CS Professor: “What M word is the black hole to all productivity?”

Student: “Management”

CS Professor: “Was going to say meetings but that’s better”

Well here's how I see things going:

Intel and AMD ditch their assembly architectures for Scratch, because drag and drop is very popular lately.

The Boolean is renamed to the biggot by SJW leaders for only supporting binary views.

You must first ask consent to add an item to a linked list, because forcing two items together promotes rape culture.

Apple removes the "h" and "7" keys on all laptop models and gives no reason for their actions.

Linus Torvalds grows an extra middle finger, and it still isn't enough.

Nintendo makes Mario gay and Luigi black to be more inclusive.

LG makes a curved monitor that curves away from you rather than towards you. People buy it in confusion.

Everyone makes the same ad revenue on YouTube, and it is rebranded to OurTube. Luckily, they were able to keep the color scheme.

People finally realize that machine learning is just math, and stop using it everywhere. (Just kidding lol)

AMD and Gucci merge. Nobody understands why.

Latest update for the devRant app has some new twists: 1) collabs are now free for all 2) black theme is available for devRant++ members 3) when posting a rant we now ask for you to classify the rant as a specific type of post. RIP !rant :/ To be clear, this isn't meant to say that any posted content needs to be different than what everyone is doing already, just that the extra categorization helps all parties who like or dislike different types of content. This categorization will help better inform the algo and allow for advanced filtering which is coming soon.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please ask me or @dfox in this thread.

An incident which made a Security Researcher cry
--------------------------------------------------------
I was working on my laptop finishing up my code while waiting for the flight which was late . Meanwhile two guys (I'm gonna call them Fellas) in black suit and shades came to me

Fella : Sir you have to come with us .
Me : *goes along with them*
Fella : Sir please proceed *points towards the door . The room has a round table with some guys discussing something *
Fella 1 : Your passport please
Me : *Hands over the passport*
Fella 1 : Where are you traveling to sir?
Me : India
Fella 1 : Put your laptop in the desk sir.
Me : Sure thing
Fella 2 : What were you doing there? *Taps the power button*
Me : Just finishing up my work .
Fella 1 : Or hacking our systems?
Me : Seriously?
Fella 2 : The password please .
Me : Here you go
*5 minutes have passed and​ he still can't figure out how to use the machine*
Fella 2 : Which Windows is this?
Me : It's Linux
Fella 1 : So you are a hacker .
Me : Nope
Fella 1 : You are using Linux
Me : Does it matters?
Fella 1 : Where do you work?
Me : *I won't mention here but I told him*
Fella 2 : So what do you do there?
Me : I'm a Security Researcher
Fella 1 : What's your work?
Me : I find security holes in their systems .
Fella 1 : That means you are a hacker .
Me : Not at all .
Fella 2 : But they do the same and they use Linux .
Me : You can call me one .
*After 15 minutes of doo-laa-baa-dee-doo-ra-ba-doo amongst them I dunno what they were talking , they shutdown the computer and handed over it to me*
Fella 2 - So you are somewhat like a hacker .
Me - *A bit frustrated* Yes.

##And now the glorious question appeared like an angel from river ##

Can you hack Facebook?
Me - 😭😭😭

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap. When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, "It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I'm glad she slapped him." The Project manager is sitting there thinking, "I didn't know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn't missed him when she slapped me!" The young woman was sitting and thinking, "I'm glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!" The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, "Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!"

Customer: I need a program that can do this.
Me: Okay. We can do this. But we recommend you a gui.
Customer: Oh I don‘t need a gui. We have Windows.
Me: you will need a gui. Here you are a dummy programme without a gui. Try it out. Find out yourself.
Customer: I trust you. Dummy is fine. But it’s not ready yet, right?
Me: It’s just a dummy to show you what it means, having ni gui for that.
Customer: all fine i need this programme. Go ahead.
Me codes and silently makes one build with gui... ;) xou know what comes:
Me: here you are your programme.
Customer: how to use it? It is cryptic. A black window opens. I cannot click. The manual is full of text i habve to type. I don’t understand!?
Me: you need a gui.
Customer: Oh. I thought since windows 3.11 everything has one...
Me: pay me bucks I make you the gui.
C: meh. Okay here you are bucks.
Me: take this
C: wow so fast. This is cool. Take my money.

This sort of cognitive dissonance I will never understand. In first case ignoring my hints. In second recognizing my hints were true. But in third forgetting own stupidness and paying me extra-extra for what you ignored? Ethically I hated you so much for ignoring me, that I took your money, but you could have gotten me blaming me not selling you a gui... :D

Have a nice weekend

I was activating virtualenv in powershell when my younger brother came in.

Me: *all nervous* please don't think I'm hacking or trying to set off a bomb. (He always thinks I'm hacking and tells on me.)

Brother: *silent*

Me: *even more nervous* I don't want my laptop to get taken away. Don't tell on me and say I'm hacking, because I'm not.

Brother: Oh, I know you're not hacking this time.

Me: You do? *relieved.*

Brother: Yeah, because this time it's a blue background, not a black one.

Me: Oh, haha. So you're only scared of things such as these? *opens CMD and Git Bash* you know, just because it's dark themed, doesn't mean it's malicious. Besides it—

Brother: oooOooOh! You're hacking again! I'm telling on you!

*Note to self: Never use dark theme in front of the ignorant again.)

First Helpdesk call of the day:

"My PC has been stuck on the same thing for an hour now. Its completely crashed."
"Does pressing ctrl alt delete do anything?"
"Where's that button?"
"Its 3 buttons - ctrl in the bottom left, alt beside the spacebar and delete over near the arrow keys. Press them all at the same time. Does it do anything?"
"No"
"Okay then, you need to manually power off the laptop then."
"How do i do that?"
"Hold down the power button"
"Where's that?"
"....on your laptop?! It's how you turn it on in the mornings?"
*60 seconds go by* "oh i see it. Ok i pressed it! Its Flashing blue now."
"Oh, no, just hold it down until everything goes black."
"The power button?"
"Yes."
"But that would turn off the entire PC?"
"Yes."
"Why do i have to do that?"

God help me if this is how my day is going to be 😢

So I decided to give Linux a try again.

Created live usb. Prepared myself to go through all the hassles at the beginning.

Booted in live USB. I can't see mouse cursor.

Searched in google, apparently a common problem with GTX 1070/1080 graphics cards.

Installed proprietary nvidia drivers with keyboard only. Took me about 20 minutes.

Finally managed to get the mouse cursor and install ubuntu. Time to boot and smell the fresh air of linux again.

Sound card doesn't work. Even the integrated mobo sound card doesn't work. Looked for a solution, found the bug in lunchpad but not solution yet. Everyone recommending to buy an external sound card.

I can't code without music. Decided to remove linux.

Booted back to Windows and removed linux partition. That fucked up my bootloader although I installed linux's efi loader completely separately.

Now I am sitting in front of my computer, with black grub screen, while trying to make a Windows 10 usb with my 7 years old broken laptop.

Next time I see a rant about Windows 10 that glorifies linux, I swear I'm gonna smack your face over standard TCP/IP

Another story on the spirit of wk93. TL;DR I DOS'd the whole campus network for some beers.

In highschool teachers had this blackboard system (a sort of moodle) and we used to have really lazy teachers who only read the PowerPoint presentations and made us take notes. One day I was fed up with their bullshit and figured these lazy ass professors wouldn't "teach" crap as soon as there was no internet connection...so the race was on...

10 minutes before the bell rang a friend and I managed to break in into a computer lab, I booted up Kali and searched for the access points, 3 routers through the building all with CISCO OS.

I figured they had all the default configs, time was running out so I decided to Smurf the three access points with the lab's IP range, scheduled an automatic shutdown in 2 hours and blocked the PC. The bell rang and as predicted, no internet, no class, my friends and I used that free time to go to a bar (on a Monday afternoon).

Funny side note, since the 3 routers were down the whole network collapsed, no cameras, no access control, no faculty network or any network. We kept doing it and every time we did campus security would be desperately searching for someone with a black hoodie.

Someones keyboard just stopped working in my job.
They called the helpdesk and i told them to unplug the keyboard from the back of the PC and try a different usb port before i send them down a new keyboard.
Their reply?

‘How am i meant to do that? I mean... *laughs* I didn’t go to college for this kind of stuff. I know you did but you need to explain it in English for me instead of using technical terms.’

....

So i had to describe what a USB looks like, and tell her how to follow the (only) skinny black cable she has on her desk, down the back of the desk and into the PC. She got overwhelmed by this cable being the same colour as the thicker VGA cable, so ended up unplugging everything!
Its fine though, as when she plugged them all back in, everything was back working.
She finished the call by saying:

“Like, i know how to use a computer but I just don’t understand all this technical mumbo jumbo, like USB’s and stuff? How should i know about that?”

...

I sincerely think interviews need to have just 5 minutes dedicated to the person showing that they know what a bloody USB is!!, can turn on/off a PC, open outlook, and follow basic instructions.

Ugh I work with idiots 😢

!dev !rant - only very sad

I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.

I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.

In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.

The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.

As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.

It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.

Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.

What a damn fuckin' week.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

So our public transportation company started to sell tickets online with their brand new fancy​ system.

• You can buy tickets and passes for the price you want
• Passwords are in plaintext
• Communication is through HTTP
• Login state are checked before the password match so you can basically view who is online
• Email password reminders security code can be read from servers response

Oh and I almost forgot admin credentials are FUCKING admin/admin

Who in the fucking name of all gods can commit such idiocracy with a system that would be used by almost millions of people. I hope you will burn in programming hell. Or even worse...

I'm glad I'm having a car and don't have to use that security black hole.

Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.

Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.

Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)

Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.

Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.

C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.

Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.

APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?

HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.

LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.

VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.

C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.

JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.

Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.

Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.

Credit: Thomas jalabert

If you are a developer and the resume you send me says "Certified Web Ninja" on it. I will invite you to an interview. But keep in mind, if you don't show up wearing all black and carrying a Katana, I will throat punch you and send you on your way.

This might be a little off topic, but I just wanted to talk about this for a bit.

I know that quite a lot of devs aren't the happiest of people, and I've seen many of you discussing depression around here. It's great to have this platform be open about these issues.

Makes you remember that people aren't all that bad, a small conversation with another person could make your day a bit more bearable.

Also, don't forget to have an honest conversation with yourself sometimes. Cut yourself, and others, a bit of slack.

Don't let the big black dog grow too much. It will still be there, but don't let it engulf you in darkness. 💜

So Github went down and it showed how much empathy devs have for fellow devs.
We saw tweets saying things like,
God I can't imagine how freaking stressed out the devs at Github are right now.
Or "Hugs and kisses to the devs at Github. You got this"
Of cause there were the occasional dumb Github tweets.
But in all it just shows how much we empathize with other devs and knowing they are trying their best to handle the situation. For more than 8 hrs. Imagine a black out of something like twitter for just an hour or two.. Gives you chills.
But bravo/brava to all the understanding devs.

Requirements vs Delivery - Guide to Programming
This one is a killer and I've received it in multiple forwards in office email, and we always have a good laugh seeing this joke.

Client: “Our next requirement, and this is something big you know, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only, let me explain our current process……” (client explains for an hour)
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

Requirements are taken as follows:
Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development!

At the Offshore Development Centre,

Design/Development – Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client:

Dev: Sam’s a little nervous about taking his paid leave. I guess it’s not common in Nigeria. He needs to hear from the company that taking time off like that is acceptable.

HR: THAT’S SO INAPPROPRIATE! YOU CAN’T ASSUME HE’S FRON NIGERIA JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK. BLACK PEOPLE HAVE A VERY RICH AND DIVERSE CULTURE, THEY ARE NOT ALL FROM NIGERIA!!!

Dev: Sam is from Nigeria. He told me so. He tells me a lot of stories from there.

HR: …

Dev: Can you tell me something about Sam besides his skin colour?

HR: …

Dev: …

New rant = Rant.type(['non-dev', 'public transportation']).init()

So i am taking the bus now to see a friend, and this fucking whale woman comes on board with a baby caddy, except, it wasn't for a baby, but for a fucking dog the size of a brick. That already in itself makes me grumble because dogs have fucking legs and there is no fucking real need to carry them around like newborns.... Anyways this woman sits and takes up a lot of space for the 'handicapped' persons for her fucking baby dog... So far no real issue there since people with disabilities hardly get on this bus line. A fzw bus stops later an equally whale black woman gets on the bus, obviously struggling with her size and her caddy filled with groceries...

There is enough room to accomodate the baby caddy and her groceries.
That fucking white whale says to her 'there is no room there, move someplace else'... The black woman stands there in disbelief, and this is the first time i look up, giving the 'the fuck you just say bitch' look to the white whale. I mention there is enough room and the black whale sits carefully next to the dog caddy.

Now the bus takes a sharp turn, the dog caddy tips over due to the g-forces it causes...and inmediately this white whale shouts to the black whale 'fucking retard, don't tip my dog over!' this while the black woman apologises for the fall of the caddy not even being her fault...

This angered me so puch that i rantzd to this woman: 'madam, thzre is such a thing called physics, the bus made a sharp turn and your stupud useless space-wasting dog caddy tipped over bzcause of that. Don't just go accusing people for your own degenerate racist lifestyle. I suggest you hold on to it and apologise to the lady'

She then murmles incomprehensibly and gives a butthurt look, rhe black woman thanks me and tries to remain very quiet on her seat, eventually she gets off

This fucking thing makes me angry to a level i wanna toeturz that whale by peeling off her skin with garden fence metal wiri g, suck the fat out of her body and brain with an industrial vacuum cleaner and put her in the fucking oven baking in her own fat, of course without any anesthetics...

Damnit all to hell!

Also, why on earth do dogs need caddy's? They got perfectly fine legs!

I know, sadist inside

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

TL;DR: don't fuck with your IT guy.

One of the guys in our office treats his laptop like shit, has dropped it a number of times and had managed to break the screen. There was a nice crack diagonally corner to corner across the screen with a nice black splotch around it making a good chunk of his screen unusable. Servicing the laptop would be too expensive and would mean being without the machine for several weeks forced to use a Mac.

I offered to replace the screen for him since I have experience doing laptop repairs. Once the screen arrived I kept the laptop for the evening and spent an hour replacing the screen. I left a note telling him he owed me $60 for my time.

He sees the note, laughs and says "I'll buy you lunch."

Not only does this guy only keep his word when offering to buy lunch about 10% of the time, when he does actually do it he charges it on the company card so it isn't really him paying for it. So I spent my lunch break writing up a little Python app which randomly fucks with his mouse and keyboard.

I sent him a message that I needed to run some tests on his new screen tonight so I'll be able to install it and set it to run on boot.

The app does things like:
Jiggle the mouse
Minimize all windows to show the desktop
Double click
Right click

Can't decide if I want to add in reboots as well.

I figure I'll leave it going until I get $60 worth of entertainment out of it.

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Always at home: check
Dark themes ftw: check
Black hoodie: check
At least 2 monitors: check
1k Browser tabs: check
Up all night: check
Tiered 24/7: check
notepad++: check
Keyboard wakes my sister from 2 rooms across: check
Burns in sunlight: check
DevRant: check

What else to be a successful programmer?

So, continuing the story, in reverse order, on the warship and its domain setup...
One day, the CO told me that we needed to set up a proper "network". Until now, the "network" was just an old Telcom switch, and an online HDD. No DHCP, no nothing. The computers dropped to the default 169.254.0.0/16 link local block of addresses, the HDD was open to all, cute stuff. I do some research and present to him a few options. To start things off, and to show them that a proper setup is better and more functional, I set up a linux server on one old PC.
The CO is reluctant to approve of the money needed (as I have written before, budget constraints in the military is the stuff of nightmares, people there expect proper setups with two toothpicks and a rubber band). So, I employ the very principles I learned from the holy book Bastard Operator From Hell: terrorizing with intimidating-looking things. I show him the linux server, green letters over black font, ngrep -x running (it spooks many people to be shown that). After some techno-babble I got approval for a proper rack server and new PCs. Then came the hard part: convincing him to ditch the old Telcom switch in favour of a new CISCO Catalyst one.
Three hours of non-stop barrage. Long papers of NATO specifications on security standards. Subliminal threats on security compromises. God, I never knew I would have to stoop so low. How little did I know that after that...
Came the horrors of user support.
Moral of the story: an old greek saying says "even a saint needs terrorizing". Keep that in mind.

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

Still haven't been paid for completed a retail shop project. But all is well, since the system will not start on Black Friday till I remove the if condition 😈

"Everyone must attend this meeting. It's really important that you all attend".

Me: *walks into meeting with other co-workers

Host: So what should we discuss today?

Co-worker 1: We can discuss how we did on the recently completed project.

Host: We'll save that for next meeting.

Co-worker 2: Any strategic plans for upcoming project?

Host: That too, for next meeting.

Me: Black Panther.

Host: That was actually a great movie. I saw it over the weekend. Who else saw it? ....

Me (in my thoughts): Just wow! 😂

PS: I still haven't seen that movie.

!rant

Guys... I've figured it out. Instead of wearing black hoodies, we should all wear white turtlenecks. We'll be the ultimate hackers. No one would suspect a hipster of being h4XX0r mastermind.

You: working on a terminal with a black background and green foreground
Girl: sees the console "are you a hacker?"
You: 🎶..all around me are familiar faces..🎶

Got my VisionTek Radeon 7750 today! Held my breath during the amd drivers installation on Linux (KDE Neon) but it all went well.

Rebooted, all screens (4 right now? upgrading to 6 soon) black.

Closed eyes, opened after 10 seconds and BAM, first display is working.

After some settings tweaking I've got 4 monitors up and running now, waiting for new hardware for two more.

Also waiting for a hex monitor stand ❤.

AMD, thanks for providing stable and working drivers for Linux for free!

THERE HAS BEEN A SLIGHTLY BIG SPIDER IN MY ROOM SINCE YESTERDAY AND YESTERDAY IT DISAPPEARED THE LITERAL SECOND I FUCKING SAW IT IT DISAPPEARED. I SHIT YOU NOT IT JUST VANISHED. AND THIS SPIDER IS A BLACK FUCKER AND MY DESK, MONITORS, TV, HEADPHONES ARE ALL BLACK SO IVE BEEN REALLY PARANOID. AND JUST A FEW DUCKING MINUTES AGOI WAS WATCHING A VIDEO AND I FELT SOMETHING IN MY RIGHT HEADPHONE AND SLAM JAMMED MY EAR AND THREW THAT BITCH AS HARD AND AS FAST AS POSSIBLE TO THE POINT I HAD TO SIT THERE AND COLLECT MY THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED AND I DONT EVEN KNOW IF IT WAS EVEN THERE OR IF IT LEFT THIS FUCKING ASSHOLE IS SCREWING WITH ME I AM ONE STEP AWAY FROM JUST BUYING A GUN TO SHOOT THAT LITTLE FUCK

So here I am... thinking to myself how does this kid not know about the shift key?

Me: "Ok we're going to test see if you have sudo access. Please enter your password, now"
Student: ~stares at the black terminal box and begins pressing the caps lock key. The light doesn't display~
Student: "Um... what? Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No"
Continues to click the caps-lock button and waiting for a light to appear on the keyboard. It doesn't. He continues clicking.
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "What???"
Me: "You need to press the shift button"
Him: "Um.. I don't understand"
Him: Presses shift button, nothing happens. Goes back to pressing caps lock button.
Me: "Your password has a capital letter in it right?"
Him: "Um... yeah."
Me: "Press the shift button to capitalize your letters."
Him: "I don't understand... Do I need to enter a new password?"
Me: "No... you need to press and hold the shift key to get a capital letter"
Him: "................................ ............................................ . . . . . .. .. .. .. .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...................... . . . . . . . Oh..."
Him: "Presses and holds the shift button with his thumb and then presses the Z key."
Me: ~What in the hell are you doing?~ 🤦
Me: "Perfect it looks like you are a part of the sudoers list."
Me: "You can take you computer back."
Me: ~Do you fucking use the caps lock key to capitalize all the first letters in your sentences? Please tell me you don't!~

When I joined my current company there was a sales woman who had all kinds of weird esoteric quirks.

Like, she was legitimately afraid the WiFi signal could fry her brain so she put up some sort of mandala or whatever that was supposed to filter all the bad frequencies. She never wondered why WiFi (or her smartphone for that matter) still worked the same way despite the mandala.

Or this one time she brought colored liquids and told everyone to put them on their hands and smell them. She said if you liked the "scent of the color" then that was your color.

I never found my color, I think it's because she didn't have black.

Downloading all kinds of icons for a project from this website and kept having the feeling that I was missing something.

Everything finally downloaded aaaaaaand I’m realizing I had to download them in three colors instead of black.

Well I guess I’ll just go fuck myself 😑

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

The deeper I dig into HP's designs, the more I realize how amazing they are.

- Let's put 18.5V on our charger label
- Let's make it actually put out 20V, just because 🤪
(Note: this is a SMPS, not one of those old linear ones where that's normal)
- Let's make our charger output positive on not only 1 line, but also a second smaller one, just because. All the while the thicker line is more than capable enough, and the same size as the negative line.
(So essentially there's 2 positives, one negative)
- Fuck conventional wiring colors (red for positive, black for negative). Let's awaken our 'murican patriotism and make positive black, and negative white.
- Oh those are the colors for American AC lines and not DC lines? I had no idea! But look, I have a shiny piece of paper and you don't so your concern is invalid!

I lost more brain cells from these realizations than I would from a whole night of binge drinking. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU HP?!!

So, I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on my main desktop now.

I think I fucked up my partitions because Windows boots to a black screen now, but I'm not even mad.

*deletes all windows partitions*

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

!Rant But after seeing this I laughed like hell I need to share this to all my dev folks.

Client: “Our next requirement, we need an elephant”
IT Team: But why don’t you adjust with a buffalo, even it is big…. and black?”

Client: No, we need an elephant only.
IT Team: Fine, I understand your requirement. But our system supports only a buffalo…

Client:We need only an elephant!
IT Team: Ok, let me see if I can customize it for you”

At the Offshore Development Centre :
BA – Client wants a big black four legged animal, long tail, less hair. Having trunk is mandatory. The same was documented, signed off and sent to offshore for development! Based on requirement all features are supported in base product (as buffalo), for trunk alone a separate customization is done.

Finally the customization is shown to client, and the client faints

Addon to this, testers completed their test case as above

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

A few days ago I went to my local bank again to check my balance and see whether some transfers that I've been waiting for have been completed.. as I was walking there - headphones on, music full blast - I was zoning out a bit. Of course I was, not like I have to mind cars in the middle of bumfuck here. There's hardly any in this town. So meh.

Now that day there was one.. I was just about to cross the road and suddenly looked left, and there it was. A mindless meatbag behind the wheel of a killing machine - an average driver. Visibly startled I suddenly stopped and waited for her to drive away. At this point she was about 20-ish meters away and already stopped. Come on bitch.. I already stopped and I am not going to cross this road as long as you're here. Hit the fucking pedal.

So she accelerated again.. and drove to the parking spot at the other side of the road, then stopped there. Oh, cool. Maybe she needs to be somewhere in this town. … Not at all. Bitch accelerates again, and stops yet again 2 parking spots further. What the fuck (ಠ_ಠ).. and I thought that I was an idiot...

Then she accelerates yet again and drives away. Looked after her, astonished by the amount of brain damage she just caused to me. Must've been a Facebook user.. holy fucking shit. Through what kind of black magic do these people get a driver's license?!

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

This morning:
SLACK HAS A DARK THEME! ALL GLORY TO THE AMAZING SLACK TEAM! SLACK FOR PRESIDENT!

This afternoon:
OH GOD THIS THEME MAKES ME WANT TO SCOOP THE EYES OUT OF MY SOCKETS THE FONT LOOKS UGLIER THAN THE PILE OF SKINFAT I SCRAPED OFF MY MOUSE ITS AWFUL I NEED HUGS SEND HELP

Thanks, companies, for trying, I guess.

I love dark themes, but the ones provided are often even worse than the light themes.

They go overboard with extreme black/white contrasts, pick a super weird hue of puke-gray, or certain elements are unreadable.

So, please, instead of wasting the time of your designers on something that's clearly too difficult for them.... how about just making it easy to create community themes for your app?

Especially if it's an electron app, how hard is it to add a config option to import a CSS file, and provide one template as an example?

So, sometime ago, Elon musk proposed a website that ranks news sources.

How about a website where we rate recruiters and black list those inhuman ones like the guy who sent an email saying you're legally not allowed to work for anyone else and 750 month pay for 40 hours a week.

A public spam filter, like ads or spam emails, but from disrespectful recruiters

That way recruiters feel more scared and improve their behaviors against programmers from all levels and everyone can have better experience during job search.

(I mean I'm sure these recruiters got some blacklist of their own, right?)

My work laptop (windows) updated yesterday. Today my monitors keep flickering, hanging, and going black for a few seconds then come back with an error that my display drivers crashed. Since I have basically zero access to anything admin on this machine, I put in a help desk ticket with all the details, the error message, even screen shots which took forever to get because of all the crashes.

They finally respond after about an hour, and tell me that my computer does not support 3 screens so I will have to use 2, and that is what is causing the crash. Well I have been using 3 screens with this computer since I started there in 2014, and it has worked perfectly until the update, so I asked if they could revert the update.

He told me that they could not revert it, and not only that, but I couldn't have been using 3 monitors before because the computer doesn't support it and never has. REALLY??? I just freaking told you I have been doing that for over 3 years so obviously it does support it you deaf, stupid retard. Try using your brain for 2 seconds and work on a solution instead of calling me a liar and dismissing my issue without thought.

After going back and forth for about 5 minutes I gave up and hung up. Finally I fixed it by switching out my docking station with another one I found laying around. Not sure why that worked, but I'm back to working on all 3 monitors. I called the guy back to tell him it's working and sent a picture of my setup, his response: "Well I don't know why that works because your laptop is too old to support that."

Useless...

I don't know what Google's design team has taken for drugs lately, but I want some!!

First, replacement of the blobs into this trash that they call emoji nowadays. 10-20 years ago we called it the crap stickers from MSN.
Next, Android Pie would look like iOS, but in the most grotesque way possible.
And now it's creeping into the apps.. Google Play, YouTube, Messaging, …

It all looks so.. white, and round, and childish. What happened to sharp corners, using all the screen real estate, and.. those colors?! God I can't stand how white the Google apps are starting to look. But I know the solution. I'll accuse Google of being RACIST!! Because black people would be so offended by the lack of dark themes. GOOGLE, YOU PATRIARCHIC, NON-INCLUSIVE, RACISTIC A-HOLES!!! CHANGE YOUR COLORS NOW!!!

I can see how that could actually work nowadays 🙃

FUCK PRINTERS

WERE ALL PRINTERS DESIGNED BY INCOMPETENT MONKEYS WHO HAVEN'T EVER TOUCHED AN ACTUAL PIECE OF PAPER IN THEIR LIVES?!

WERE THEY PAID SPECIFICALLY TO MAKE SURE THEY WOULD NEVER WORK WHEN YOU NEED THEM TO?!?

IT REALLY SHOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING PAIN TO DO A GODDAMN SIMPLE THING LIKE PRINT A BLACK AND WHITE JPEG!

I'M NOT ASKING FOR MUCH, JUST A FUCKING EVEN HALFWAY FUNCTIONAL MACHINE THAT DOES AS ADVERTISED AND DOESN'T REQUIRE SACRIFICING A GOAT TO CONNECT TO

FUCK ALL PRINTERS EVERYWHERE

!rant

Today I bring happy news. First company I interviewed at clicked so well, both personally and technically, and they expressed an eagerness to hire me on the spot. I figured we might as well talk salary to compare them against other interviews. The offer they made me was so good I decided to sign there and then. They said they participate in a fair wage program but for me this is absolutely the dream. I get lots of nice perks to boot. And they've already mailed me some tech documentation to go over so I can prepare, as I'll be working with the latest front end stuff and of course my trusty .NET (and yes I asked it'll be C#, haha).

I can't even begin to express how great this is. The last decade I've been unemployed for several years in total, and vastly underpayed when I was employed. I've worked in some toxic environments, been falling behind on tech and wrote a lot of rubbish code as a result of that. But it seems that somehow all the hard work I did put in paid off by taking a chance when it presented itself and go in accepting I might fail horribly. And I did bomb the tech questions actually. But they let me explain myself and come to answers together and saw beyond the black and white.

In short I feel like I've won the work lottery and will start 2018 in style. Part of me is still scared though, that there will be a mistake or a catch or even somehow I'll ruin everything. But that is the risk in life and I'm just going to have to deal. What I can control and will do is my very best, because I want to keep succeeding and have a great future career. And I hope I can inspire others in the same boat with my actions too.

South Africa Electricity:

This is after I lost my 7th 3000VA online UPS...

In South Africa we have 240V power most of the time which is great, but then there is scheduled power outages (because our electricity companies cannot "handle the load").

When we have a power outage we have automatic generators which brings everything back up although there is still the 1 minute drop which has weird spikes and odd voltages before switching to the generator (as the generators wait until they are stable)

This has being destroying our equipment, we had a $2000 repair bill 3 TIMES for 3 SEPERATE Xerox Machines that have surge protectors although their circuit board somehow fried.

We have lost 7 3000VA UPSes (3 different brands) and 5 voltage regulators we put to protect the UPSes.

The one UPS that fried just had 2 dead fuses, I decided to replace them (unplugged the batteries to avoid 240V) and when plugging the batteries back in there was a huge spark and flame and the metal and plastic melted onto the board and turned black (the metal pins to connect the battery are non existant now)

I am done with electricity...

P.S. 2 of our generators also got hit by lightning as we are high on a hill and ALL the plastic cable coverings inside the generator were melted

Programming Languages are Like Cars:

Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.

FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.

FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.

FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.

COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.

BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.

PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.

C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).

ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.

ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.

Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.

liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.

PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.

FORTH: A go-cart.

LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.

APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.

Sorry if this sounds like retard question on linux system

I installed nvidia driver on my laptop (720M) and it showed black screen after reboot, BUT if I enter my password and hit enter the screen goes back to normal on desktop, it just didn’t show anything on the first lock screen

I’ve followed linux mint nvidia driver instructions, removing the package re installing, etc.

P.S. All of the question I found on the internet seems to be total black screen after installing the driver, whereas mine could work after I entered my password

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Pale night themes
>= blackest of black themes
>= no screen at all
>= satan's glowing asshole
>= light themes

CMV

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

It was all black, I couldn't see anything but the words:

git reset --hard

And then I woke up.

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

We do infra as a code, and one of my coworker worked on the project alone. Few months down the road, when shit hits the fan, he just message me this is not working.

First of all, I did not write that shit, and also I was never part of the conversation during the decision making. So when shit hits the fan what do you expect me to do? Do some black magic and fix it magically???

!dev && rant

What's people's problem with Wikipedia.

Earlier this week I told my cleaning lady about how Black Friday was so pointless this year, and apparently it's the first thing she heard about Black Friday (she's in her late 30's and a mother of 2, go figure). Not only that but she believed that it occurred every end of the month because someone else told her so. She said it would make sense because it's close to everyone's payday.

So I go and look up some information about Black Friday for her. All the DDG results somehow shit or cluttered by marketing wank.. your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, appended Wikipedia to get some reasonably good information quick. And that looked for all the world like that was the case. Apparently it's got to do with American Thanksgiving.. who knew?

She still didn't believe it. "But that's Wikipedia..." So she looked it up on her own phone on some random local site.. it confirmed that indeed it occurs once a year. Well, confirmed to the extent that there was "2017", "2018" and "2019" on the page... Yeah.

Finally she believed it. At least she didn't double down on it anymore. But seriously.. you're gonna take the words of one random person over a medium that's constantly being improved under the many eyes principle?

"People can edit Wikipedia so therefore it's bad"

I really don't get people...

So... After reading up on the theoretical stuff earlier, I decided to make a real AI that can identify handguns and decide whether it's a revolver or a semiautomatic with 95 percent accuracy...

Well, basically, I been browsing my local gun store's online store for four hours for training data, killed a Mac mini while first training the system and I think I ended on the domestic terrorism watch list... Was that black sedan always there?

Anyway... It's working fairly accurate, my monkey wrench is a revolver by the way.

Isn't AI development a wonderful excuse for all kinds of shit?

"why do you have 5000 pictures of guns on your computer?" - "AI development"

"why did you wave around a gun in front of your web cam" - "AI development"

"why is there a 50 gram bag in your desk?" - "AI development"

Hmm... yeah well... I think it might work. I could have picked a less weird testing project, but... No.

I don't understand all this chat about misrepresented groups in tech. Why is it that this forced inclusion as reached even the tech community... Personally I have no problem working with anyone, but yeah...

...in 10 years, I never worked with a female colleague, never with a black person, never with a transgender/unicorn... But I would have absolutely no problem sharing with them... Every person Ive work with so far has been very passionate about tech and software and they sure worked their asses off to have the position they have, learning everyday and coding long hours...
If you're 'misrepresented' grab a fucking book, Google, train, fight, find your way... I never had enough money to study a degree but I loved CS so much since a kid I just made myself a fucking programmer and now I'm a white, straight, male working in IT, so fucking what.

People love fast moving green text with a black background.

I have linux on my laptop and I have a script (litturally just 1 line) that outputs random hex data to the command line.

I ran it while WebStorm was starting up and I had people instantly telling me to shutdown all the pcs on the network xDD

Today, my dad can finally ditch his iPhone 4 which is passed down from my eldest sis to my mom and to my dad, all thanks to my brother-in-law getting a Samsung Galaxy J7 on Black Friday.

Finally. No more Apple bullshit in my house!! NO FUCKING MORE!!! *insert hysterical laughter* GOODBYE STUPID 20-PIN CHARGER CABLE~ GOODBYE ITUNES~ GOODBYE ICLOUD~ FUCK YOU!!!

Tunes throughout the work day...

Someone's interrupting:
Queen, Don't Stop Me Now

Working on same bug for hours:
Muse, Supermassive Black Hole

Merge Conflicts:
Jay Z, 99 problems

In the zone coding:
xzibit, Concentrate

All bugs squashed, deployed, going home:
Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World

So to start off this happened today while I was at school.

Each student gets a netbook for school and the amount of restrictions put in place are probably up to government spec. Well I brought in my personal netbook and a flash drive with a few distros of Linux on it on it to mess with during study hall(all on my own hardware).

I told my friend that about it and said I doubted it would boot because the bios is password protected and the IT guy probably removed external drives from the boot list but let him use it anyway.

5 minutes later he is showing me his screen with Ubuntu running on it, I was freaking out some and asked for it back and he gave it back to me.

About a minute later he shows me his screen. All black with white text shooting down it saying windows disk integrity check or something like that. All I see is "file xyz deleted" and was freaking out even more. I just sat there for the next 20 minutes thinking of how to explain this to the IT guy and hopefully get in less trouble.

Finally after the longest 20 minutes of my life as a student I see the windows 7 boot screen appear. Probably the one time I actually wanted to see it honestly but I was so happy to see the end of the situation.

Sorry this was so long but I hope it's fine for a first post here, I've been putting it off but after this decided to finally post.

TL:DR: I'm terminally addicted to Tea.

I have been drinking tea twice every day since 6th grade. I'm almost 30 years old now.

One day I decided to quit tea altogether. And at 6 PM that same day, I started to lose color from my eyes. The whole world turned black and white.

At about 7:30 PM, severe depression kicked in and I started questioning why the hell I wanna keep on living and not end it all.

At that point I ran to the kitchen and made tea and drank it. 2 mins after that I started to see colors again and the depression went away.

It's kind of funny now that I look back at it.

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

What the fuck is wrong with web designers these days?

Every fucking web page is white with black text. It's 2022, let's stop this paper bullshit and change everything to use colors that make sense on screens.

For fuck sakes, even monokai.pro is black on white. You know monokai, that dark colorful color scheme that most editors support. With a black background and white text.

I'm nursing the worst migraine in the world right now and all I want to do is smash people's faces into these shitty white screens.

It wouldn't be so bad if these fuckers would have a dark mode, but 80% of the documentation that I have to read doesn't support dark mode. Yeah I know about the browser plugins that do it for you, but I honestly don't trust any of them since most of them have been found to be spyware.

DON'T. INSTALL. BETA. SOFTWARE. BY. DEFAULT.

RAZER

When I plugged my $250 keyboard (Which I have had for years and love beyond measure) into my new install of Windows, it popped up with a cute little message to install Razer Synapse, which manages the lighting on Razer devices, like my keyboards (One mechanical and one not - for silence during voice chat), mouse and headset.

"Wow, this looks different", I mutter to myself, as I unknowingly and non-optionally install software which is IN BETA.

I notice that my other keyboard and mouse don't show up. I don't customize my mouse much, I leave it in spectrum cycling. Easy, works well. My other keyboard is much cheaper and does not offer very much customization (three colors. whoop. I don't touch that either much)

Since I only really touch this keyboard, I am not bothered in the slightest and carry on for a couple months. Fast forwards to yesterday when my mouse stops lighting up. Fuck, now its just a black blob. I'll open synapse tomorrow and fix that.

No I won't

After uninstalling devices, uninstalling synapse, restart restart restart, uninstall again, install again, blah blah blah, download a tool that didn't detect the device either, etc etc, for about two hours, I was about ready to accept my dark fate. But then, I saw (screenshot attached) this little itty-bitty beta tag next to the software (again) installed by default.

I about flipped my shit, uninstalled Razer Synapse 3 so hard it sent a tsunami towards some coastal country, and then angrily installed Razer Synapse 2.

That looks more familiar. Oh, there we are, all three devices. Ah, very well, my mouse is working correctly once again. I know its at the header of this rant, but let's reiterate (or, reiterage, in this case):

DON'T. INSTALL. BETA. SOFTWARE. BY. DEFAULT.

Thank you.

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

Well two days ago, i was in a sap codin g camp (ranted about that)
The challenge: moke a robot that avoid collisions and 6inds a black mm spot on tha floor
We marginally had enough time te implement sth but well i tried to do an algo.
10 mins before deadline i realized that it wouldnt work. So i took an old prototype (without algo) from the trash bin, fixed compilation errors and went to the competition without testing. Because we had to do a little explanation for the parents about arduinos, we all were shaky. A friend of mine even failed to remember his text xD

Asso, because of Fortuna wanting to beat us down, we were the last team driving in the arena. Everybody got pretty fast times. (with a random algo). At the end, we took our robot with the untestet thrash bin program.
It drove pretty well, avoided collisions and then it happened: it reached (only robot not to collide) the black spot in 1:09!!! 😁

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

I was at a meetup yesterday where the topic was PHP7. I'm frontend though went there because of my backend friend. I have one question. How the fuck do you guys understand PHP? To me it looks like total black magic fuckery. Respect to all my backend fellas!

I had a project where I completely suprised the client and the company within the beginning. It was silky smooth, working on multiplatform ios android,standalone. I wrote the most complex shader I ever made. Everything was great and I even got a bonus for the project.
Then one day. Videos started to stutter. Not playing, completely black on some cases and some devices.
I started to think about reasons. I tried every solution I come up with. No success.
Updated all the codecs, middleware still nothing. Tried to solve the problem for a week. It was a total diaaster and I even thought I a dont deserve to be a developer.

We encoded the videos a few times. Decided to export the original video again, boom! It worked. Theres no particular reason why it worked. But it worked. I guess I am a good developer. Not the best but, eh.

Not entirely sure if should be said an IT company but yes I would mention SHAREit.

The well known file sharing software, I remember using it most of the times for file sharing between my Android devices, it previously was only meant for "File Sharing" but now they're just more into ads, video recommendations, news etc etc "useless stuffs".
I mean who the hell in this world would like to open a file sharing app for trending WhatsApp video recommendations? Getting notifications in a language unknown to me? Who has even asked you all for this.

I know ads gives you profit but atleast not the trending movies and all for a file sharing app.

It was good overall in the start but now not they're not working in a way they used to.

PS: image below is a SHAREit notification for someone doing black magic on a kid. See, stupid stuff! not even a news to be read just fake stuff. Atleast show some serious ads or else just rollback to your previous version.

Today after working 7 days on a project. My coworker comes up to me and says he pushed everything on the server and that he cleared git to make everything cleaner. When he did I that he forgot to change some vital things. Now we have a black website running and no backup code. I was so passed at him. Luckily a stressbal works really well. I threw it at is head and felt immediately better. Sad part need to do it all over again.

A recruiter who claims in his signature "Certified in Sourcing Ninja Black-Belt in Internet Recruitment" [sic] offered me a Java Developer position. Guess what? I'm no Java Developer at all.

Well today we got to test our system to the extreme and I'm pleased to say it passed. Major power surge followed by a black out. UPS for all networking and servers kicked in without missing a beat and the standby generator outside about 45 seconds later. After explaining to users how to turn on their computer (😑), we were able to get everyone working again in about 5 minutes. Lasted three hours without power from the grid without any client downtime

Started programming on one of these bad boys. It's an ABC80 a Swedish built computer.

Boy did I envy the kids that later got a C64 with color graphics. After all black and white is not that sexy... But I made my first steps in a version of basic none the less.

Well i was between jobs at the time, looking for something, anything to fill in the black hole being created in my wallet.

I applied online though this company’s website and within 20 minutes was on a phone interview setting up a face to face, this was Monday afternoon.

I went in on the Wednesday morning with the manager, no cv, no resume, no examples of work, we talked, did a couple of brain teaser questions and Friday morning I had the job 😂

I have never put so little effort into getting a job before but it was all a sham, the workload and requirements this job constantly sets out to kill me with are godly.

3 years later I’m still alive ( somehow ), and no blood has been shed.... yet.

At work today I met an api that redefines http status codes to mean something else. Naturally this makes integrating between systems a whole thing when system a keeps spitting out 207 and system b will not accept anything other than 200. Thanks for nothing. WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER WANT TO DO THAT THO? there's just no good reason to.

Anyway hens how r yous?, hope you're all doing well and that your coffee is as strong and black as the void <3

Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.

So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.

After I picked up cooking, I dialed in a classic Russian pancakes recipe of my grandma (the babushka) and made it sugar-free. I cook those pancakes for my wife every Saturday, and she says they taste heavenly.

So, here’s the recipe of kiki’s pancakes:
- 8 eggs, 150g of 82% butter, 300g of flour, baking powder, 800ml of 3.2% fat milk. If you have a blender, it’ll make things easier
- let them sit and make all of them the same temperature
- take 8 eggs, add milk, stir
- liquify the butter in the microwave, add, stir
- sift the flour in while stirring continuously
- let it sit for 30 minutes
- take a pan, add little butter or sunflower seed oil, make it scary hot
- after you pour, flip the pancake when its top gets dry

to flip them easily, spread pastry wide when pouring, overlapping frying pan edges. Then, use those edges (now bone dry) to flip the pancake. After you’re done, those edges (now almost black) will break away, leaving a perfect pancake. This works especially well if you don’t have a good non-stick frying pan.

enjoy!

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

My non dev friend called me in middle of night for getting shortcut virus removed! I would have blasted 🔫 him but I felt pity on the guy as I know that he is poor with tech stuff

Any he had only windows, so I Google up solution and replied back to him.

He asked where to put it. I told him in cmd. He is like what so I told him to press win+r then in that type d and "black" 🏴 window will appear. Type in that.

guess what he typed exactly as mentioned in the reply and didn't replace the drive name properly .😑

I told him to put proper drive and saw that he missed spaces so l told him that he missed space 😤 and he put only one space and it still had problem so I had to explain it in weirdest was possible( shown in fig 1.1 had been writing report and figure gave yo be mentioned with number 😅)

Finally. It was all done! Well some pf my cs ( !counter strike but computer science friend) are worse then this can't use teminal or even connect to WiFi (wpa-enterprise @ college with mschap v2 and peap auth which is crackable using twin tower and brute force) properly, do I guess it not BA's that this guy cry to get rid of shortcut virus (virus > wifi setup) 😬

Finally I feel relived after ranting 😪

A big company owned by a bald cynical guy selling stuff especially during the black Friday offered me a job, all I had to do is 5 interviews.
So I found real job instead.

!rant and !related_to_programming

Saw Black Sabbath today, final tour. Was quite sad but it felt good to see all of them giving it all. So much energy

Damn! I never thought resigning from first company is not easy.
The team was amazing, overall culture was great. But after working for 2 years and making product stable enough, the learning curve started to flatten.
Decided to move on, last day was most painful. Sitting on the chair, wondering whether I did the right thing. All the memories flash black on that day. Nervous but little bit excited. Kinda mixed feelings

But turned out that job switch was even better. Good pay + one hell of learning to build product from scratch.

"Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men, God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers, and all men will respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality."
- MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Our IT-Class project: Mathematics trainer in Java
Day 1 (was monday)

TL;DR we didn't save.

So we formed groups and I landed in the UI team with, let's call him Mage and let's call her Goth.

We had an eclipse project folder on our desktop (they said it only works when put on desktop) Btw they didn't even want to use a cloud or something (I wish we'd use git and I'd finally learn it). We should take the changes by USB from computer to computer.

So me, Mage an Goth are making a basic GUI for this Mathematic-Training App. We use this thing from Eclipse but I forgot the name. It has not enough functionality on surface and I hate things that break complex things up to ease things but leave away so much.

So after a productive hour of building a GUI and centering shit by calculating the top and bottom distance and use margins (hurts me really but Mage was designing, Goth intensively calculating on paper), the bell rings.

Mage wants to save the project on my USB-Stick and bamm💥
A black screen.
I don't know how it happened but it sure had something to do with the USB-port looking like you fucked it with a way to huge🍆. It looked damn broken.

So because we have a nice App called HD-Guard, which fucking wipes the desktop on startup and resets all but the documents/images/videos/music folder —

It's all's gone. Today is day 2 of this project so let's see how today turns out.

Hello my Friends.

TL;DR i meditate as I draw, here’s the result. What about you?!

Does any of you exercise on any kind of meditation? Not the popular meditation forms, more alternative meditation? I. E. walking meditation, dancing meditation, reading medidation, etc. ? Remember, it’s all about being here and now and letting go of any pre-programmed thoughts, right?

I myself, have a ritual which is performes once-twice a year. I call it drawing meditation. When daylight ends, and the moon rises, I sit at my desk in a dark room with one light, which is hanging aboce the white sheet of paper. I take black pencil, turn on some music mildly and turn off my thought receiving part of the brain. I hear every thought which is passing by, but I have no attachment to it. My hands are drawing, without my interception. It feels amazing, and I believe this method helps me to clean up some space in subconscious file system.

This activity of mine, takes strangly short/long time. Once I’ve sat for about 16hours, once 6hours.

Furthermore, I’m always amazed by the abstract art pieces which are the end result. I’m attaching the image of the last drawing made in this way to the post.

Can I hear what you see in it?

I recently started working with some adult content websites for my client, it's good money but it's hard working on the websites at home because of obvious reasons.

I want to avoid the awkwardness, so does anyone know of a plugin or some solution to black out all images on particular sites?

To all the Java Teams that died during the fucking Mobile Civil War, We salute you!

1. Millionaire 2011
2. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
3. Dragon Ball Z Saiyan Fighters
4. Moto Girls
5. 24 Special Ops
6. Thor: The Dark World
7. Kung Fu Panda
8. Worms 2011: Armageddon
9. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
10. Resident Evil - The Missions
11. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
12. Spider-Man 3
13. Need for Speed - Undercover 3D
14. Contra 4
15. Rambo on Fire
16. Fast and Furious 6 
17. Counter Strike 3D
18. Men in Black 3
19. X–Men Origins: Wolverine
20. WWE Legends of Wrestlemania 3D
21. 3D Fight Night: Round 4
22. 3D Ultimate Rally Championships
23. Assassin's Creed
24. Zuma
24. Die Hard 4
25. 3D WWE Smackdown Vs RAW 2009
26. Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones
27. 3D Fight Night: Round 3
28. Super Mario Bros
29. Bruce Lee - Iron Fist 3D
30. Naruto Adventure: A New Apprentice
31. FIFA 2011
32. James Cameron's Avatar
33. Racing 2: The Real Car Experience
34. King Kong
35. Gangstar City
36. Iron Man 3
37. XIII 2: Covert Identity
38. 4x4 Extreme Rally 3D
39. Real Football Manager 2013
40. Splinter Cell: Conviction
41. 2008 Real Football 3D
42. Assassin's Creed 2
43. Hummer 3D
44. American Gangster
45. Real Football 2009
46. 3D Football: Real Madrid 2010
47. Xtreme Dirt Bike
48. Tekken Mobile
49. A Good Day to Die Hard
50. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
51. Asphalt 3: Street Rules 3D
52. GTA IV Mobile
53. 3D Contr Terrorism
54. Real Football 2015
55. The Amazing Spider-Man
56. Contra 4 (2009)
57. Mortal Kombat 3D
58. Bad Girls
59. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
60. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 3D
61. God of War
62. PES 2009 (Pro Evolution Soccer)
63. Ultimate Street Football
64. Assassin's Creed: Revelations
65. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
66. 3D Super taxi driver
67. Gangstar 2: Kings of LA
68. Asphalt 6: Adrenaline
69. Assassin's Creed III
70. Danger Dash
71. Real Football 2014
72. Gangstar - Crime City
73. Gangstar 3: Miami Vindication
74. Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
75. Zuma's Revenge!

We know you guys did your best but the world is a fucking shit hole. We still remember your hard work!

76. Mission Impossible 3
77. Gangstar Rio: City of Saints (I guess these were your last days at work. Well-done guys!)
78. Real Football 2010
79. Real Football 2011 (Real Soccer)
80. Real Football 2012
81. PES 2011 (Pro Evolution Soccer) 
82. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (My Favorite)
83. And those missing the list.

WE SALUTE YOU ALL!!! ∠(^ー^)

Black mirror is awesome.
What do you all think about that?

Fuck. The entire day to do this shit.
The screen was my first experiment, but because of a bad module (i2c) it didn't worked.
Today I finnaly got it to work.
Starting making everything almost like in the picture, everything mounted (and lots of black hot glue, no wires showing...
Didn't work.
One hour breaking everything apart without damaging the screen... Was a loose wire.
Started again... Didn't work...
The pot is also damaged, sometimes it works, others need to turn it hard.
New pot.
New set of wires.
Soldering everything right, testing all wires so no mistakes this time... But it takes so longgggg... Making everything in modules this time (to reuse without having to sordering again. And finally... It works.
By this time I should have 3 or 4 learning projects finish (I really wanted the screen to adapt all output in text, no serial, no blinking less, everything in modules, code prepared so, when I get my 40+ packages from China I already have a prototype tester ready.
10 hours... Fuck I'm really addicted, or else I would just solder everything together :D

Not a rant, of course, as life is amazing but...

... Here is a rare, beind the scenes look at what happens on the back end of our office.

Wishing you all a brilliant fucking' day from Bulgaria's Black Sea coast...

What are you all planning on getting on Black Friday/Cyber Monday? I've pinched pennies all year and saved up just enough to only be able to afford 35% or so of the cost of being beaten in a local dark alley. That's not even what I wanted, but still.

!dev

Just wanna share yesterday nights story because I really really enjoyed it..

Have been to Galway with a friend.
Went to the pubs and 2 Irish girls tried to speak French - just for fun. A French guy wanted to flirt with them and said: “you British girls are so cute when you try to talk French.”
The girl completely freaked out and screamed at him: “ DONT YOU FUCKING DARE TO CALL AS BRITISH..” and the second girl started singing in the middle of all the people: “Come out ya Black and Tans, come out and fight us like a man”..

Ended with those girls trying to stop other Irish guys from beating up that French guy.

Few pubs later at 2:30am walking to the car (driver didn’t drink) when the “irish Jesus” (YouTuber) walks by and asks us if we have “something”, he really needs to get stoned 😂

Best night ever..

No offense to the British here, I assume you’re familiar with your shared history;)

What games made you racist? Or had racist content when you thought about it? (Whether intentional or not.)

Skyrim (somewhat Morrowind too, not Oblivion). I hate piss elves (high elves). They are condescending cunts. Didn't much care for Dark Elves in Morrowind. They were always swearing at me. Orcs are kinda stupid, but their abilities made me respect them. I have great respect for the Nords. Some of them wanted to murder all elves. I am okay with this. The Foresworn are gross.

Minecraft. Didn't make me racist, but had some interesting inclusions. First off all the villagers looks Jewish and are the arbiters of trade. Weird that. Then there is the Endermen. They are black, they steal blocks, they were introduced with watermelons (maybe not true, what I heard), and want to fight you if you look at them. I wonder if they will get changed later because of this...

You know a game is doing something right on their stories to get you wrapped up in the politics to choose sides. I think this may be part of the success of Skyrim. I hope to make my own players polarized on topics in my games, but in a good way.

Worked on a WordPress Multisite project that required digging around to find ways to hook into areas that weren’t meant to be hooked, create and add custom core files that would withstand updates, ensure certain plugin capabilities were available even if the current site didn’t load them, and a variety of other black magic that I’m too fried to remember off the top of my head.

By the end of the project I more or less felt like a god in WordPress—There’s little I could ever want to get it to do that I didn’t know how to do.

Then again, this is all probably a long way of saying I learned some very bad ways to do things. Mercifully, it’s fully documented with PHPdoc blocks down to the loop level so that even a 3-year-old should be able to figure out the logic...

All this to say, I’m definitely ready for a new project.

I just noticed that the about page doesn't go all black. Is it a bug or is it intentionally left that way?

I really want that new computer! What are you all buying for Black Friday?

Right, that's fucking it. Enough. I'm all for learning new technologies, frameworks, and development protocols, but my time on this earth is limited and at the end of the day if I'm having to spend DAYS AND FUCKING DAYS just scouring through obscure forum posts because the documentation is shit and just hitting ONE FUCKING PROBLEM AFTER ANOTHER then there comes a point at which the time investment simply isn't worth it. I HATE throwing in the towel because some FUCKING CUNT code problem has got the better of me, but fucking sense must prevail here.

Laravel fucking Mix. Do any any of you use this shit on Windows? Because I take my fucking hat off to you. I'm done with it.

Oh, so your server uses 'public_html' instead of 'public' does it? Well, of course you can just set

mix.setPublicPath('public_html'); then can't you?

No, you can't. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Not only do you have to hard-code your fucking public directory into each specified path, additionally you have to set

mix.setPublicPath('./');

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. It took me the best part of two days to discover that little nugget of information, buried at the bottom of some obscure corner of the internet in a random github issue thread. Fuck off.

Onto next problem. Another 5 hours invested to extract some patchy solution that I'm not at all happy with.

Rinse, repeat.

Make it work with BrowserSync by wrapping your assets like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ mix('/build/css/main.css') }}">

Oh oh oh but "The Mix manifest does not exist"... despite a fresh install of Laravel 5.6 and all relevant node modules installed... follow some other random Github thread with a back and forth of time-consuming suggestions for avenues of experimentation, with no clear solution.

Er no, fuck off. I'm going back to Grunt and maybe I'll try Webpack/Mix in another year or two when there's actually some clear answers, but as it stands this a wild goose chase into a fucking black-hole and I've got better things to do with my precious time. Go die.

Most awkward video conference call?

Our department is in a 'virtual' book club, reading The Unicorn Project, and I asked..
Me: "So what similarities have you seen with the Phoenix project and projects we work on here?"
Dale: "Ha ha..sooo many. The biggest is the disconnect of managers with no clue of what goes on."
<Vice president of our department also in the book club>
VP: "Really? Dale, I'd like to know more about this."
<awkward silence with blank stares all around>
DBA: "Come on Dale...spill the beans. Got the VP right there."
Dale: "Um...nope...not going there...nope"
<Dale's screen goes black>
VP: "OK, so when Maxine asks ..."

Rant Mode: ON

Do you know what really grinds my gears? Those dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors. It's like a digital black hole, sucking your users into a vortex of frustration.

And don't get me started on inconsistent coding standards. It's like trying to decipher hieroglyphics written by different ancient civilizations. Why can't we all just follow the same conventions?

Oh, and software updates that break everything! You spend hours perfecting your code, only for a new update to come along and wreak havoc. It's like the universe is conspiring against developers.

But hey, despite the rants, we developers are a resilient bunch. We thrive on solving problems, no matter how infuriating they can be. So, here's to the endless debugging, the endless coffee, and the endless love-hate relationship with coding. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Rant Mode: OFF

Phew, that felt good. Thanks for letting me vent!

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap.

When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, “It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I’m glad she slapped him.”

The Project manager is sitting there thinking, “I didn’t know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn’t missed him when she slapped me!”

The young woman was sitting and thinking, “I’m glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!”

The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, “Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!”

Holy shit firefox, 3 retarded problems in the last 24h and I haven't fixed any of them.
My project: an infinite scrolling website that loads data from an external API (CORS hehe). All Chromium browsers of course work perfectly fine. But firefox wants to be special...
(tested on 2 different devices)
(Terminology: CORS: a request to a resource that isn't on the current websites domain, like any external API)

1.
For the infinite scrolling to work new html elements have to be silently appended to the end of the page and removed from the beginning. Which works great in all browsers. BUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE SCROLLING DURING THE APPENDING & REMOVING FIREFOX TELEPORTS YOU RANDOMLY TO THE END OR START OF PAGE!
Guess I'll just debug it and see what's happening step by step. Oh how wrong I was. First, the problem can't be reproduced when debugging FUCK! But I notice something else very disturbing...

2.
The Inspector view (hierarchical display of all html elements on the page) ISN'T SHOWING THE TRUE STATE OF THE DOM! ELEMENTS THAT HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED AREN'T SHOWING UP AND ELEMENT THAT WERE JUST REMOVED ARE STILL VISIBLE! WTF????? You have to do some black magic fuckery just to get firefox to update the list of DOM elements. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEBUG MY WEBSITE ON FIREFOX IF IT'S SHOWING ME PLAIN WRONG DATA???!!!!

3.
During all of this I just randomly decided to open my website in private (incognito) mode in firefox. Huh what's that? Why isn't anything loading and error are thrown left and right? Let's just look at the console. AND IT'S A FUCKING CORS ERROR! FUCK ME! Also a small warning says some URLs have been "blocked because content blocking is enabled." Content Blocking? What is that? Well it appears to be a supper special supper privacy mode by firefox (turned on automatically in private mode), THAT BLOCKS ALL CORS REQUESTS, THAT MAY OR MAY NOT DO SOME TRACKING. AN API THAT 100% CORS COMPLIANT CAN'T BE USED IN FIREFOXs PRIVATE MODE! HOW IS THE END USER SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??? AND OF COURSE THE THROWN EXCEPTION JUST SAYS "NETWORK ERROR". HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THE USER THAT FIREFOX HAS A FEAUTRE THAT BREAKS THE VERY BASIS OF MY WEBSITE???

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL FIREFOX??????????????????

I actually managed to come up with fix for 1. that works like < 50% of the time -_-

Today I experimented a bit with Dockerfile's.
Was quite surprised how far you could go with a spicy salsa of ARG, ENV, SHELL and multi stage builds.

But... For fucks sake....the debugging is like poking a light year long rod into a black hole, trying to fish something out of the event horizon....

In the end I got a nice setup for Java build's, version injectable with ENV/ARG, non root user and version specific behaviour.

As the debugging is non existing...

I filled up more than once my SSD....

It was an annoying brain damaged repetitive cycle of changing Dockerfile, pruning all images if docker build stopped because of missing free space, waiting for all stages to complete, start new.

And caching is a fragile thing that puzzles me .........

Guess more fishing tomorrow.

*Gives a happy deep throat to the beer bottle in hope of death*

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

One of our customers is a minor telco, which has been taken over by a bigger one. Some of the customer documents, welcome letters and so on, are generated by our system.
First of all, the new owner wanted us to re-brand it all for free. Well, we didn't (maybe you understand). I wrote an offer for the whole package including some fixes, sums another 9000 $.
Of course, they have to discuss it now,they told me. But in the meantime - they seriously asked us to black the former company name by hand on each letter using a marker. No shit buddies!

Idiot mode: on

It's bad when you realize you are the most idotic person you know. I just bought a wifi card replacement for my laptop only to find out that one of the screws on its back was completely unscrewable. I foolishly decided to force my way through by forcing the plastic. I tought I got away with it as I only damaged a plastic support tighten to the laptop base but now, my laptop screen isn't showing anything.

When I first booted it up after this, it was working, but it started showing troubling signs shortly after. Now, all I can get out of it is a completely black screen, no backlight at all.

What should I do? 😥

I am right and you're wrong.

Aka: Living in a yin / yang (black n white) bubble.

If you're unable to adapt because the only perspective that matters is your own small little universe, then you shouldn't be a dev.

As a dev, you'll have to accept that you cannot know it all. There will be smarter people and there will be things that you won't understand.

It's okay to be wrong. It's okay to not know it all.

Facebook's algorithm is so bad that I can't believe that. In the past few days I marked ~20 posts from the same person with the same/similar content as "Hide post - see fewer posts like this". And now, not that I see fewer of these posts, they are literally throwing all such posts of that person to my feed. I know that I can unfollow this person but I don't want to. I just want to filter out these specific posts (they are all the same, some link, image of an old black and white photo and some description).

So I agree with some arguments against using dark themes but only because they all seem to be about white text on black, but I would never use that as a dark theme... (who would?) Dark shades are where it's at! Take devRant itself as an example.

I had a hockey accident where the hockey stick hook caught me in the eye and among many other things, tore my iris to the point that the doctors couldn't stitch it (something about cutting being reparable but tearing not :/ )

Luckily with some exercises, it healed a lot in its own but still let's in about double the light it should. Since then, black on white for more than a few hours will, without fail, give me a migraine. But then so would white on black, too much light allowed in means that white on black give an almost blurry effect on the characters. Hence, colour shades for the win :D

Just my 2 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyone who has watched Black Mirror and thought what shit it is and technology can never go that far but wonder what if it does and we all are fucked.

Or we are already there but mini version of it. I see people glued on there phone, screen, and even I am guilty of that. But the amount of data we create everyday which can be treated as huge asset by the AI and Data mining enthusiast, I dont doubt we will be at a breaking point, which is coming sooner than we think.

Fuck, fucking cock sucking stupid ass prick of a little black box, why, why the fuck do you not fucking boot any more, all you have to do is fucking boot but no, that's to much for you to fucking do!

Ah well, good thing it's only a Rpi!

It had a good life, now to wipe the card and start again! I

When you’re use to dark theme and the lights in your car are too bright, you black electrical tape all the things...

I’m either more sensitive to light, or I’ve adapted to dark theme-ing all the things.

What's with all these master/slave terminology rants?

Clearly the world's biggest problem is the default of white text (foreground) on black background in most terminals.

Before I decided to switch careers (PM to Dev) I would drink coffee, black, sometimes with 2+ shots of espresso on those nasty days...

It's been 18 months into this transition and I find that by about 9AM a strong dark coffee with 1+ shots of whiskey is required on any day...

No regrets on the switch, Just didn't see that coming is all...

Inside Microsoft Palo Alto, the office where only women work: a surgery! The kidney is a frag grenade.
Left to right: white coat, black coat holds kidney (frag), a girl in “sleep” T-shirt, a girl that holds a gun. Meanwhile, my gun’s barrel was made from that fridge flexible magnet material. I fixed it using rainworms as glue.

Now we’re entering my uni teacher’s brain, trying to make her give me a passing grade, all while she sings.
It’s just two of us here. Inside her, we fuse into one. Now we sing too:
🎵 We are Scottish — 🎵
🎵 A batshit crazy thing to be, 🎵
🎵 Trying to be normal 🎵

Xiaomi made a torture device for home that was quite popular in Kazakhstan.

tldr: Fuck Adobe Premiere

What the flying fuck.
I have a school project together with a friend and decided to do a video. Not only do we now only have one fucking day left, because the teacher decided we dont need time or anything, but I have to learn video editing software, record clips and create the video withing one fucking day.
I've downloaded Premiere because I have a 7 day trial left and had Creative Cloud on my PC and WHAT THE FUCK kind of fucked up bullshit software is this human compiled piece of shit?! I needed to google how to add text and edit it because adding text gives you absolutely nothing, you get no possibility to edit the text in any way, except the content. After googling for 10 minutes because I have the newest version and they changed the text tool, I found out that you need to go to another tab... of which there is 7 and all have such telling names like: "Effects" and "Compose"...
I needed to go to "Effects" BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT, TEXT SURE LOOKS LIKE AN EFFECT TO ME! Then I wanted to align it to the right so its on 50% of the screen. You fucking cant, I've tried and looked for an hour the only possibility you have is to align it to the center or just throw it somewhere. The snapping didn't even work correctly. So I tried to do something else because I was ready to punch a kitten.
A box. A box thats black. A box thats black and thats aligned to the... FUCK YOU, YOU CANT ALIGN THIS BOX.

I cant align a box...
They dont even give me the possibility to...
But I can align the text BOX, not even the FUCKING TEXT itself...

What
The
Fuck

This is the worst program I've EVER had to use. I'm fucking mad and this fucking project can FUCK ITSELF.

My step father had gotten me into computer programming, more or less indirectly though.

My family supported my programming when it didn't involve destroying the computer.

All other times, it's just a magical black box to my mother

WTF... so I have one eye that has really poor vision but still usable if I really try, the stuff I see through it becomes very wavy like looking through water...

But now all black text on my monitor... looks bold...

How many of you use the right data structures for the right situations?

As seasoned programmer and mentor Simon Allardice said: "I've met all sorts of programmers, but where the self-taught programmers fell short was knowing when to use the right data structure for the right situation. There are Arrays, ArrayLists, Sets, HashSets, singly linked Lists, doubly linked Lists, Stacks, Queues, Red-Black trees, Binary trees,.. and what the novice programmer does wrong is only use ArrayList for everything".

Most uni students don't have this problem though, for Data Structures is freshman year material. It's dry, complicated and a difficult to pass course, but it's crucial as a toolset for the programmer.

What's important is knowing what data structures are good in what situations and knowing their strengths and weaknesses. If you use an ArrayList to traverse and work with millions of records, it will be ten-fold as inefficient as using a Set. And so on, and so on.

Google wanted to be politically correct and gave faces different colors. But apparently using "black" or "asian" is a shame too so all of these emojies have same name.

This decision was very poor as it's hard to implement this duplicity in frontend so as always Devs choose easiest choice - just use the first one. And first one is always yellow...

Congrats on making whole lazy Dev world using your "correct" emojies enforcing only one face style.

Fucking experimental technologies. I feel like doing webassembly stuff is like buying a smart device, it's not worth any of the trouble for now.
I wanted to do some webassembly-stuff with rust and yew (basically react for rust). I was really hyped because it all looked promising and i found this cool band "heilung" whose music made me my coding feel like black magic with complex incantations and shit.
A basic webassembly setup did work, but everything afterwards was pure shit. Crate installation didn't go as expected, i get weird errors even though i simply copied the example (and checked the versions). The best i got was when i tried to compile and rust told me to go fuck myself because i cant use feature XY in a package in the stable environment. Why the hell would someone even publish said package then? After losing half a day because of this i give up for now. I don't feel like a badass magician anymore anyways, more like the guy that puts mentos into coke and gets hit by the foam.

The feature was to parse a set of fairly complex xml files following a legacy schema. Problem was, the way this was done previously did not conform to the schema so it was a guideline at best, which over the course of many years snowballed into an anarchy where clients would send in whatever and it was continuously updated per case as needed. They wanted to start enforcing their new schema while phasing out the old method.

The good news is that parsing and serialization is very testable, so I rounded up what I could find of example files and got to work. Around the same time I asked our client if they had any more examples of typical cases we need to deal with, and sure enough a couple of days later I receive a zip with hundreds of files. They also point out that I should just disregard the entire old set since they decided to outright cut support for it after all if it makes things simpler. Nice.

I finish the feature in a decent amount of time. All my local tests pass, and the CD tests pass when I push my branches. Once we push to our QA env though and the integration tests run, we get a pass rate of less than 10%.

I spend a couple of days trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually narrow it down to some wires being crossed with the new vs. old xml formats. I'm at a loss. I keep trying to chip away at it until I'm left with a minimal example, and I have one of those lean-back moments where you're just "I don't get it". My tests pass locally, but in the QA environment they fail on the same files.

We're now 3 people around my workstation including the system architect, and I'm demonstrating to the others how baffling and black magic this is. I postulate that maybe something is cached in my local environment and it's not actually testing the new files. I even deleted the old ones.

"Are you sure you deleted the right files?"

"Duh of course -- but let me check..."

when KhronosGroup anounced Vulkan back then, they also announced a whole set of software, that can handle all the new formats, that they introduced.

One format in particular peaked my interest recently, which is ktx2. It's an image format, that can be multilayered, and supercompressed, has inline mipmapping, and most importantly: streamed directly to the GPU, without involving the CPU basically at all.

Now here comes the kicker. If i want to use this format (mind you: Vulkan is around for a while now) for creating Skyboxes, there is only a single tool, that can properly convert hdr images to ktx2, and it only works on windows. Oh and there are no binaries, so in every case you have to compile it yourself.

Ah and then i thought, okay what if i then already render the cubemap faces and assemble them by hand into the cubemap, because _some_ ktx tools work on linux, then that should work right? wrong. When assembling it, it turns out, that now it's a 2D image instead of a 2DArray image with one element (which apparently is not the same for skyboxes)

Why is this shit such a pain in the ass?

Like.. I'm currently rendering equirectangular hdr images on my linux machine, then move these (usually 100MB) files over to some windows PC, convert it there into ktx2 cubemaps and then move it back. And everytime i need to do a change on the skybox, i have to repeat this whole nonsense. Ah.. and this tool doesn't even properly work on Windows, like you can't just disable mipmaps or change the filtering, because then the skybox is just black for some reason.

The funniest thing is, at the end of the day, these ktx2 files work on linux, as well as windows, mac and even mobile platform, so there's really no reason, that the conversion tool only works on one of them systems.

But hey, at long last i got them working, and this stuff looks quite nice now 👌

Looks like Google forgot how to do good UX / UI design.

1.
Why is the text in the appbar black, but all other icons (including the lock inside the textview) white. It would make sense, if the lock would be black too (as the textview is abit lighter than the appbar).

2.
Maps was way easier to use, before they invented MD Refresh. When you tap on a point on the map you get that info view at the bottom of the screen. Before it was a draggable window, which could be maximized with a swipe. Now you have to tap it, the box goes away and a new window appears, which is just the same as before MD-Refresh.

3.
In "Google Tasks" the activity title is not centered for some reason.

I’m convinced that CSS is black magic and those that can visualize what it’s going to do before changing code are witches/warlocks.

Usually my attempts end up in humor as the website ends up /comically/ broken. Elements shifted around to not anywhere near they belong, drop downs appearing from completely nonsensical places...

No idea how you all do it.

I have been sitting in front of my laptop for 4 hrs without getting up with full concentration and now all I can see is black boxes wherever I look.

Got an update for Firefox 😊 ->
Updated Firefox 🎉 ->
Got a sticky popup that asks if I would answer 3 review questions, why not? 🙄 ->
Went to a fucking website that uses my fucking IP to identify my fucking language automatically, and the result is the one you can see in the image,
half fucking German and half fucking English,
meanwhile I'm the turd from fucking Italy!

Firefox, I didn't knew you like it 🤬 black (pattern(UX))

Message for ALL, take my example and WHENEVER THERE'S A TURD THAT SUGGESTS TO IMPLEMENT THE fucking LOCALIZATION BASED ON IP ADDRESSES, SAY THAT IT DOESN'T WORK, NEVER WORKED(not my first time elsewhere on the web) AND NEVER FUCKING WILL 😤

Black mirror episode where all the smart devices fail due to one missing semi-colon

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.

But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.

And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.

Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.

And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...

The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".

Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!

"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.

And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...

"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "

"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".

But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "

"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.

That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.

Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!

And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.

And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.

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:~