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.

Everyone talks about crappy categories of user on Stackoverflow - help vampires, rep whores, etc. - but the category of "people who don't care about the stupid mind games, politics or internet points and just want to help others" is so small people apparently don't even think it can exist.

I mean sheesh, I answer on there in my free time to just lend a hand to people, usually in a couple of niche tags that have very little info elsewhere, even for beginners. Of course there's questions that are beyond salvaging and just random homework dumps, but the majority are from genuinely confused users who simply don't know the correct terms to search for.

A question is not inherently evil just because its asker has misunderstood a key concept.

I'm not even asking you to help the poor sods, I'm just asking you to allow me to help without calling me a rep whore or a moron who'd be better talking to bots on reddit 🙄

We need an open-source alternative to stack overflow. They have fucking monopolizing pieces of ratshit admins there and lame ass bots.

I HAD A FUCKING 450 REP :/ and now i have "reached my question limit"

I mean its okay of you want to keep stackoverflow clean , but straight out rejecting the new queries should be against your god damn principles, if those mofos have any!

If it is so easy to downvote and delete a question for the mods, why can't they create a trash site called dump.stackoverflow.com ? whenever a question is not following their stupid guidelines , downvote it to oblivion. After a certain limit, that question goes to dump space where it will be automatically removed after 30 days. Atleast give us 30 fucking days to gather attention of audience !

And how does a question defines someone's character that you downright ban the person from asking new questions? Is there a phd that we should be doing in our mother's womb to get qualified as legitimate question author?

"No questions are stupid" is what we usually hear in our school/college life. And that's a stretch, i agree. Some questions are definitely stupid. But "Your questions are so stupid we are removing you from the site" is the worst possible way to deal with a question asker.

Bloody assholes.

Now, can anyone tell me that if am passing a parcelable list of objects in an intent before starting a new activity, how can i retrieve it in the new activity without getting any kotlin warnings?
The compiler is saying that the data coming via intent is that of list<Type!> aka list of platform type, so how to deal with this warning?

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

I know some C++. What should I really learn next Python or Java?
I want to be able to make a meaningful project as soon as possible.(with Java as I can see I have SpigotPlugins, and with Python I have Telegram Bots).
Sorry for asking for advice here but idk what to do.

Never seen this one before...

Just came across a website that asks you an addition math problem to prevent bots. Except it's always adding two single digit numbers. And they are always 2 and 9...

TL;DR When talking about caching, is it even worth considering try and br as memory efficient as possible?

Context:
I recently chatted with a developer who wanted to improve a frameworks memory usage. It's a framework creating discord bots, providing hooks to events such as message creation. He compared it too 2 other frameworks, where is ranked last with 240mb memory usage for a bot with around 10.5k users iirc. The best framework memory wise used around 120mb, all running on the same amount of users.

So he set out to reduce the memory consumption of that framework. He alone reduced the memory usage by quite some bit. Then he wanted to try out ttl for the cache or rather cache with expirations times, adding no overhead, besides checking every interval of there are so few records that should be deleted. (Somebody in the chat called that sort of cache a meme. Would be happy , if you coukd also explain why that is so😅).
Afterwards the memory usage droped down to 100mb after a Around 3-5 minutes.

The maintainer of the package won't merge his changes, because sone of them really introduce some stuff that might be troublesome later on, such as modifying the default argument for processes, something along these lines. Haven't looked at these changes.

So I'm asking myself whether it's worth saving that much memory. Because at the end of the day, it's cache. Imo cache can be as big as it wants to be, but should stay within borders and of course return memory of needed. Otherwise there should be no problem.
But maybe I just need other people point of view to consider. The other devs reasoning was simple because "it shouldn't consume that much memory", which doesn't really help, so I'm seeking you guys out😁