Remy Porter of The Daily WTF uses a reader submission from Jarek to riff on the state of hardware documentation. Anyone working in embedded development knows the problem: datasheets are often incomplete or outright wrong. Sometimes an English version does not exist at all. Porter reports chips whose documentation disagreed with reality about which registers exist, forcing developers to poke undocumented registers to reach core functions. Worse, some datasheets mislabel pins, including power pins. Applying 5V to a pin that is actually ground produces what he calls the tiny pop of a dying chip.

Jarek's find is a datasheet section titled "Super User Fantastic Feature Enable Register", which lets the user modify the behavior of the on-board mEDBG debugger. The register's official name is SUFFER, it sits at offset 0x0120 and resets to 0xFF.

The punchline writes itself. Porter closes with the observation that embedded work often feels like the SUFFER register is permanently set.