tasks. Real people need to do the hard tasks that consume most of the effort.

Mgmt: "Scope out the level of effort to resurrect this ancient project and spin it up again."

Me: "It's waaaaaaaaaayyyy higher now that you laid off everybody who knows anything about it."

They replaced our e-mail based helpdesk with an AI agent. it sucks and i hate it

1. I describe the issue and in an email with screenshots showing what's going on. E-mail bounces and tells me tech support doesn't use email anymore, use this AI chatbot instead

2. Try to raise the issue with the AI chatbot, it ignores all the info I supply about the issue and asks me a bunch of dumb questions that are unrelated to my problem.

3. It doesn't create a real ticket until after it's wasted a bunch of time. It finally creates a ticket but supplies none of the info I gave it to the tech support team. it essentially created a blank ticket.

4. I go manually edit the ticket to add all the missing information.

5. Tech support ignores all the info I painstakingly put in the ticket and asks me all the basic dumb questions all over again

(of course it's about some Microsoft garbage products not working right)

[...continued]
- Decide if you're a better fit for big company culture or small company culture. One tends to learn way more at small companies where one's scope of responsibility is wider. Working at a small company can be a WILD RIDE. Big companies offer more stability but they're likely to pigeonhole you. Most engineers I've interviewed from huge companies like Intel don't know much outside of their tiny area of responsibility.
Advice for those who want a career in integrated circuit design:
- Learn as broadly as you can in your first professional roles. You're going to have to specialize, and the knowledge will inform your career development decisions. If you don't drive your own specialization & career growth, your employer will do it for you and you might not like it.
- Maintain a healthy work-life balance. Sometimes employer will ask too much and you must know how and when to push back.
- AI is shaking up this industry. Brace yourself, but keep it in perspective. Automation has always been the industry's bread and butter. They'll still need you but you're gonna have to do more than your predecessors did, and you may have to think at a higher level of abstraction. The complexity of your role will scale with the capabilities of the tools available.
- Learn how to code. Knowing some script-friendly languages like Python is especially helpful. Don't be one of those hardware guys who can't write programs.
[... continued]

For the past few years I've been getting lots of direct e-mails from randos who were "deeply impressed" by my linkedin profile. They write (or AI writes) detailed messages expressing a desire to connect and learn from me, or to "exchange insights". They state that there is "no commercial intent".

I'm skeptical about their true intent but I don't know what their endgame could be. I did reply to one or two of these and they seemed like real humans, friendly and polite and not pushy about anything. Maybe they really do just want to chat? Or harvest data, idk.