Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

My school.

We have free WiFi access, but you need to login into your personal student account to use it.

Turns out, SQL Injection works.
It gets worse.
Table name "schueler".
SELECT *
Well.
Got all data on all students.
Name, address, phone number, passwords in plain.

I reported it using an anonymous email. Partially fixed. Standard quotes now get eacaped. Still, passwords are now MD5.

So I wrote a code in HTML and js that puts an alert on the screen that says "all of your info is mine now, goodbye" and then redirects you to the nyam cat site

I sent it to some of my friends to have a little laugh but they have sent it to other people and eventually the school principle called me and told me to go to her office and retrieve all the data I stole

I went there and explaind her the prank but she didn't believe me
So she called the programming teacher to check the file
She laughed as hard as I've ever seen anyone laughing and told me to go back to class

It was scary and funny but the thing I've learnt is that it's stupid to prank ignorant people.

So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

Meeting with client.

Me: our solution does not require a central server, any computer (windows, Mac or Linux) on which you install our software can act both as a client and a server

Client: no we need to have all our data on our server

Me: sure, you can install our software on any computer

Client: no, we need it on our server

Me: ok then, we can make the needed changes to install our software on your server, it will cost an additional fee though

Client: very good then

So I have been temporarily assigned to new team .. moving from mainly backend.. to help the Web team ..

Me .: Aight guys .. what we working with ?
Team: MVC .net
Me: awesome ..
Team: but we have our own version of MVC .
Me : 🤔 your own MVC ?
Team: yeh we only buse controllers.. but no models at all ?
Me.: 😲 So where does the view gets its data from ?
Team : from Azure functions apps.
M: how ?
T: ( in very proud tone ) .. we use js to call all functions.
M: so why not just use HTML pages . Why MVC then !
T: coz MVC is modern architecture design.
M: but you not using it and all of calles to the functions are exposed publicly.
T: 🧐 THIS IS MODERN DESIGN !!
M: 🤪 My bad .. what the hell do I know ! I only been developing MVC applications for 7 years !!
Please tell me more about your " Modern Design "
🤮🤮🤮

I'd like to extend my heartfelt fuck-you to the following persons:

- The recruiter who told me that at my age I wouldn't find a job anymore: FUCK YOU, I'll send you my 55 birthday's cake candles, you can put all of them in your ass, with light on.

- The Project Manager that after 5 rounds of interviews and technical tests told me I didn't have enough experience for his project: be fucked in an Agile way by all member of your team, standing up, every morning for 15 minutes, and every 2 weeks by all stakeholders.

- The unemployment officer who advised me to take low level jobs, cut my expenses and salary expectations: you can cut your cock and suck it, so you'll stop telling bullshit to people

- The moron that gave me a monster technical assignment on Big Data, which I delivered, and didn't gave me any feedback: shove all your BIG DATA in your ass and open it to external integrations

- the architect who told me I should open my horizons, because I didn't like React: put a reactive mix in your ass and close it, so your shit will explode in your mouth

- the countless recruiter who used my cv to increase their db, offering fake jobs: print all your db on paper and stuff your ass with that, you'll see how big you will be

To all of them, really really fuck you.

Benefits of being a dev:
Wife: "I just wish I had a program that could organize all my shit for my [work-from-home outside sales] job. My old company had much better software."
One week later:
Me: "Here honey: I built a program that will organize your business leads, allow you to search them by city, street, phone number, it detects when you have multiple businesses with one owner, warns you of duplicate information before you add it, and you can now launch phone calls with the click of a button. I've also put an app on your phone that can send and receive data from the main program."
One hour later:
Giggity giggity.

Started talking with someone about general IT stuff. At some point we came to the subject of SSL certificates and he mentioned that 'that stuff is expensive' and so on.

Kindly told him about Let's Encrypt and also that it's free and he reacted: "Then I'd rather have no SSL, free certificates make you look like you're a cheap ass".

So I told him the principle of login/registration thingies and said that they really need SSL, whether it's free or not.

"Nahhh, then I'd still rather don't use SSL, it just looks so cheap when you're using a free certificate".

Hey you know what, what about you write that sentence on a whole fucking pack of paper, dip it into some sambal, maybe add some firecrackers and shove it up your ass? Hopefully that will bring some sense into your very empty head.

Not putting a secure connection on a website, (at all) especially when it has a FUCKING LOGIN/REGISTRATION FUNCTION (!?!?!?!!?!) is simply not fucking done in the year of TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SEVENTEEN.

'Ohh but the NSA etc won't do anything with that data'.

Has it, for one tiny motherfucking second, come to mind that there's also a thing called hackers? Malicious hackers? If your users are on hacked networks, it's easy as fuck to steal their credentials, inject shit and even deliver fucking EXPLOIT KITS.
Oh and you bet your ass the NSA will save that data, they have a whole motherfucking database of passwords they can search through with XKeyScore (snowden leaks).

Motherfucker.

"I don't care if the government spies on me, I have nothing (criminal) to hide."

Uhm... but... if you have nothing criminal to hide.... then why'd they have to spy on you/collect your data...?

After all you didn't do anything illegal...

After it was revealed that the Equifax hack was even bigger yet again, the US government said something that really made me say/think something in the trend of "WHAT the actual FUCK?!"

"This data is in the hands of cyber criminals anyways".

You run the biggest mass surveillance program in the world, sucking up more than a million terabytes every hour, then at least could you PRETEND to care/take interest when the personal data of about all your citizens appears on the Internet?!

Fucking hell.

*Interview*

Interviewer: We have an opening. Are you interested to work?

Me: What is that I'll be doing?

I: What technologies and languages do you know?

Me: I know Scala, Java, Spark, Angular, Typescript, blah blah. What is your tech stack?

I: Any experience working on frontend?

Me: Yes. But what do you use for it?

I: Can you work with databases?

Me: I can, on SQL based. What are yours?

I: Can you do big data processing?

Me: I know Spark, if that's what you are asking for. What is it that you actually do?

I: Any experience in cloud development?

Me: Yes. AWS? Azure? GCP?

I: Do you know CI CD?

Me: Excuse me.. I've been asking a lot of questions but you're not paying attention to what I'm asking. Can you please answer the questions I asked.

I: Yes. Go ahead.

Me: What will be my position?

I: A full stack developer.

Me: What technologies do you use in your project?

I: We use all the latest tech.

Me: Like?

I: All latest tech.

Me: You mentioned big data processing?

I: Yes. Processing data from DB and generating reports.

Me: what do you use for that?

I: Java.

Me: Are you planning to rebuild it using Spark or something and deploy in the cloud?

I: No we're not rebuilding it. Just some additions to the existing.

Me: Then what's with cloud? Why did you ask for that?

I: Just to know if you're familiar.

Me: So I'll be working with Java. Okay. What do you use for UI?

I: Flash

Me: 🙄

I sat for a couple of minutes contemplating life.

I: Are you willing to join?

Me: No. Not at all. Thankyou for the offer.

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Working with a radio chip we selected because it had built-in encryption. Cannot make the encryption work, thus in contact with the manufacturer:
"- I cannot make the encryption work, it's like the chip doesn't want to take a key.
- which key do you use?
- does it matter?
- well yes, you can't just use any key!
- why not?
- you need to get an approved key from us.
- why is that?
- so that your competitors can't read your data!
- ...
- ...
- so the way to get working keys is to get them from you?
- of course!
- keys are 256 bits. Can we potentially use all of them?
- OF COURSE NOT!
- how many can we get from you?
- one! We reserve it from your company.
- are you telling me that all units within a company will need to have the exact same encryption key?
- yes!
- so anyone with our product could eavesdrop another same product?
- well yes, but it's all within your own products.
- ...
- ...
- that's not how encryption is supposed to work.
- but it's safe, your competitors cannot eavesdrop!
- I'm out of here."
(We finally found a satisfactory work-around, but i am still pissed at them)

Interviewer: So are you familiar with our company and what we do?

Dev: I looked at your website, looks like you build tools for managing restaurants.

Interviewer: No. That’s not even close.

Dev: ?

Interviewer: What we do is create an ecosystem of integrated data centres all orchestrated for immediate stakeholder utilization.

Dev: But the product itself…. it’s a user interface for tracking inventory. Of like…. burgers…. and bottles of wine.

Interviewer: It’s not a product! It’s a data……habitat!!

Dev: …

Dev: So does that make your users animals?

Interviewer: 😡. Unfortunately it looks like you do not see our vision and would not be a good fit for this role.

Dev: Agreed.

Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.

One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.

3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?

Here comes the biggest one,

4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?

I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.

Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".

Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢

Me (to friend): So all your information these days is stored in the cloud.

Friend: Yeah I know that's crazy, huh!?

Me: Yeah!

Friend: I wonder if there's any disruption of the data when planes fly through.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Like when a cloud breaks when a plane move through it since we store our data in the precipitation layer. Nikola Tesla would be so proud.

Me: Uh... The fuck?

Me (thinking to myself): maybe he's just joking...

What an awful day :(

The server where I host my 4 clients websites crashed.

Unable to reboot from the console.

I contact the support. 15 minutes later: "we'll look at this"

No news for 1 week despite my messages.

Then... 1st ticket escalation... 2nd ticket escalation... 3rd ticket escalation...

Answer: "Sorry, your server is down and cannot be repaired."

Fuck.

I ask "is there any way to get my data back?". Answer: "No, because we would shutdown the whole bay and all our clients would be impacted".

Fuck.

I subscribe to another server, at another provider.

I look at my backups... shit, the last one is 4 month ago!!

I restore the first website: OK

I restore the second website: OK

I restore the third website: My new server is "too recent" and not compatible. with this old Wordpress. Fuck! I'll look at this later...

I restore the fourth website: database is empty!! What??? I look at the SQL backup for this site... it failed...

I lost ALL my 4th client data!!!

I'm sooooo piece of crap!

Hello!
I'm a member of an international hacker group.

As you could probably have guessed, your account [cozyplanes@tuta.io] was hacked, because I sent message you from it.

Now I have access to you accounts!
For example, your password for [cozyplanes@tuta.io] is [RANDOM_ALPHABET_HERE]

Within a period from July 7, 2018 to September 23, 2018, you were infected by the virus we've created, through an adult website you've visited.
So far, we have access to your messages, social media accounts, and messengers.
Moreover, we've gotten full damps of these data.

We are aware of your little and big secrets...yeah, you do have them. We saw and recorded your doings on porn websites. Your tastes are so weird, you know..

But the key thing is that sometimes we recorded you with your webcam, syncing the recordings with what you watched!
I think you are not interested show this video to your friends, relatives, and your intimate one...

Transfer $700 to our Bitcoin wallet: 13DAd45ARMJW6th1cBuY1FwB9beVSzW77R
If you don't know about Bitcoin please input in Google "buy BTC". It's really easy.

I guarantee that after that, we'll erase all your "data" :)

A timer will start once you read this message. You have 48 hours to pay the above-mentioned amount.

Your data will be erased once the money are transferred.
If they are not, all your messages and videos recorded will be automatically sent to all your contacts found on your devices at the moment of infection.

You should always think about your security.
We hope this case will teach you to keep secrets.
Take care of yourself.

>> RE >>
Well f### you, thanks for telling my password which is obviously fake. I have sent your details to the local police department, shall rest in peace. Don't earn money by this kind of action. STUPID!

A few years ago:

In the process of transferring MySQL data to a new disk, I accidentally rm'ed the actual MySQL directory, instead of the symlink that I had previously set up for it.

My guts felt like dropping through to the floor.

In a panic, I asked my colleague: "What did those databases contain?"

C: "Raw data of load tests that were made last week."

Me: "Oh.. does that mean that they aren't needed anymore?"

C: "They already got the results, but might need to refer to the raw data later... why?"

Me: "Uh, I accidentally deleted all the MySQL files... I'm in Big Trouble, aren't I?"

C: "Hmm... with any luck, they might forget that the data even exists. I got your back on this one, just in case."

Luck was indeed on my side, as nobody ever asked about the data again.

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Alright, I just wanna start off by saying that I'm a huge privacy guy. I hate all kinds of data collection companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon and all that. Yet I'm forced to have a Google account for certain reasons.

But the thing that I want to say is that I often talk to people to express my concerns about privacy. And most people agree and say that "yeah sure that's some scary shit" but don't actually do much about it.

And the thing is. If you just browse through all of the options in your Google account. You can turn off and remove almost all data collection/ad serving and identification options entirely.

And yet purple complain about that Google sees what you buy and shit. Turn everything off. Get and adblocker and get noscript. The single best browser add-on out there. It's almost that easy to get at least acceptable amounts of Internet privacy.

Please, don't ever ignore the significance of in Internet privacy. And the potential issue of net neutrality. Don't be ignorant. Don't be the client.

Dear Android:

I know I'm not on wifi. I get it. Sometimes data coverage isn't amazing or the network is congested. It's cool. You can just flash "no service" and I just won't try. or even "3G" and I'll have some patience. I rember how slow 3G was. It's okay, I'll wait.

But fucking stop showing 4G LTE if you can't make a fucking GET request for a 2kb text file in less than 5 minutes! Fucking really? Don't fucking lie to me with your false hope bullshit, just tell me the truth and I'll probably sigh and say shit and put my phone away.

But fuck you and your progress bar externally stuck in the middle. As if to say you're making progress! Wasting my time!

If you can't download a kilobyte in a 5min period, why even say I have data at all? What good does that do me?

I'm convinced code addiction is a real problem and can lead to mental illness.

Dev: "Thanks for helping me with the splunk API. Already spent two weeks and was spinning my wheels."
Me: "I sent you the example over a month ago, I guess you could have used it to save time."
Dev: "I didn't understand it. I tried getting help from NetworkAdmin-Dan, SystemAdmin-Jake, they didn't understand what you sent me either."
Me: "I thought it was pretty simple. Pass it a query, get results back. That's it"
Dev: "The results were not in a standard JSON format. I was so confused."
Me: "Yea, it's sort-of JSON. Splunk streams the result as individual JSON records. You only have to deserialize each record into your object. I sent you the code sample."
Dev: "Your code didn't work. Dan and Jake were confused too. The data I have to process uses a very different result set. I guess I could have used it if you wrote the class more generically and had unit tests."
<oh frack...he's been going behind my back and telling people smack about my code again>
Me: "My code wouldn't have worked for you, because I'm serializing the objects I need and I do have unit tests, but they are only for the internal logic."
Dev:"I don't know, it confused me. Once I figured out the JSON problem and wrote unit tests, I really started to make progress. I used a tuple for this ... functional parameters for that...added a custom event for ... Took me a few weeks, but it's all covered by unit tests."
Me: "Wow. The way you explained the project was; get data from splunk and populate data in SQLServer. With the code I sent you, sounded like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Oooh nooo...its waaay more complicated than that. I have this very complex splunk query, which I don't understand, and then I have to perform all this parsing, update a database...which I have no idea how it works. Its really...really complicated."
Me: "The splunk query returns what..4 fields...and DBA-Joe provided the upsert stored procedure..sounds like a 15 minute project."
Dev: "Maybe for you...we're all not super geniuses that crank out code. I hope to be at your level some day."
<frack you ... condescending a-hole ...you've got the same seniority here as I do>
Me: "No seriously, the code I sent would have got you 90% done. Write your deserializer for those 4 fields, execute the stored procedure, and call it a day. I don't think the effort justifies the outcome. Isn't the data for a report they'll only run every few months?"
Dev: "Yea, but Mgr-Nick wanted unit tests and I have to follow orders. I tried to explain the situation, but you know how he is."
<fracking liar..Nick doesn't know the difference between a unit test and breathalyzer test. I know exactly what you told Nick>
Dev: "Thanks again for your help. Gotta get back to it. I put a due date of April for this project and time's running out."

APRIL?!! Good Lord he's going to drag this intern-level project for another month!

After he left, I dug around and found the splunk query, the upsert stored proc, and yep, in about 15 minutes I was done.

My coworker requested I add a bunch of tracking to our product.

I've previously tried explaining to him (and honestly the rest of the company) about privacy issues stemming from tracking, such as by their beloved Venmo. Venmo tracks absolutely fking everything you give it access to, from location data to your entire facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc. feeds, and sells ALL of it to third parties. It's scary. but! this guy simply does not understand, and/or does not care, and marches right on into all the surveillance, loudly singing the song of convenience to all who'll listen. (Nobody else in the company cared, either. :/)

ugh.

Anyway, I'm conflicted.

I have to install some tracking, but I can probably come up with an excuse to cut most of it out and gimp their surveillance. It'll still be useful to us, but it'll limit the amount of data the tracking company can sell to third parties.

but they'll push this guy pretty hard on it, and he's as technically-inclined as a smudged glass of warm, stale beer. "Better for your conversion!" they'll say. "How much tracking do you want?" he'll reply. "@ashkin, why can't you do this right now? What else do you need to make this happen?" he'll firmly inquire. and so I'll be forced to make it happen...

ergh

Stupid annoying client want me to add 2 new fields on a form. Ok I said, my estimation is that I need 2 days to make the changes on form, database and all the scripts that posting and getting data, plus testing. His reply was, come one do you really want 48 hours to just add 2 fields, its sooo easy!!!! WTF dude... if it is sooo easy why are you fucking bother me??? Do it your self!!!!

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

- devRant TOR rant! -

There is a recent post that just basically says 'fuck TOR' and it catches unfortunate amount of attention in the wrong way and many people seem to aggree with that, so it's about time I rant about a rant!

First of all, TOR never promised encryption. It's just used as an anonymizer tool which will get your request through its nodes and to the original destination it's supposed to arrive at.

Let's assume you're logging in over an unencrypted connection over TOR and your login information was stolen because of a bad exit node. Is your privacy now under threat? Even then, no! Unless of course you had decided to use your personal information for that login data!

And what does that even have to do with the US government having funded this project even if it's 100%? Are we all conspiracy theorists now?

Let's please stop the spread of bs and fear mongering so that we can talk about actual threats and attack vectors on the TOR network. Because we really don't have any other reliable means to stop a widely implemented censorship.

Less rant, more story.

Tl;Dr: Disney uses "Magic Bands" to track every action of every person within their parks.

So I took my family to Disney World this past summer and we got these "nifty" little things called Magic Bands. These things are little wrist devices that basically handle everything for you in the parks. It unlocks your resort room, it gets you into the parks, you pay for meals and souvenirs with it by connecting a credit card and/or your meal plan. It makes things real simple as it's like putting on your watch each day.

At first I kinda enjoyed how easy it made everything on the trip, but then as we were exiting a ride the couple in front of us noticed the digital signs had their names on them, I looked around and noticed mine too, a sign that said "have a good day $myName." It suddenly clicked. These "Magic Bands" are people trackers. Suddenly everything about the park that I had been enjoying, was part of the system they had in place using these bands as human cattle tags. The ride wait time estimations were perfect, not because of a good algorithm and estimations, but because they had actual real data telling them when a person entered the line and got off the ride.

Using a BLE scanner app I was able to see that they have hundreds of APs throughout the parks tracking every single band on every single person withing their compound. I started to think about all of the data they're collecting and the thought of it was overwhelming. The amount of assumptions they can make about people based on their actions within their parks and what that data would be worth to additional advertisers. By the end of the trip I was cynically pointing out everything to my family about the cattle tags and how much I hated wearing it and yet it was required in order to do anything.

Old man's tale. It's true.

Like 12 years ago, I was working in a small town computer store.

One day, a really ugly woman came in and asked for data recovery since she could not boot up her PC anymore.

We recovered her data, and just to make sure it was all "working", we randomly checked a few directories for files.

We have found some photos of her.
Her and a bottle of Coke.
Let me put it this way: she loves coke bottles. A lot.

There are things that can't be unseen, and moments you still remember after 12 years. Like the moment she came in to get her stuff - and you need to pretend to be all business while you're almost pissing your pants.

Good days :)

What is the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all your devices and accesses the data, the other is a hardware standard!

Had a job interview recently that went well besides one little disagreement... and it has made me question my sanity. Tell me if I'm wrong.

They asked the difference between a GET and POST request.

Wow, that's an easy one, they're giving me a break, I thought to myself.

I said "GET is used to retrieve data from a server, whereas POST is used to add data to a server, via it's body, which a GET lacks" or something like that.

They were like "ya mostly, but GET can be used to enter data into the server too. We were just looking for the body thing."

And I'm like.... yeah, you could do that, but that's not what it's meant for.

They mention stuff about query parameters and I hold steady that GET and POST are different because GET has a specific purpose. Otherwise, we wouldn't need the "method" part of an HTTP request at all. We could just either include a body or not include a body.

I ended it with "Well, POST implies that you are adding data to a server, and GET implies you are querying data from the server. When I'm reading documentation, that's how I quickly determine what an endpoint does."

My confidence was a little shaken at this point. Crazy what two people with (I assume at least) 10+ years of experience telling you you're wrong will do to your confidence.

FUCK!!! FUCK IT ALL. FUCK YOU AND YOUR CRAPPY BULLSHT UNDOCUMENTED AND OUTDATED API.

YOUR DATABASE SERVER BACK-END HAS TO BE THE ONE MANAGING THE DISPLAY DATA FOR ITS WEB AND MOBILE CLIENTS. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND, DAMN IT.

I'M NOT GONNA SIT HERE ALL DAY HARD-CODING ALL YOUR SERVER'S INADEQUACY.

MAKES ME WONDER DO YOU EVER USE DESIGN PATTERNS OR APPLY DESIGN PRINCIPLES? DRY AT LEAST? DON'T FUCKING REPEAT YOURSELF, DAMN IT.

I CAN'T WAIT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE FOR GOOD.

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

QA: When I open the app I get this strange error message that includes "No data connection could be established" near the start of it.

Me: I'll clean up how thats displayed, but the error means your phone doesn't have internet connection.

QA: No that can't be it, I do.

Me: You screenshot shows no WiFi or 3g / 4g symbols.

QA: No those are never there, please investigate.

Me: I have investigated and found that every other one of your screenshots had a WiFi or a 3g symbol. Example: <link>. Please check your connection and try again, i'll clean up the error display.

PM: Oh i've had an issue something like this before. We really need to show users an error screen. We can't just leave them on this screen with no error message at all.

Me: ... we have an error, thats what QA is complaining about, its not loading the text and displaying the error object.

Anyone else want to not pay attention and complain about something else that doesn't make sense? ... no? ... ok good, back to work then

--- SUMMARY OF THE APPLE KEYNOTE ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER 2018 ---

MacBook Air:
> Retina Display
> Touch ID
> 17% less volume
> 8GB RAM
> 128GB SSD
> T2 Chip (Core i5 with 1.6 GHz / 3.6 GHz in turbo mode)
Price starting at $1199

Mac Mini:
> T2 Chip
> up to 64GB RAM
> up to 2TB all-flash SSD
> better cooling than previous Mac Mini
> more ports than previous Mac Mini - even HDMI, so you can connect it to any monitor of your choice!
> stackable - yes, you can build a whole data center with them!
Price is 799$

Both MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recyled aluminium!
Good job, Apple!

iPad Pro:
> home-button moved to trash
> very sexy edges (kinda like iPhone 4, but better)
> all-screen design - no more ugly borders on the top and bottom of the screen
> 15% thinner and 25% less volume than previous iPads
> liquid retina display (same as the new iPhone XR)
> Face ID - The most secure way to login to your iPad!
> A12X Bionic Chip - Insane performance!
> up to 1TB storage - Whoa!
> USB-C - Allow you to connect your iPad to anything! You can even charge your iPhone with your iPad! How cool is that?!
> new Apple Pencil that attaches to the iPad Pro and charges wirelessly
> new, redesigned physical keyboard
Price starting at 799$

Also, Apple introduced "Today at Apple" - Hundreds of sessions and workshops hosted at apple stores everywhere in the world, where you can learn about photography, coding, art and more! (Using Apple devices of course)

A few weeks ago a client called me. His application contains a lot of data, including email addresses (local part and domain stored separately in SQL database). The application can filter data based on the domain part of the addresses. He ask me why sub.example.com is not included when he asked the application for example.com. I said: No problem, I can add this feature to the application, but the process will take a longer.

Client: No problem, please add this ASAP.

So, the next day I changed some of the SQL queries to lookup using the LIKE operator.

After a week the client called again: The process is really slow, how can this be?

Me: Well, you asked me to filter the subdomains as well. Before, the application could easily find all the domains (SQL index), but now it has to compare all the domains to check if it ends with the domain you are looking for.

Client: Okay, but why is it a lot slower than before?

Me: Do you have a dictionary in your office?

<Client search for a dictionary, came back with one>

Me: give me the definition of the word "time"

<Client gives definition of time>

Me: Give me the definition of all words ending with "time"

Client: But, ...

Never heard from him again on this issues :-P

Had a discussion with a developer about security. His software transfers all user data (password and files) unencrypted, so anyone can grab them with wireshark. I told him that this is a severe issue. He said no its no problem because if you get hacked its your own fault, because you probably used an insecure network. NO ! YOU FUCKING MALADJUSTED SHEEP-MOLESTING OBJECT OF EXECRATION, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS ENCRYPT SENSITIVE USERDATA NO MATTER WHAT NETWORK YOU USE. FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY.
Not implementing encryption is one thing but then acting like its no problem is a fucking nother one. Why do people not understand that security of userdata is important???

I just released a tiny game for iPhone!

It's basically an attempt to mix 'Heroes of Might & Magic' and mtg.

In the screenshot my terminal says 'helloworld.cpp'. That's right, this is my first c++ program and I don't care how crappy you think this game is, I'm super proud of myself!

I've always worked in data science where managers assume I know how to code because there's text on my screen and I can query and wrangle data, but I actually didn't know what a class was until like 3 years into my job.

Making this game was my attempt to really evolve myself away from just statistics / data transforms into actual programming. It took me forever but I'm really happy I did it

It was brutal at first using C++ instead of R/Python that data science people usually use, but now I start to wonder why it isn't more popular. Everything is so insanely fast. You really get a better idea of what your computer is actually doing instead of just standing on engineers' shoulders. It's great.

After the game was 90% finished (LOL) I started using Swift and Spritekit to get the visuals on the screen and working on iPhone. That was less fun. I didn't understand how to use xCode at all or how to keep writing tests, so I stopped doing TDD because I was '90% done anyway' and 'surely I'll figure out how to do basic debugging'. I'll know better next time...

So I've been reading a lot about this #deletefacebook trend across devrant lately. And frankly I'm a little concerned.

As per my understanding, everyone wants to delete Facebook because they're harvesting data. Learning more about us.

While I would agree that I want my privacy. I am a little surprised at how fast this trend is picking up. People are turning a blind eye on everything else they do online just to assume they have privacy.

Let's put this Into perspective, shall we?

You are afraid of letting Facebook harvest your data yet you watch videos on YouTube which is owned by Google. You may even proceed to removing your Google account and use a stripped down version of Chromium to protect yourself from these companies yet you're using a Windows, Mac, iPhone, or Android all of which may be harvesting your data behind the scenes. Some may argue that they have stripped down their android phones but don't take into consideration that you are still using apps on your phone that may be collecting your data.

Let's say that you manage to get out of every sort of technology, you should remember that companies like Facebook also check data about you through your friends.

You use platforms like DuckduckGo assuming that they might not be collecting data about you in some way. I don't think there is anyway for you to prove that these privacy companies don't collect our data.

I don't know why everyone seems to be interested in this trend. I absolutely don't see a point in it. If anything, things I see are super relevant to me.

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

--- UK Mobile carrier O2's data network vanishes like a fart in the wind ---
One of the largest mobile carriers in the UK; O2 has been having all manner of weird and wonderful problems this morning as bleary eyed susbcribers awoke to find their data services unavailable. What makes this particular outage interesting (more so than the annoyingly frequent wobblers some mobile masts have) is that the majority of the UK seems to be affected.

To further compound the hilarity/disaster (depending on which side of the fence you're on), Many smaller independent carriers such as GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile piggy-back off O2's network, meaning they're up the stinky creek without a paddle as well. Formal advice from the gaseous carrier is to reboot your device frequently to force a reconnect attempt, Which we're absolutely sure won't cause any issues at all with millions of devices screaming at the same network when it comes back up.

Issue reports began flooding DownDetector at around 5am (GMT), With PR minions formally acknowledging the issue 2 hours later at 7am (GMT) via the most official channel available - Twitter. After a few recent updates via the grapevine (companies involved seems to be keeping their heads down at the minute) Ericsson has been fingered for pushing out a wonky software update but there's been no official confirmation of this, so pitchforks away please folks.

If you're in need of a giggle while you wait for your 4G goodness to return, You can always hop on an open WiFi network and read the tales of distress the data-less masses are screaming into the void.

"Big data" and "machine learning" are such big buzz words. Employers be like "we want this! Can you use this?" but they give you shitty, ancient PC's and messy MESSY data. Oh? You want to know why it's taken me five weeks to clean data and run ML algorithms? Have you seen how bad your data is? Are you aware of the lack of standardisation? DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE MISSPELLED "information"?!!! I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THERE WERE MORE THAN 15 WAYS OF MISSPELLING IT!!! I HAD TO MAKE MY OWN GODDAMN DICTIONARY!!! YOU EVER FELT THE PAIN OF TRAINING A CLASSIFIER FOR 4 DAYS STRAIGHT THEN YOUR GODDAMN DEVICE CRASHES LOSING ALL YOUR TRAINED MODELS?!!
*cries*

Today a colleague was making weird noises because he was modifying some data files where half of the data needed to be updated with a name field, there were 4 files all about 1200 lines big.

I asked how he was doing and he said he was ready to kill himself, after he explained why I asked why he was doing if manually. He said he normally uses regex for it but he couldnt do this with a regex.

I opened VS code for him, used the multiselect thing (CTRL+D) and changed one of the files in about 2 minutes. Something he was working on for over half an hour already.... He thanked me about a million times for explaining it to him.

If you ever find yourself in a position where you have a tedious task which takes hours, please ask if somebody knows a way of doing it quicker. Doing something in 2 minutes is quite a bit cheaper and better for your mental state than doing the same thing manually In 3 hours (our estimate)

Client: How's our B2B data lookup platform coming along?
Me: All done, your clients can now search by first/last name as well.
Client: I just search "fuck" as first name and 5 results came up, our data is not cleaned up properly.
Me: Fuck
Client: Fuck

Just managed to setup a tiny/simple privacy-friendly analytics system.

You basically call an api from your backend with the api key and all the headers you received from the browser (php and Apache or nginx in my case) and the analytics api gets useful stuff out of that data without sacrificing privacy.

I get a little bit more insight into my websites usage and the client isn't sacrificing identifiable information!

I've been wanting to make this fucker for fucking months.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

9 days.
9 fucking days without internet.
9 fucked up days with access to a national intranet with the only accessible things being websites with privacy-respect policy of facebook, with all your unencrypted data streaming under dictator hands.

True story.
Some clients (especially in India) don't want to pay, but they want everything to be implemented in the project.

Big data.... Check
Machine learning.... Check
Deep learning..... Check
Espresso maker.... Check.

They want all the buzz words that are buzzing to be put in your project and they want you to put it in the 'cloud', for which you have to pay.....

So my in-laws got a new computer 😑
Yup you know where this is going. Ok so after I transferred all of their data set them all up etc.
They wanted to use "word" and could I set it up for free for them. I said no Microsoft office is not free you lost your license and disk and your old computer is trashed so the better choice would be Google services . So I explained the value of using Google drive, docs,sheets etc.. today and told them how much better it is everything would be on their Google drive so if I got hit by a bus they could get a new computer again and still have access to their data etc... So they said great and so I did.

Two weeks later... Can you set up word for us on our computer. Me annoyed at this point " sure no problem"

I made a shortcut on their desktop to Google docs. Them: oh boy this is great see John all you have to do is click on google docs to go to word! Thanks so much!

🤫🤓

Why even bother with article sites now? Try to search for a quick answer to a question and the only resource is some article and the user is met with:

- "Hi, here's where all your data goes. Please unsubscribe from our 937 partners and continue."

- "DO YOU KNOW WE USE COOKIES?" (Covers 60% of the page).

- "It looks like you're using adblocker. Mind whitelisting us for the 2 minutes we're in your life for? "

- "Before we show you the single sentence answer you're looking for let us promote our shitty content that you'll never click on because we hired the guy who makes shady porn links on every z-list site possible."

- "This article is in multiple parts to spread ad revenue. Click next to continue."

There's probably an extension that stops most of this but christ, it shouldn't be this bad.

My dream was shattered!!

I joined a new company. I graduated last 2 months before and joined as data analyst.
So I was dreaming to work on some awesome research projects and all, but it was just another dream...people here don't work on any sort of data analytics instead the data science team uses regex and all to extract things and say they are building models.
Ahh...wtf!!!
Many co-workers are good and help me, but the boss. He left all the annoying works to me and the release is in next month...
"BRUH I JUST JOINED YOUR COMPANY!!!"
Then after some days he gave me more task, when he found that one task was super easy(i mean it was just to extract things using bs4 and selenium, hardly will take an hour) to do then he took that himself and in the next meeting said he did that work and it was super difficult!!!
Data science here to senior members is just for loop!! I dont even know why I joined this firm
Ahhh!!! I want to scream!!!

If you ever wondered how to get all the data from your database in reverse order, chatGPT is here to help.

When you forget you're using your hotspot and not the WiFi and burn through all 7GB of your mobile data...

So my friend was in a hurry when she was setting up the passocde for her phone and later she forgot the code.
So she takes it to the service center.

SC guy: Ma'am we have to do bla bla bla. And you will lose your data. It will cost you around $10.

She just came back and later gave me the phone.
*unlocks bootloader *
*flashes a custom recovery*
*delete passcode file*
Phone is now unlocked with all the data intact.

PS: I got a small treat at McDonald's. 😋

[Dark Rant]

I'm sick of this stupid tech world.

Don't get me wrong, I love tech. I just can't stand anymore the global brainwashing that we're part of.

Think about all the huge companies making profit on our data. For a better service, yeah sure, but do we really understand what the cost is?

Ok sure, you don't care about your data because you trust these companies and the advantages are all worth it. What about the fact that we are all forced to buy the next new smartphone after 2 years?

Like if removable batteries were a problem for us, users. Or like the audio jack. Because now someone decided that the pricey wireless headphones are Just What You Need™.

Do you think you own your smartphone?
No, you don't. You are paying a bunch of money for something that soon will be just a useless brick of glass and metal which you can't repair. But you'll be happy anyway.

Someone is so happy to the point that they will defend their favorite company, doesn't matter how they decided to stick it into their ass.

Open your eyes, you've been brainwashed.

Can someone explain to me why the fuck I should even care about the fact, that some companies collect, use and sell my data? I'm not famous, I'm not a politician and I'm not a criminal, I think most of us aren't and won't ever be. We aren't important. So what is this whole bullshittery all about? I seriously don't get it and I find it somewhat weird that especially tech guys and IT "experts" in the media constantly just make up these overly creepy scenarios about big unsafe data collecting companies "stealing" your "private" information. Welcome to the internet, now get the fuck over it or just don't be online. It's your choice, not their's.

I honestly think, some of these "security" companies and "experts" are just making this whole thing bigger than it actually is, because it's a damn good selling point. You can tell people that your app is safe and they'll believe you and buy your shit app because they don't understand and don't care what "safe" or "unsafe" means in this context. They just want to be secure against these "evil monster" companies. The same companies, which you portrayed them as "evil" and "unfair" and "mean" and "unrepentant" for over a decade now.

Just stop it now. All your crappy new "secure" messenger apps have failed awesomely. Delete your life now, please. This isn't about net neutrality or safety on the internet. This is all about you, permanently exaggerating about security and permanently training people to be introverted paranoid egoistic shit people so that they buy your elitist bullshit software.

Sorry for my low english skills, but please stop to exist, thank you.

SWIFT!!!!! I understand that you're a relatively new language so I forgave you for all of your wrong doings..BUT WHAT THE FINGER IS THIS SHIT YOU HAVE IMPLEMENTED IN YOUR STRING DATATYPE? WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU FORM A CHARACTER FROM AN EMPTY STRING? AND WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED TO THE SUBSCRIPT OPERATOR? WHY NOT JUST ADOPT THE "\0" AS OTHER LANGUAGES? But NOOOOO...We're Apple we'll not adopt it..I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT STUPIDITY AND LUCK OF INNOVATION RAN IN THE IPHONE TEAM BUT APPARENTLY ITS EVERYWHERE..Its annoying because the String datatype is one of the most common and basic data types so the last thing you expect is this shit..APPLE........SERIOUSLY AND SINCERELY FUCK OFF

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

Ten Immutable Laws Of Security

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not solely your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content in your website, it's not your website any more.
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.
Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.
Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key.
Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all.
Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practically achievable, online or offline.
Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

When I saw that the Zuckman was gonna go testify for congress I already knew that shit was gonna be retarded.

I had 0 expectations of congress asking the correct questions.

I was still disappointed. That is the beauty of my government. I have 0 expectations and they still disappoint me.

I love playing the devil's advocate. I really do, in this case and even tho I think Facebook is the most toxic shit on the internet (right next to SO) I could not help it but think the entire time that we aaaare told that all our date are belongs to them as soon as we put shit on their application. Its just the nature of the beast. Don't like it? Don't use it! But if you are gonna use it then account for the fact that your data will be used for targeted adds. It makes more sense, I would rather have an add for tutorials and books and shit like i normally get rather than knowing that 10 hot singles are in my area (because those are all lies 9 times out of 10) but then again I would rather not have any adds at all.

One has to account for all the money that fb pours into shit, where do people think fb makes that money from ..duh our data and adds. But shit was too hard to understand for Congress.

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

What’s the difference between USB and USA?

The first one is used to transfer files from one device to another, while the other is used to transfer all your device’s data

My code review nightmare?

All of the reviews that consisted of a group of devs+managers in a conference room and a big screen micro-analyzing every line of code.
"Why did you call the variable that? Wouldn't be be more efficient to use XYZ components? You should switch everything to use ServiceBus."
and/or using the 18+ page coding standard document as a weapon.

PHB:"On page 5, paragraph 9, sub-section A-123, the standards dictate to select all the necessary data from the database. Your query is only selecting 5 fields from the 15 field field table. You might need to access more data in the future and this approach reduces the amount of code change."
Me: "Um, if the data requirements change, wouldn't we have change code anyway?"
PHB: "Application requirements are determined by our users, not you. That's why we have standards."
Me: "Um, that's not what I ..."
PHB: "Next file, oh boy, this one is a mess. On page 9, paragraph 2, sub-section Z-987, the standards dictate to only select the absolute minimum amount of the data from the database. Your query is selecting 3 fields, but the application is only using 2."
Me: "Yes, the application not using the field right now, but the user stated they might need the data for additional review."
PHB: "Did they fill out the proper change request form?"
Me: "No, they ...wait...Aren't the standards on page 9 contradictory to the standards on page 5?"
PHB: "NO! You'll never break your cowboy-coding mindset if you continue to violate standards. You see, standards are our promise to customers to ensure quality. You don't want to break our promises...do you?"

Mommy Microsoft really wants all your data in Windows 11.
The Facebook of operating systems.

Small random update regarding my ISP and how they call your speed if you use all of your data.

I actually sent them a small complaint (more of a suggestion but) that 256 Kbps is just too slow even for a capped penalty speed and that at least 1 Mbps so that the internet is still usable but still slow... And mother fucker if that isn't exactly what they did!

It's nice being able to sync my code and have more than 1 device connected to the wifi at once... It's a strange feeling when a company actually listens to feedback and takes measures on them...

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

It is a sincere request to all the people who are asking for a backup of their files and documents, to please stop pestering us regarding the same.

We can't possibly collect your data, and even if there's a way, it would be nearly impossible for us to find your data from billions and billions of files and directories.

Citizens are requested to please understand our problems.
Have a nice day :)

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

Fuck (some of) you backend developers who think regurgitating JSON makes for a good API.

"It's all in JSON. iOS can read JSON, right?"
A well-trained simian can read JSON, still doesn't mean it can do something with it. Your shitty API could be spitting out fucking ancient Egyptian for all I care, just make it be the same ancient Egyptian everywhere!

Don't create one endpoint that spits out the URL for the next endpoint (completely different domain, completely different path structure). Are you fucking kidding me?

As if that wasn't enough, endpoints receive data structured in one way, but return results in another!! "It's all JSON", but it's still dong.

How do I abstract that, you piece of shit? Now I have to write ever so slightly different code in multiple places instead of writing it only once.

How the fuck do I even model that in a database?

Have a crash course on implementing APIs on the client side and only come back when you're done.

Morons.

Windows: Would you like me to give all your data to MS or somewhat less data?
Me: Well .. I guess .. I'll choose the Basic option..
Windows: Here is a fun fact .. I'll send all the data regardless of your choice :)

This is what's happening in the background, I think. I mean there isn't even a phuqing option to turn this thing off.

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.

Client : We have performance issues on <this> page.

US : Testing with their data on : Xeon : All good, Core i7 : all good, Core i5 : all good, A smartphone : all good, core i5 UM version from 5 years ago (You know, 1.8Ghz, 2 cores, not 4) : all good.

US : Could you share your screen and show us ?

Client : Sure ! Shares his screen. Chrome is already opened. Refreshes the page, after 15 seconds, chrome : Would you like to stop script on this page ?”

US with mic on mute : “WTF?! It cannot happen here. It’s only a list of about 500 rows!”.

US : “Hello, could you open a tasks manager?”

Client : “ Sure, but I need to do it through here”

Some random VID interface popping up. Opens tasks manager with a beautiful “48 vCPUs detected”.

I have no idea how their virtualization is settled, but it seems to be messed up. Tomorrow going to be fun. I have a call at 9am to explain them their problem. Their IT will hate me forever.

If anyone has tips on Chrome through virtualization, please tell me.

EDIT : Yes 48. Not 4-8. It's not an error

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.

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

Client : I am unable to download data from your sever for last 10 days.

Me : Sir, we are sorry to hear that. We are doing some maintenances on our server from this morning today. We request you to call back us in next 4 hours.

Client : But i am facing this problem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, i heard you. As maintenance is going on it will not be possible to download data this time.

Client: From when this maintenance is going on?

Me: from this morning sir.

Client : but i am facing this probolem for last 10 days.

Me: Sir, you are not understanding it, or may be i am failing to describe the situation to you...

Client: Listen, you guys are incapable. Only knows to make excuse.

Me: Sir..

Client: Sorry to say, i am not Happy with your support. Let me talk to your senior tech guy.

Me : Sir, your problem will be solved in next 4 hours. We will call you as soon as our server went online.

Client: *.....*

It took me 20 minutes to finally make him understand the situation.

Client: Why did not you said that earlier? You guys will have all the time but i do not. Anyway.

He hangs the phone.

My ears are burning man...

<supervisor>,

I would like to raise a concern of mine to your attention. I would urge you to inform <CIO> because I think he should know as well. In our recorded meeting this afternoon <bad_vendor> exposed another company’s credentials after failing to access our system, and proceeded to demo access into someone else’s system while exposing their client's sensitive data. Others noticed this as well. This is an alarming situation because not only did <bad_vendor> expose someones data to <us>, but to one of our vendors. While it is unlikely that <us> or <helpful_vendor> would abuse this situation, it could have easily been <us>’s data that was exposed to another company and their vendors had the situation been reversed. I understand we are all under tight deadlines and under a lot of stress — by no means am I trying to make waves — but nonetheless I felt compelled make light of this situation and felt in was echoed by <helpful_vendor> during the meeting as well.

Thank you

R is the worst language.

* Indices start at 1, so you have to fix all your calculations by either +1 oder -1. It sucks

* Vectors and Lists are both neither vectors nor lists

* Data frames dont have a proper api. Simple operations like add or remove are a pain.

* The naming „conventions“ suck. Why on earth would add dots in your identifiers? You never know if its an object, a value, a function.

* The namespace is cluttered. If you import two libraries that deal with the same problem domain, it is likely that they define functions with clashing names that will overwrite each other defined on import.

Hey! How do I do machine learning?

Well first you start off with a metric shit ton of data.
And then you .fit() your data
from there you can .predict() your data

Trust me, the algorithms are already there. All you need to do is get the data.

Interviewer = I, Me = M

I: What is your project all about?

M: It is about reading data from memory of a program and transfer it to output register via a dedicated bus attached inside CPU and then projecting data of registers onto LCD crystals of display.

I: Can you show the working of your project?

M: Runs "hello world" program

Me - 1, Interviewer - Slap on my cheeks with shoe in one hand.

fucking piece of garbage postman!

WHY THE HELL do you auto-update yourself when i explicitly DISABLED updates?

why the hell is it just a "minor" update to switch to a version that FORCES you to have an account, even if all you do is use offline features?

and why is there no option to disable syncing your data to their server, even if it's not needed at all? YALL EVER HEARD OF A THING CALLED PRIVACY?

and why the fucking fuck of all fucked fucks DO YOU DELETE MY PREVIOUS OFFLINE DATA SO I CAN'T EVEN CONTINUE WORKING BY INSTALLING AN OLDER VERSION?!?

some dumb-piece-of-garbage-waste-of-oxygen managers decision to screw their userbase cost me several HOURS(!) of work already and probably will cost some more due to the lost collections.

So... Intense pillowtalk with the wife the other night regarding the coming enforcement of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law in the EU after a while turns into nerdy dirty talk.

Me: *Whisper in a sleazy voice like the dirty malware that I am*: So... Why don't you just open up all your inbound firewall ports for me...
Her: Hell no... But I might just make an exception in the private domain just for you...

From Sarah Connor Chronicles, 2008: "They used to think that 12 nanometer scale was impossible. The circuits are so tiny, you're all but in the quantum realm. It's the most sophisticated processor on earth. If you could take your memories, your consciousness, everything that makes you a person, turn it into pure data, and download it onto a machine, that chip could run it."

I'm watching the DVD on a quadcore Ryzen APU that is built in 12nm, and it was already outdated when I bought it last year. I guess I better download myself to my laptop because that's a 7nm Ryzen.

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.

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

Java. AGAIN. 😡

so, I am trying to get a csv opened and read, and then search through it based on values. Easy peasy lemon squeezy in python, right?

Well, damned be java. You need a buffered reader to read the file. Then you have to "while(has next)" the whole damn thing, then you have to do something with the data that you read one by one, right? Well, not to be disappointed, they do have json libraries, but you **have to install** the plugins for it. Aka you have to manually add the libraries or use some backwards manager like maven.

Gotta admit, jdbc is neat if you're anal about your sql statements, but bring the same jazz to csv, and all the hell will break loose.

Now, if you just read your json data into multiple objects and throw them in an array... Kiss shorthand search's ass goodbye, because this mofo can't search through lists without licking the arse of every object. And now, you have to find another way because this way, you can't group shit you just read from csv. (or, I haven't found a way after 5 hours of dealing with the godforsaken shitshow that java libraries are.)

Like, I'm devastated. If this rant doesn't make much sense to you, blame some java library for it.
Shouldn't be too hard.

If you ever get a problem with your Linux,
DO NOT EVER try out an answer on any random forum without reading all the comments/replies.
The problem spreads like a freaking wildfire and you will end up reinstalling Linux and losing data what wasn't backed up. (If by God's grace, you do a regular back up)

I work in a fintech company and our product is a point of sale app. Two senior indian dev contractors just spent 3.5 months on a feature where all they had to do was map two tables by using a third mapper table and display 2 lists to the user so he could update the data in those two tables.

After hearing same excuses (that they are working in it) for the past few weeks, I took it upon myself and made a proof of concept for them.

Yeah our codebase is kinda shit but even me, a fcking junior with 3 years of experience managed to do it in 1 week.

Meanwhile these fuckers spent 14 weeks beating around the bush and couldnt even save data to a fucking database. They just added UI and thats it. When asked how investigation is going fuckers couldnt even come up with any findings. For weeks. Seniors my fucking ass.

If not for me, I guess they would have taken till the end of the year. No, fuck you, here is an example now pickup your slack.

Im tired of picking after you. God damn incompetent leeches

To all the data engineers in here: WTF is going on in your field?

I've worked closely with a dozen data engineers in the last 5 years (and talked to friends and internet strangers about this and get similiar responses), mine if them seem to know how to use a computer!

They don't understand git, ORMs, best practices, how to use a terminal, DAGs (important for using modern ETL scheduling tools like airflow and prefext), etc

Guys with 10 years of experience on their resume and they can't wrap a model into a flask app with 1 endpoint. They'll reference local files on their machine in w jupyter notebook and are shocked it won't work on other computers!

I don't get all the amazement etc people show when they find out that I don't use services like WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail, Outlook, Google etc, why would it be 'weird' to want control over who has/owns your data? That's not being fucking paranoid, that's being conscious about who you give your data to.

WARNING: There is a dangerous malware out in the wild, and chances are, you have it installed on your computer.

It's called Windows Update, and it is marketed as a software that "delivers security patches to your PC". Wrong. What it actually does is hard-reboot your computer at randomly picked time intervals without asking for your consent, or even showing any type of warning, basically deleting all unsaved progress that you've made in your programs or games. It also deletes/undoes all registry tweaks that you might have made (e.g. to the context menu), it deletes your nvidia display configurations, uninstalls any custom themes that you might have installed, possibly even downloads another malware disguised as "Microsoft Edge" and shoves it in your face on next boot without giving a possibility to close it. Oh and it might also make your computer unbootable so you have to go to the advanced recovery settings to fix it manually.

Yes, everything I just mentioned above happened to me about an hour ago. This LITERALLY classifies the software as a malware (Google: "software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system"). If we throw in all the data collection that happens without your consent, Microsoft actually manages to check not only one, but all three boxes in the "malware" definition.

Pleas, stop using microshit, and switch to linux as soon as possible if you can.

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

Raging here, overheating really. One spends thousands on technology that is promoted with the catch phrase "it just works", yet here I am, after updating my fancy new emoji maker (iphone x) to 11.2 and then attempt to carry on working by compiling my code to test some new features. And...

oh, whats this xCode? You have a problem? You can't locate something? You can't locate iOS 11.2 (15C114)... sorry and you think that this "May not" be supported in current version of Xcode?

Let me get this straight you advanced piece of technological wizardy, you know you are missing something, you in fact know what it is, you can actually TELL me what is missing and yet, still, in 2017, you can't go FETCH it?????

Really? All you can do is sit, with that stupid look on your face, and watch the paint dry? Your stuck? That's it?

I hate you for the false pretense of advanced capability. and for your lack of a consistent dark theme so my eyes stop bleeding when reading your "I don't know what to do" messages...

By the way, maybe you can stop randomly crashing, or pinwheeling, I get that your bored as a machine designed to crunch numbers/data/code all day long and that for fun you feel you have to add some color to your subsitance. But stop it. Do what I'm told you can do, "JUST WORK" for once without me having to drag you forward kicking and screaming.

K. that feels better. Now for some whiskey.

What a day to wake up to the win10 update asking you to confirm yet again that you don't want to send all your data to them, I guess it's time for O&O ShutUp again..

"I found this tool that we should use because I'm a manager and its simple enough that my tiny little manager brain could set it up!"

Oh wow good for you, Mr. Manager! And what, praytell, does the tool require?

"All proprietary and cost-ineffecient products: MSSQL Server and Windows IIS! What do you mean we have to get the data out in order for it to be scalable? Look at it! I set up a website by clicking on an EXE i downloaded from github!"

Amazing, Mr. Manager. So you violated our security practices AND want to pocket even MORE of our budget?

Kindly fuck right off and start suggesting things instead of making people embarrass you into stoping your fight for your tool (has happened on more than one occassion).

SQL Rule 1. Always assume there are external processes that might affect your data. (for instance, triggers).
SQL Rule 2. In Denormalised data, never execute logic on dependant table values, always copy from the parent.
SQL Rule 3. When Denormalised data schemas are created the DBA knows what they are doing.
SQL Rule 3.1. If DBA knows what they is doing then according to Rule 1 there is no problem with adding in some triggers to maintain data clones as they are created.
SQL Rule 4. If you don't like or agree with triggers, deal with it. They are a first class tool in a first class RDBMS. In a multi-app or service environment there may be many other external processes massaging your data
SQL Rule 5. If all previous rules are not broken and the system has been running efficiently for many years DO NOT complain that there are triggers in the database that are doing and have been doing the same process that you just butchered (by violating Rule 1 and 2) in your makeshift "hello world, look what I can do from my phone" angular BS when the rest of the users are still relying on the existing runtime app.
SQL Rule 6. If you turn my triggers off, you sure as hell better turn them back on!

Really now?
AWS, #1 cloud provider with their #1 cloud database DynamoDB, all shiny, highly dynamic NoSQL, your data schema could change any second...

then DynamoDB errors out when one of your values is an empty string? {"foo":""} is impossible to store?

Like nobody ever saw or used empty strings a a value or what? There are tons of upvotes to fix this.

I just have to imagine the Product owner standing there: "No,no,no. They are just using it wrong if their data has empty strings as value. Won't fix!"

Oh sweet mother of god.
What is the NBN Connection i have attached to my router?

It goes "give me all your data... NOW"
I'm not used to such speed in my house, excuse me while I watch my porn collection in 4K!

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

ME: Here's an endpoint to get all the textual info about the entity. And this one fine endpoint is to fetch entity's files

FrontEnd: This is no good. I need all entity info in a single JSON

ME: but files could be quite heavy, are you sure you wan...

FE: Yes, Just give me all the info in a single JSON

ME: okay... I hope you know what you're doing..

ME: <implemented as requested>

ME: <opens a webpage with 2 files attached>
Browser: <takes 30 seconds to open a page and downloads 30MB of data in the JSON>

ME: As mentioned before, your approach is a performance killer

FE: No worries, we'll fix that in the next version. First let's see if anyone will be using this feature at all - maybe it's not even worth working on

ME: <thinking> I know I would NOT be using an app if it takes over half a minute to open up a chat channel. FFS I wouldn't even be using Slack if it took 30 seconds to open some other conversation, because for some reason it wanted to fetch all the uploaded files along with all the messages each time a channel is clicked on.....

ME: <thinking> this project is doomed :(

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.

We started working with some pretty big (in data volume) client. Around 4.000 projects with about 10 to 15 deliverables by project. Our software helps them plan/manage that.
US : Hey, so on this page we only display first 10, so it is fast and you can adjust using filters.
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US : Well, for one year it will generate : 4000x10(deliverables)x12 editable fields. Your browser will crash. (No time to add virtual scroll)
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US : Ok, here is pagination to help you.
Client: No, I want to see all 4.000 projects on the same page
US: …
Tomorrow is going to be fun.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!! FUCK YOU SPRING-DATA-NEO4J YOU ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY YOU SHIT FUCK !!! FUCK YOU AND YOUR DELETE ON SAVE BULLSHIT!!!! OMFG!!!!!!! EVERYTIME IS SOME FUCKING SHIT THAT DELETES OTHER SHIT THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DELETED!!! JUST FUCK YOU ALREADY IM GONNA REWRITE ALL THIS SHIT!!!!!!!

There you are, fiddling with next.js webpack settings, because your isomorphic JS-in-CSS-in-JS SSR fallback from react-native-web to react-dom throws a runtime error on your SSR prerendering server during isomorphic asynchronous data prefetching from Kubernetes backend-for-frontend edge-server with GraphQL.

You have all that tech to display a landing page with an email form, just to send spam emails with ten tracking links and five tracking beacons per email.

Your product can be replaced by an Excel document made in two days.

It was developed in two years by a team of ten developers crunching every day under twelve project managers that can be replaced with a parrot trained to say “Any updates?”

Your evaluation is $5M+. You have 10,000 dependency security warnings, 1000 likes on Product Hunt, 500 comments on Hacker News, and a popular Twitter account.

Your future looks bright. You finish your coffee, crack your knuckles and carry on writing unit tests.

I know Google isn't the worst company in the world. But some of their data tracking just seems a bit odd. Such as keeping audio logs each time you use Google on your phone. Or when it picks up random bits of conversation. Along with them keeping track of where your going, and where you have been. Even if Google maps isn't running.

And one of my all time favorites is when Google Allo was a thing, it used to have access to my camera randomly without actually opening the app. My phone will tell me different logs each time Allo opened the camera without my permission.

I know they need to collect data in order to advance some of their fields of tech. But it just seems a bit intrusive when companies like Google do this.

When scammers want to follow GDPR regulations - the worst SCAM ever 🤦‍♂️

Long story:
I have just received a SMS message, informing me that my phone number is in several marketing databases. It also had a link to the website called stop-sms.pl, where you're supposed to be able to unsubscribe from those lists. At this moment I felt a little bit confused - the SMS seemed suspicious, but on the other hand who doesn't want to get rid of all this SMS crap. So I carefully followed the link to see the website with a form to fill with personal data - phone number included 😆 If that is not enough to realize that this is just a lame scam website, just below the input where you enter the phone number there are Terms and Conditions where it directly states that: "By filling the form you agree that your personal data (name, email, phone number) will be used for marketing purposes." - WTF?!

Who the f... gets fooled by such crap?! 😂😂😂

Holy fuck Microsoft,

you're just saying that you're giving away a ton of information to publishers when I am playing games on my Xbox.
Like data if I'm talking, chatting on Xbox Live, etc. so all this crazy stuff GA would do.

AND YOUR FUCKING OPT-OUT OPTION IS TO UNINSTALL ALL MY GAMES AND DON'T USE THEM. HOLY FUCK WHICH CRAZY DUDE CAME TO THIS IDEA?

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

Just me getting angry about the reaction after the Cambridge-scandal?
The news are spamming it every hour, and suddenly everyone is "well aware about my privacy" and deleting their Facebooks.

I mean, as if we didn't know this all along. O-fucking-course your data is stored and sold for adds, you accepted it when you wanted to "see which celebrity you are alike"!

I walk around and talk about privacy with people kinda a lot, and nobody seems to care. And then this happens, and people are going nuts. Waow, what a surprise!

Haha, have a nice evening DevRanters! ;) (20:55)@swe

This “Auto save” feature in the latest app version is buggy..
-> new rant
-> prefilled with previous rant..

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

Apple, go fuck yourself, seriously.. put your trillion dollars way up your arse...

Moved to Ireland, want to switch country..
“If you want to switch countries, cancel your Apple Music subscription first”..
so be it. Cancelled it..
“Your subscription will be cancelled in 28 days”.

FUCK YOU, YOU COCK SUCKING BASTARDS!!
I NEED TO SWITCH THE STORE TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD BANKING APPS AND STUFF LIKE THAT..

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

Suddenly iMessage stopped working. This is kind of a big deal because I have unlimited data but only unlimited sms to Irish numbers and I need to communicate with people in Switzerland and Germany..
Internet works so I try to turn iMessage off and in again. But that doesn’t work.. i can only reactivate iMessage via WiFi.

So I go back to the hotel, reactivate iMessage..
“Verifying imessage” >> google..
Leads me to an Apple forum: “the verification of iMessage can take up to 24h”.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a new country and rely on this overpriced shit..

Fun but sad fact, I have a second phone with me. IPhone 4 with iOS 7 and that thing WORKS!!

If this is where the future is going we’re all gonna die very soon.. plains crash, power plants explode but hey, at least they have data about it and it looks shiny. That’s all that matters..

Another reason to switch to android..

MacOs fucked me up so I already switched to windows + Linux. Next one will be getting rid of iOS, they don’t build small phones anymore anyway..

As usual a rather clickbait title, because only the chrome extensions (as always) seem to be vulnerable:

"Warning – 3 Popular VPN Services Are Leaking Your IP Address"

"Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in three popular VPN services that could leak users' real IP addresses and other sensitive data."

"VPN Mentor revealed that three popular VPN service providers—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate"

"PureVPN is the same company who lied to have a 'no log' policy, but a few months ago helped the FBI with logs that lead to the arrest of a Massachusetts man in a cyberstalking case."

"Hijack all traffic (CVE-2018-7879) "
"DNS leak (CVE-2018-7878)"
"Real IP Address leak (CVE-2018-7880)"

My university has a internal developed system, where everything is managed from e-mails, exams to personal data.

What I'd like most about it, they talk all day about Internet Security and store our passwords in plain text and if you press the "I've forgott my Password button", they even send your password unencrypted, plaintext via e-mail. (Hello Wiresharks)

I don't know how to feel about this, it just hurts :(

Gdpr thing aside...

Does anybody read the new policy...

I just did for 2 apps (intel driver software and 9ga.. You know it)...

On the things that they collected on the side without you knowing include:
9ga:
Device memory, language, battery level, timezone, unique device identifiers, compass, accelorometer and microphone... Even service provider and signal strength

Intel:
Website you visit, how you use your computer(vague too vague) and computing environment.

Did anybody knew for sure before this that their apps are listening to them? That they just made a profile of you with all the data?

With all this they dont even need your ip they already know who you are and what you do on a daily basis...

There are 20 more but it will be waaay too much to write about. These 2 are way worse since 9ga doesnt use microphone for anything... And why a driver reads what websites i am going to?

Wondering why your form isn't submitting any data to the db.
Spending half an hour checking all POST-Variables and functions in your script multiple times to see if they give the correct values (they do).
Finally realizing you wrote 'INSERT INRO' in your SQL statement.
Questioning your intelligence for the rest of the day.

Alright... how the FUCK is an IP address considered personal data by GDPR????

Fucking boomers don't even know what an IP is. Guess what, every website you've ever been to has your IP! It's in your router, your fucking ISP's registry, and in every DNS server within 1000 miles of you!

Imagine thinking your IP gives up private information, god, just fuck me, I hate all of it, idiotic fools fumbling around with shit they don't understand.

...WKO making every developer's life a living nightmare because fucking GOOGLE FONTS stores a copy of your IP for their stupid analytics. You know what? Just don't use the internet either, that needs your IP too. In fact, don't pay taxes either, the tax office has a copy of your address, that's pretty personal information if you ask me! Just live in the woods and survive with the wolves.

I already know the future 'resolution' to this one - store fonts locally, resolve this dangerous "issue"... "waaaahhh fullStackClown! the site is slower now!!!"

...an infinite circle of clownshipness continues...

tune in next week as the world continues to approach it's circus fate!

Recent conversation with a client for our SaaS product.

Client: So why can't we delete this information.

Me: We want to able to know who made a change to the data to avoid getting into trouble with the law.

Client: Does that mean you can see all the data on our account?

Me: (I know where she is going but let me stall)..You are the only one with access to your account. If I don't know your password, I can't access your data.

Client: But you sound like you can see the information in the cloud.

Me: (Laughs softly and segued).. The additional features you requested would be.......

Someone needs to read the T&C...

If you're currently in college and wish to get placed in a major tech giant like Amazon or Facebook:

Don't learn React.js, instead learn Linked lists.

Don't learn Flutter, instead learn Binary search trees.

Don't learn how to perform secure Authorization with JWTs, instead learn how to recursively reverse a singly linked list.

Don't learn how to build scalable and fault tolerant web servers, instead learn how to optimally inverse a binary search tree.

These big tech companies don't really care what real world development technologies you've mastered. Your competence in competitive programming and data structures is all that matters.

The system is screwed. Or atleast I am.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Never lose your sense of wonder when it comes to working with clients. Client berated us saying her data were outdated. Ok. Check the file the third party that generated the data is sending us.

Outline all stated discrepancies in the data back to the client, showing that everything lines up with what we are receiving.

Client is frustrated. Contact the third party in their behalf.

Third party support: “oh yea, client had us start sending data to your competitor like a month ago”

Bruh. Bruh. Bruh.

Fortunately the client wants to stay with us and is getting their data pointed back but how in the hell do you forget that. The reason the client when looking at competition (at least guessing looking at previous call records) is to get faster processing of the data coming from the third party. How are you gonna forget you turned off the sending when you are so worried about speed?! Most of our clients are running 7-8 figure businesses by the way.

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

"Do not lose time improving the data pipelines from our ERP, it is about to be replaced!"
Then suddenly there is a week of bugs and stress because the non-improved data pipeline can't handle new situations.
"Just fix the bugs! It is all about to change anyway!"
Repeat. And repeat.

Fuck, I hate when managers think that there are such things as "temporary fixes" in ERPs. Or that companies can ever migrate to another ERP. Those things are forever, as Cheetos dust on your bowels.

!rant

I've always been kinda lazy about backups and such, thinking it wouldn't be so bad, and "I have my most important stuff on Dropbox".

Just now, for some reason one of my hard drives just stopped for a bit, and I couldn't do anything with it anymore. Luckily it went away after restarting my pc, but it scared the shit out of me, as I almost lost 500 gigs worth of music, films, documents, etc...

This made me really think about the whole backup thing, and I'm creating a disk image as I type this. The time that I spend on that will be much less then the time it'll cost to recover everything. Lesson learned ^^'

Sometimes I just HATE Google.

No, this is NOT because they keep all your data, are evil and all the usual things. I just think they suck, yes there are super cool things and a lot of things are just the best in the field but I just feel like we could do better, there are so many smart people out there I just do not understand why everything is taking so much time.

PS. Just deleted all my browsing histroy accidentally because I didn't read the small print - in the picture attatched.

Sometimes In wonder if the support at my hosting company are a team of highly untrained monkeys.

I know jack shit about the finer details of server management, thats what I pay you guys for.

But you guys could at least try to be a bit more usefull.

If I ask you guys about the backup functions you could try to answer my questions instead of telling me what I can see on my screen myself. Because I can read pretty damm well.

After 3 days of getting no answers and not being able to backup to server with the tools you build and are telling us to use. The server died and now you are telling you can't recover the data?

How about fuck you! So we got no backup because of your fault you now tell us all our data is lost?

We got our own backups but rebuilding the entire server and infrastructure is going to take days.

Going to be a fun couple of days telling clients why shit isn't working.

My own cloud service. Mainly because of privacy reasons, but also playing around with servers can be fun. Before you know it you've got your own Spotify, Netflix, Google Drive, Last Pass etc... Without sacrificing all of you data :)

Sure, at first it may be a bit expensive because you have to get a server, but you don't need a crazy server to run these things, if you've got an old pc or laptop laying around you can use that too (in that case setting up your own cloud services is practically free).

It's sometimes really anxiety inducing thinking that all data could be gone, if somebody decides to kill/discontinue/crash [see gitlab shitting 6 hours of data due to fucked backup strategy and shitty seperation of servers] your account/service, be it server, git-repos, backups, chrome syncs, games, music, sim card, ..

But there's simply no way of having a backup of absolutely everything (ignore DRM) - especially automated and abstracted away from you, so you don't have to do all that shit yourself

Fuck MySQL Workbench!
I have spent 2 fucking days diagramming a 350 table database 3 times over because if it doesn't crash and ignore your saves it corrupts its own data and drops the hours of formatting you've done! Now I'm trying to print an ugly un-formatted piece of sh*t because I need to get on a flight to the meeting I need to present this at and it ignores all my default printer settings and wastes 40 A3 sheets of paper. Does Oracle even use the shit they are releasing? For the love of god if you can't maintain it for free fix your fucking bugs and I will buy a license but I cant keep working like this.

Oh my fucking god. Austria wants to sell the data of it's citizens to schools, universities museums, and: Companies with enough money. What the fuck?

The data contains shit from the central register of residents, information about name, date of birth, sex/gender, nationality, recidence, health data (!), education, social security/insurance, tax data, E-Card/ELGA Data (system where your doctor visits, prescribed medicines/drugs, all these things, are saved), and other shit.

Welcome to 2018, where you can try as hard as you want to keep your privacy, and then your government sells all the shit you are not able to remove. Fucking bullshit.

Do you get filled with anxiety and mental anguish when asked for your availability for a technical interview, knowing you’ve spent all your time recently programming and not working on algorithms/data structures and so you’re terribly unprepared but have no idea what the acceptable amount of time to schedule out without seeming like you’re incompetent is?

No?

....me neither. (She says, lying)

Why pay $7/mo PER PROJECT for heroku that runs on aws when you can just pay $5/mo for Linode that has opt-out data sharing and you can install Caprover or Dokku there to have the experience similar to heroku and create as many projects as your hardware allows you, $5 for all?

Firts social hacking ever 😁😁😁

In the bus at the end of the day
Me:(fake phonecall to Bell)ho you offert me a 10go of data per months for 30$ ! Wow

Guy in bus: he call is phone company and give all is Private information in the bus to have a better deal.

Me: poke him and say "you know now i can create accounts on your billing address for free"

Guy: Holy shit man you are right i need to take care.

Me: now change all you password contains what you publicly said.

Me: have a good day 😋

Working in a organization that hire people that don't know what they doing and can't ask a question correctly...

HELP WE'RE GETTING AN ERROR IN OUR CODE WHILE TRYING TO GET DATA FROM YOUR DB... PLZ FIX IT

WTF IS NOT WORKING, WHAT ARE YOU QUERYING, WHAT IS THE ERROR?

**Sends a SQL query but with ? for all the parameters**

WTF..... U PPL ARE IDIOTS.... CAN'T EVEN ASK A QUESTION CORRECTLY OR PROVIDE NECESSARY INFORMATION... CLEARLY YOU HAVE NO IDEA WTF UR DOING..

EVEN GOD CAN'T HELP YOU...

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

You know, I am astonished at the number of people here that use(d) Facebook. It's even more amazing that these same people are actually surprised that all this shit happened with their data.

I don't have a Facebook account, or Instagram, or Twitter, etc. When this stuff first started coming out, people kept telling me to sign up for accounts.

I refused, telling them that I didn't want to give my private information to a third party that I didn't even know. And not only that, but they can use the private information about you in any way they wish and also sell it to third parties.

I was of course told to take off my tinfoil hat... and it's only now that people are realizing that they are giving away potentially private information to people they don't know?

If I came to your door and asked you everyday to send everything you did that day to me so that I could file it away and use it as I please, you would probably tell me to get the hell off your property.

It just blows me away that if you put that same offer in the format of a website, suddenly people are begging to give you their data.

It's fucking lunacy... 😞

>TINFOIL GUYS!!!!!
guys don't just deactivate your FB acc, request deletion, beacuse if you deactivate and use any services like any page login or any social services like insta, and you use your FB credentials to login, the gets reactivated and your news feed even shows what you have missed in the mean time , so all of the (your) data is still in their servers

PouchDB.

It promised full-blown CRDT functionality. So I decided to adopt it.

Disappointment number one: you have to use CouchDB, so your data model is under strict regulations now. Okay.

Disappointment number two: absolutely messed up hack required to restrict users from accessing other users’ data, otherwise you have to store all the user data in single collection. Not the most performant solution.

Disappointment number three: pagination is utter mess. Server-side timestamps are utter mess. ANY server-side logic is utter mess.

Just to set it to work, you need PouchDB itself, websocket adapter (otherwise only three simultaneous syncs), auth adapter (doesn’t work via sockets), which came out fucking large pile of bullshit at the frontend.

Disappointment number four, the final one: auth somehow works but it doesn’t set cookie. I don’t know how to get access.

GitHub user named Wohali, number one CouchDB specialist over there, doesn’t know that either.

It also doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox at all.

So, if you want to use PouchDB, bear that in mind:
1. CouchDB only
2. No server-side logic
3. Authorization is a mess
4. Error logs are mess too: “ERROR 83929629 broken pipe” means “out of disk space” in Erlang, the CouchDB language.
5. No hosting solutions. No backup solutions, no infrastructure around that at all. You are tied to bare metal VPS and Ansible.
6. Huge pile of bullshit at frontend. Doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.