The atmega328 was a fine option a decade ago, and I still love them, but they aren’t what I’d recommend to someone new. The Pi Pico or an ESP32 make more sense in the current day.

This seems like a project that doesn’t need super high performance nor tight timing requirements (for anything other than driving displays), so I’d recommend considering Circuitpython or Micropython instead of C++.

I’ve definitely seen some really attractive balls, and I don’t have a testicle kink.

I viscerally hate this. Thank you

Probably not as many as we’d like to think. I recently got to run a few days of tests at Lawrence Livermore National Labs with an absurdly massive laser. At one point we needed to bring in a small speaker for an audio test. It took the lab techs and managers about two hours and a couple phone calls to some higher ups to make sure it was ok and wouldn’t damage anything. There’s so much red tape and procedure in the way that I don’t think there’s an opportunity to just fuck around. The laser has irreplaceable parts that people aren’t willing to jeopardize. Newer or smaller lasers are going to be more relaxed. This one is old enough to be my father, and it’s LLNL’s second biggest single laser iirc. And they are the lab using lasers for fusion, so they have big lasers.

And if there’s ever a brand integration, he’ll spout their marketing drivel uncritically and try to pass it off as science. I can’t trust him anymore.

“I took four months off to recover from burnout”

I’ve actually found 1% to be a lot more common nowadays.