I went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.

I typed in my dentist's full business name and location, "<name> family dentistry <city> <state>", and it was still #5 in the results. I still, out of habit, tapped the first link and called that number instead. It's ludicrous. In 2010 that would have been the top hit, next to the Wikipedia page on dentistry.

Yeah, and cameras changed art forever.

If you don't like change, then my recommendation is to steer clear of careers in either art or technology.

people still make clay pots and paint landscapes

Creativity is not what would expect out of the Renaissance

Can confirm.

I was consulting like this too, but my wife also had a full time corporate job. It all kind of ended with her team having layoffs around the same time that most of my clients figured out that they could use AI to do most of my work at a tiny fraction of my rate. I had built up a lot of experience working with oil and gas software, and I thought that was pretty solid, but it's hard to compete with $20 a month. Anyway, after all that, I found a stable job with good health insurance.

This spacing reminds me of Turing patterns, or activator/inhibitor systems, but I'm gobsmacked that this occurs in random matrices.

What would I use this for? Everything in the examples is pretty easy to do in scripting languages like Python, JS, and Ruby.

It would be pretty nice to write those simple things in one language if you have a ruby server, react front end, and postgres database. You could target different parts of the stack but think/implement in one language. Seems nice to me.

I got a stable job! I was unemployed for a few months, we paid a small fortune for health insurance, and I got ulcers from the stress, but things worked out! I enjoy my team, and I'm hopeful about 2026.

Same.

They probably use Excel, maybe Microsoft Access.

Microsoft Access form that connects via IIS to an Excel spreadsheet acting as a database. Also the server it's running on is sitting on a wooden table.

Bro you can't just leak operational secrets on the world wide information highway like this.