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

https://github.com/giacomo-b/rust-stakeholder

by riidom • 1 year ago

433 138 1 year ago

Liftyee• 1 year ago

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/

chihuahua• 1 year ago

HackerTyper is a worthy addition to that arsenal:

https://hackertyper.com

kevdoran• 1 year ago

the true king of productivity tools, glad someone mentioned this

noufalibrahim2• 1 year ago

Thanks for this. It's really trippy.

brikym• 1 year ago

Be sure to use a mouse jiggler if you walk away.

vzaliva• 1 year ago

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.

incanus77• 1 year ago

I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".

netsharc• 1 year ago

Lots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.

relwin• 1 year ago

That's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)

nwellnhof• 1 year ago

Better known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

kazinator• 1 year ago

So, yeah, yes he was.

hakaneskici3• 1 year ago

Creative use case for a TSR :)

The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)

When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.

wruza3• 1 year ago

Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.

fragmede• 1 year ago

why was it pointless? it worked in the text guis of the time

fasteo• 1 year ago

Another use of TSR !

I implemented a password protected access to A:

hannasm• 1 year ago

So is this one on-par with DeepSeek or no? I didn't see those metrics in the ReadMe

noufalibrahim2• 1 year ago

Ah yes.. The good old "boss key".

I first discovered this in a sierra quest game and as a kid didn't know what it meant. I found out only years later.

vunderba• 1 year ago

I think I first encountered the boss key concept in Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris where hitting the ESC key would bring up an officious looking spreadsheet.

walrus01• 1 year ago

One could also do a "make world" on an entire FreeBSD system, if you want a lot of stuff scrolling past the screen.

wruza3• 1 year ago

Or build ports/ruby, it usually takes longer than the whole system. I remember one popular but non-DE-requiring package that required perl, ruby and(?) python among others. Building it could take a half a day mostly spent in ./configure scripts. I wondered why didn’t ports or autotools guys just pre-configure everything once for a specific machine and skip this annoying step. My strdup(3) won’t go away right after they finish yet another iteration of it.

ellis0n• 1 year ago

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.

mirekrusin2• 1 year ago

Ain't perfect it's only 99.9% rust according to github.

ChadNauseam• 1 year ago

won’t be perfect until issue #1 is resolved

_fzslm• 1 year ago

Would be fun to plug this up to an LLM and see how absolutely unhinged it lets itself go over long runs.

kdamica• 1 year ago

"Fork the repo (whatever that means)" I lol'd

anta403• 1 year ago

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

Tepix• 1 year ago

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

robomartin2• 1 year ago

My rule has always been very simple: If you are goofing off, don't hide it. The worst thing you can do if you work for me is think I am stupid and pretend you are working. I'd rather someone say "My head just isn't in it right now", which is honest and something that happens to all of us.

I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.

BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.

harvey9• 1 year ago

I once had a boss who told me to buy some games on the company dime for those times.

otherme1232• 1 year ago

Not bullet proof. I have coworkers that are very specialized in looking busy, like sending mails at late hours, always in meetings, micromanaging and bike shedding other people work, and so on. They get lauded by the bosses for working so much.

robomartin2• 1 year ago

Not bullet proof

Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action.

I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired.

I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are?

He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?".

It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone.

What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential.

I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.

teleforce• 1 year ago

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.

stigi• 1 year ago

The work is mysterious and important

jama2114• 1 year ago

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

huijzer• 1 year ago

If I was a boss and saw someone being busy building Rust all day I would offer a faster computer.

loxs• 1 year ago

Win-win I guess :D

jama2114• 1 year ago

If you were a boss and you were staring at my screen all day, I’d find another job ;).

In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.

freehorse• 1 year ago

Is this the way to get your boss buy you a faster computer?

dancccskooma• 1 year ago

I hope this was vibe-coded

philipdavis• 1 year ago

The badges are hilarious lol

career|saved stakeholders|impressed

uwagar• 1 year ago

run it during a DOGE audit.

keyle• 1 year ago

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

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 1 year ago

It already exists as a scam on the web. A web page that pretends to be your locked desktop, and goes into fullscreen automatically. On top of it you have a scary warning telling you to call a phone number to fix that.

Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.

andrewstuart• 1 year ago

A friend of mine who was in charge of finance said to his boss “the bank keeps sending me emails to confirm transactions and change my passwords and even after I click the links and re-enter my password they keep on asking, it’s very annoying.”.

wruza3• 1 year ago

On that one he should have called police to process cardiac arrest.

__rito__• 1 year ago

Quick question: do people who do production design for movies use something like this for coder/hacker screen? Should they?

wewewedxfgdf• 1 year ago

Of course its written in Rust.

knighthack• 1 year ago

Rustaceans, the over-engineers.

I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.

Svenstaro• 1 year ago

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.

bellboy_tech• 1 year ago

Love Genact!! Fantastic job

odysseus• 1 year ago

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.

astrobe_• 1 year ago

Back in the days, I figured that Nethack would be too obvious so I went for MUDs (online multiplayer text adventure) instead. Except you need to connect somewhere in order to play. Hopefully, I had a device on which I could randomize the MAC address and IP, so if someone was monitoring outgoing connections they could have a harder time to figure out who it was.

I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.

padolsey• 1 year ago

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.

_cenw2• 1 year ago

They just don't get that some people can't spread their time into perfectly equal slices of productivity. Remote work and flexible time has allowed me to work a big productive burst in the morning and in the late evening, spaced way more than 8 hours apart, with busywork somewhere in the middle. Probably wouldn't work this well if I had to do that in an office, in a single 8 hour (or 4+1+4) segment.

jimmydddd• 1 year ago

This is my issue. For whatever reason, i used to get most of my work done between 4PM and 10PM. Unfortunately, I had to be at my desk at 9AM.

mystified5016• 1 year ago

That's why I'm so happy to have a salaried job with lax office hours. For whatever reason, I'm also really productive before noon and after 6. The middle of the day is mostly a waste. At current job, I work when I'm most productive and more or less goof off the rest of the time. I'm one of the most (if not the most) productive members of the company so boss can't complain.

But also I can't tolerate WFH for more than a few days at a time. I need external structure to tell my brain that it's work time.

jahnu• 1 year ago

The Lynx browser came in handy for these sort of situations in the past for me too

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

bboygravity3• 1 year ago

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices.

What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home".

That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would have a reason to work for WFH company instead, WFH company would have significantly less expenses (more profits/budgets).

Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.

muspimerol• 1 year ago

Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?

I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

What do you mean WFH is not a thing? Since the pandemic it's a huge thing.

xlii• 1 year ago

That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).

The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost.

It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often things like issues caused by functioning without micromanagement (which is the case in many companies), problem with written communication skills, communication process not efficient for remote work (e.g. water cooler knowledge share which is foundational for people breaks without water cooler) etc.

Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished by home conflicts, non-prepped environment or depression coming from isolation and lack of physical movement. Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)

From my experience, both remote work proponents and opponents are right with their arguments but the crowd cannot be generalized. Some will suck at the desk, some will suck in remote.

As for „sit where I can see you” - that’s a standard offshoring practice, nothing new. You do get to the point of „who watches the watchers” conundrum sooner or later ;)

dwedge• 1 year ago

I think that despite what LinkedIn influencers promote, a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work. Not all, maybe not even most, but dealing with this (and not knowing who will fit into which camp) eats into the efficiency saving.

Also once the majority of a team is WFH, it's very tempting for management to take this one step further and start supplementing, then replacing, with off shore workers

gruturo2• 1 year ago

Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.

Sadly yes. I was grumbling about finding a solution to a problem and a colleague overheard me and supplied a perfect solution, as he had the same issue a month before. Same colleague was grumbling about needing a specific non-OSS software and the paperwork around requesting it and I told him we have a subscription already and he can get access to it. Wouldn't have happened if not in the office.

My boss tries to keep me informed of what's happening and what will come, but often enough the best stuff is learned serendipitously at the coffee machine. A couple of times I challenged what I learned and it ended up correcting our strategy and saving money.

Sgt_Apone• 1 year ago

Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?

WFH is still a thing despite some big names pulling back on it.

shepherdjerred• 1 year ago

I would rather take a 50% pay cut than work fully remotely

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that...

That's an interesting "fact".

ionwake• 1 year ago

After 20 years working in and around London in IT I empathise. Thx for sharing this story.

varispeed3• 1 year ago

Most of the programming I do outside of computer. I like to think everything through in my head before I type something in. I see no value in putting something that maybe works maybe not and then fiddling with it. That would slow me down too much. That said I also have ADHD so I can't stare at IDE whole day. One time a junior developer complained about me to the manager, that I spend most time on Reddit or outside of office (some best work I created whilst walking in the park). Manager called me in and said there are complaints from team members that apparently I am "slacking". I asked him if I deliver on time and whether there were any complaints about my output. He said no. I was back to my desk. I had no further complaints. Though that manager and that developer were sacked couple of weeks later for poor performance.

Artoooooor• 1 year ago

Did the stream include sound? Certain music genres can discourage the boss from logging in again:)

stef25• 1 year ago

a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine

That's diabolical

forinti• 1 year ago

I've never had such intrusive management, but I have worked at places where I had to justify every minute of the day.

So my tasks were inflationed to occupy the whole day on those days I didn't have enough work for 8 hours.

That really messes up your statistics.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work

Is that a British thing? I've only ever heard that from people working in the UK, but there it doesn't seem to be uncommon.

cheema33• 1 year ago

Wouldn't work on my boss. She would get very curious and ask me to explain to her what it was.

mirekrusin2• 1 year ago

Just say it's in rust, it usually wades off nosy people. If not, you have virtually unlimited feed of things to talk about how cool it is etc. - they'll quickly learn when they hear it, they should move along.

9dev• 1 year ago

Seriously, they should use something like this in movies when showing hacker screens. Those are so ridiculous, sometimes I think it’s a deliberate inside gag to display an HTML page on a terminal when someone purportedly „hacks“ into a government computer.

genezeta• 1 year ago

Someone already mentioned hollywood [0]. From its homepage:

  Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42,  Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne,  the DEFCON music channel,  Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of  Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as this one from Texas A&M University.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43377030

anta403• 1 year ago

Look interesting, but seems like it's Linux only. And closed source.

jama2114• 1 year ago

They do this on purpose… it’s pointless to try and appease realism pedants, so they just make an aesthetic instead. It’s the computer equivalent of every phone number implausibly starting with 555.

bitmasher9• 1 year ago

In all satire there is some truth. The coder running nix, neovim, and a terminal heavy workflow will stand out compared to gui and ide heavy workflows. The thing is both sets of tools create essentially the same output with very similar time consumption.

ycuser2• 1 year ago

Notepad++ has a "sticky note" mode (F12 key): it removes all borders from the window, only the text box itself being left.

Some years ago I used to copy reddit threads in Notepd++ and move the window on top of Visual Studios output window tonread reddit half on the day.

andra_nl• 1 year ago

I run i3wm (poorly :P). Does anyone know whether it would it be possible to trick i3lock (or something similar) into showing the output of this "tool" instead of a static image?

Would be a fun look, with the added bonus of some colleagues potentially being tricked into thinking they have an opportunity to mess with my machine. :D

meribold• 1 year ago

There are screen-locking programs that don't hide what's on the screen (for example `alock` and `xtrlock`). So you can use one of those in a script that also launches this tool.

neals• 1 year ago

I used to type "tree" and go get coffee

bilekas• 1 year ago

This is hilarious, at work sometimes I need to catch up on some friend through irc and use weechat so as not to draw any attention, most non devs simply ignore anything terminal related. I even tend to use the hn-text cli for hacker news just to not give anyone a reason to think I’m slacking.

Locutus_• 1 year ago

I had this literally happen to me a couple of months ago.

Slacking off while waiting for some performance tests to run (Shoutout to Locust.io!) with my big 27" screen full of terminals for each runner, server logs etc.

...And then on my laptop screen I honestly was just slacking off and reading Reddit.

'VP Of Technology' comes over "I dont know what you are doing, but it's the most impressive thing I've seen in a while".

...Yes sir!

improbableinf• 1 year ago

Does it work as well for remote workers?

dijit3• 1 year ago

Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal.

Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either.

However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy.

"Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.

iammrpayments• 1 year ago

Red means good in a lot of Asian countries, I bought my macbook there and the stock market shows red when it goes up.

dijit3• 1 year ago

yeah, I’m aware, which is why i was careful to say “our” culture, like- predominantly english speaking countries.

it is interesting how this difference can exist though.

greenchair• 1 year ago

mind blown, thanks for sharing.

pasc1878• 1 year ago

Even worse - My part of project just did a release of new functionality making things much quicker. Others just did a change of the screen colours making no difference and got massive praise for their work.

otherme1232• 1 year ago

We were once warned that the TV was comming to make some interviews with the bosses. I though it will be funny to pipe a nginx access log slowly (5 lines per second or so) through a coloring log program, and leave it running, to show in the background.

I left the room because I didn't want to be on camera, and in no time they were recording in front of my screen because it looked "cool, busy and profesional".

gchokov• 1 year ago

Fired on the spot when I walk in and ask what is that.

v3ss0n• 1 year ago

How this hit top HN news? I believed in HN ...

pacifika• 1 year ago

Good fun to write these tools. In practice but simply rolling back a git repo and deleting a JavaScript vendor folder or simulating a CI run would have the same effectiveness I think.

Or helping understand people that engineers need thinking time.

ohmygoodniche• 1 year ago

Love this project!!!

mkzetta• 1 year ago

Pretending to work is self-degrading. Fix whatever authority problem incentives sending out false signals instead.

lfsh• 1 year ago

100% agree. When you need this tool it is time to look for a job at another company.

Maybe it is very useful for the movie industry or something.

marban• 1 year ago

Alternative ;) https://terminal.news

anthk• 1 year ago

Or https://neuters.de under Lynx

also: gopher://magical.fish/1/news

assimpleaspossi• 1 year ago

I worked one place where a co-worker advised me to move my workstation against the wall so my screen could be seen to the rest of the space. That way the boss could walk by and tell if I'm just surfing the web or working.

gryfft• 1 year ago

Years ago I made up a script that would incrementally output from random files in a given directory at configurable speeds. Then I'd run a few instances of the script in a bunch of tmux panes so I could make my second monitor look eternally "busy."

I was _actually_ busy enough, and the cubicle walls were high enough then, that I virtually never used it as a real "boss key." But it's fun to make this kind of thing.

seinecle• 1 year ago

This reminds me of my time as a professor at a business school, where I worked in an open space with my screen visible to everyone. I spent a lot of time coding, so my IDE was always in plain sight.

Yet, it was only when I had the terminal open, running a few basic commands, that people would stop by and say—impressed—"Oh, I didn’t realize you could code."

datavirtue• 1 year ago

Where was this in the 1990s when we needed it?

westurner• 1 year ago

The amount of time I spent getting asciifx and agg to work with syntax highlighting because IPython now has only Python Prompt Toolkit instead of deadline.

In order to leave Python coding demo tut GIF/MP4 on their monitor(s) at conferences or science fairs.

stemkiosk arithmetic in Python GIF v0.1.2: https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fb...

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

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