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If Doctors Were Like Coders
(cross-posted from https://medium.com/@c09b6133a238/...)
Problem: The patient has a broken leg.
Solution:
1. Ask the patient to reproduce the exact scenario that resulted in the broken leg. Watch closely to see if the leg breaks again. Check for consistency by repeating the scenario a few more times.
2. Explain that this isn’t an intended use case for the leg, and besides, it only affects one person. Ask the patient if, all things considered, he really wants to prioritize his broken leg over your other work.
3. Point out that the patient’s other leg performs just fine under the same circumstances. Ask if he can use his other leg instead, at least as a workaround.
4. Attach several accelerometers to the broken leg and break it again. Stare at the data received from the accelerometers, then shrug and declare it useless.
5. Decide that the patient’s problem must be in his spleen. After all, that’s the only part of his body you don’t really understand.
6. Track down the people who created the patient. Ask them if he’s ever had spleen problems before. When they seem confused, explain that he has a broken leg. Ignore them when they tell you that the spleen they created could not possibly cause a broken leg.
7. Ask Google where a person’s spleen is. Spend half an hour reading the Wikipedia article on Splenomegaly.
8. Open the patient and grumble about how tightly-coupled his spleen and circulatory system are. Examine the spleen’s outer surface to see if there are any obvious problems. Inform him that several of his organs are very old and he should consider replacing them with something more modern.
9. Compare the spleen to some pictures of spleens online. If anything looks different, try to make it look the same.
10. Remove the spleen completely. See if the patient’s leg is still broken. If so, put the spleen back in.
11. Tell the patient that you’ve noticed his body is made almost entirely out of cellular tissue, whereas most bodies these days are made out of cardboard. Explain that cardboard is a lot easier for beginners to understand, it’s more forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s the tissue franca of the Internet. Ask if he’d like you to rebuild his body with cardboard. It will take you longer, but then his body would be future-proof and dead simple. He could probably even fix it himself the next time it breaks.
12. Spend some time exploring the lymph nodes in the patient’s abdominal cavity. Accidentally discover that if the patient’s leg is held immobile for six weeks, it gets better.
13. Charge the patient for six weeks of work.14 -
I once brought my Kali Linux laptop to school. (Because normal had dead battery, waiting for shipping)
MFW someone from the IT department is called in to fix teachers projector and he sees I still have the default dragon wallpaper on it.
MFW when recognises it it's Kali.
MFW he calls the police and my laptop gets taken away because 'its dangerous' and I get questioned in school.
The police came back a week later to check my laptop again. 'uhh we gotta check the logs'.
IF I WANTED IT TO BE DANGEROUS YOU'D BE FIXING A LOT MORE THAN JUST THE FUCKING PROJECTOR!
Also, wuddup devrant!11 -
Anyone know this bitch hacker 127.0.0.1 story?
WORST HACKERS OF ALL TIME
CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS BECUASE IT IS SO LONG...
TLdr bitch hacker hacks himself by localhost
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can’t you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn’t kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you’re stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You’re a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again… I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you’re so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-9ff3c180.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> elch you son of a bitch
<Metanot> bitchchecker how old are you?
<Elch> What’s up bitchchecker?
<bitchchecker> you have a frie wal
<bitchchecker> fire wall
<Elch> maybe, i don’t know
<bitchchecker> i’m 26
<Metanot> such behaviour with 26?
<Elch> how did you find out that I have a firewall?
<Metanot> tststs this is not very nice missy
<bitchchecker> because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me
<bitchchecker> be a man turn that shit off
<Elch> cool, didn’t know this was possible.
<bitchchecker> thn my virus destroys your pc man
<Metanot> are you hacking yourselves?
<Elch> yes bitchchecker is trying to hack me
<Metanot> he bitchchecker if you’re a hacker you have to get around a firewall even i can do that
<bitchchecker> yes man i hack the elch but the sucker has a fire wall the
<Metanot> what firewall do you have?
<bitchchecker> like a girl
<Metanot> firewall is normal a normal hacker has to be able to get past it…you girl
<He> Bitch give yourself a jackson and chill you’re letting them provoce you and give those little girls new material all the time
<bitchchecker> turn the firewall off then i send you a virus [Please control your cussing]er
<Elch> Noo
<Metanot> he bitchchecker why turn it off, you should turn it off
<bitchchecker> you’re afraid
<bitchchecker> i don’t wanna hack like this if he hides like a girl behind a fire wall
<bitchchecker> elch turn off your shit wall!
<Metanot> i wanted to say something about this, do you know the definition of hacking??? if he turns of the firewall that’s an invitation and that has nothing to do with hacking
<bitchchecker> shut up
<Metanot> lol
<bitchchecker> my grandma surfs with fire wall
<bitchchecker> and you suckers think you’re cool and don’t dare going into the internet without a fire wall
<Elch> bitchchecker, a collegue showed me how to turn the firewall off. Now you can try again
<Metanot> bitchhacker can’t hack
<Black<TdV>> nice play on words
<bitchchecker> wort man
<Elch> bitchchecker: I’m still waiting for your attack!
<Metanot> how many times again he is no hacker
<bitchchecker> man do you want a virus
<bitchchecker> tell me your ip and it deletes your hard drive
<Metanot> lol ne give it up i’m a hacker myself and i know how hackers behave and i can tell you 100.00% you’re no hacker..30 -
I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.
Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.
Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.
A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.9 -
A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.
So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.
This dude.
It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.
Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.
He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.
Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"
With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.
"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"
That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"
Mofocka plz.
Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.
Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.
He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.
"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"
"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"
Lost it more.
I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.
Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.19 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.
Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".
And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.
I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.
I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.27 -
Conversations I've genuinely had at work:
Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."
Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "
Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."
Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."
Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."
PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."
Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."
A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."5 -
_An engineer was removing the engine parts from a motorcycle._
_Suddenly he saw a famous heart surgeon in his shop. He went to him & said.. "Look at this engine... I opened its heart, took the valves out, repaired and put them back"...So why do I get such a small salary? and u get huge sums_....!
_The doctor smiled at the engineer and came close to his ear and said.... "Try the same when the engine is running_."
👌👏 *Classic!*
_Continuation
.
_The engineer smiled back came close to doctors ear and said_
_I can pick any dead engine and make it alive . . . . . . . can you_ ???
👌👏 *Not only Classic but Epic*_ 😂😂👍8 -
Dead 💀 developer.
My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.
In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.
About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”
Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).
So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.
What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).
Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.
Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.9 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.8 -
This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.
I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍
TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂7 -
A big FUCK YOU to chrome, and a big FUCK YOU to google in generally. First the hell that is code.org, then the chrome. I genuinely want to open a dictionary in google to see if the word "privacy" is in there. Sure, first it was tracking users with by making them agree to a long ass TOS no one wants to read except lawyers, then barely even giving any info and asking for consent with YOUR data, but this is too far. For all you that dont know, LanSchool is an application that allows teachers to see students screens, internet history and more. Its the reason kids can't play games in English class. But most importantly, its a chrome extension. We have to do assignments from home right? So when we logon to the school account from home, LANSCHOOL GETS DOWNLOADED ANYRACKS EVERYTHING I DO. It pains me how teachers can view so much information unfairly because of some unknowing students, my friends privacy was unfairly in the hands of google and the school system. Right when I found out about tit (~2 mins after i first logged on) i made an Ubuntu VM just for goddamn google docs. Back to my friend, he went on some websites not to be considered appropriate, and got in huge trouble. He was completely unaware of the fact that they could see his screen, and I resent google for allowing a third party to manipulate my PERSONAL COMPUTER without my consent. Die google, you ruined android, which had so much potential, and now the web and virtual privacy. You should be <strike>ashamed</strike> dead, and I hope in the future you realize that one day people will have common sense.26
-
Around 27 hours at new customer location.
They had a server failure due to incompetence.
They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.
First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.
Waiting for new raid controller and installing.
Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.
Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!
Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.
Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.
More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.
Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.
In the end we got around 70% back.
During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.
The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)
Some just don’t want to learn.6 -
Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.
So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).
So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.
Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.
So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.
Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?
Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.
Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.
So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.
Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.25 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.
15 -
Job BS that made me consider quitting? If you find my previous rants, you find a lot of BS.
Here is one (attached is the actual email sent to me.)
TL;DR. The biggest BS part is the fact that I *got approval* from my boss to work on the migration and we already 'owned' specific project and no one else was working on it.
After I got the email (my boss sits right next to me)
Me: "Whoa..what's this!? Two weeks ago you gave me the green light to work on it."
C: "Oh yea...I forgot. Sorry."
<yes, the BS flags thrown all all over the place>
Me: "I'll schedule a meeting with everybody and straighten this out."
C: "That's a good idea, but I'll take care of it."
<10 min. later>
C: "Sorry, J said his word was final. You are not supposed to work on the project."
Me: "I never said I wanted to work on the project, it's already finished and with your approval. That's what I want straightened out."
C: "Yea..yea...I know, but J said to roll back your changes. I tried everything I could to change his mind."
Me: "I don't want his mind...never mind...I'll go talk to the boss if J won't listen"
C: "About that..um...the directive came directly from the boss. It's probably best you roll back the changes and forget this happened."
I knew then the well was already poisoned, so anything I said could be grounds for dismissal (the boss had an itchy 'firing' finger)
Time and karma took care of most of the rage. Not really a month later my boss was demoted back to developer and working on dead-end projects (porting data for reports).
6 -
Remember Apple's initiative to scan photos on user's devices to find child pornography?
Today I finally decided to research this.
The evidence is conflicting.
For context, the database of prohibited material is called CSAM (child sexual abuse material).
“If it finds any CSAM, it will report the user to law enforcement.”
— Futurism
“Apple said neither feature would compromise the security of private communications or notify police.”
— NPR
CSAM initiative is dead. It won't scan photos in iCloud. It won't scan photos on your device. It will be a feature that only works in some countries, only on children's devices, and it will be opt-in. It will only work for iMessage attachments.
This is what Apple actually said at https://www.apple.com/child-safety:
- “Features available in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, and U.S.”
- “The Messages app includes tools to warn children when receiving or sending photos that contain nudity. These features are not enabled by default. If parents opt in, these warnings will be turned on for the child accounts in their Family Sharing plan.”
News outlets telling people they will be automatically reported to authorities, and then telling there can be false-positives is a classic example of fearmongering. I hate this. Remember, anger and fear are the most marketable emotions. They make you click. News are and will always be worded to cause these emotions — it brings in money.
When presented with good news, people think they're not being told the truth. When presented with bad news, even when they're made up, people think it's the truth that's being hidden from them. This is how news works.
Now, a HUGE but:
Apple is a multi-billion dollar corporation. There is no such thing as good billionaires. Corporations will always wait for chances to invade privacy. It's like boiling the frog — one tiny measure here, one there, and just like this, step by step, they will eliminate the privacy completely. It's in their interest to have all the data about you. It brings control.
This is not the first time Apple tries to do shit like this, and it definitely won't be the last. You have to keep an eye on your privacy. If you want your privacy in the digital age, it's necessary to fight back. If you live in Europe, take the action and vote for initiatives that oppose corporate tyranny and privacy invasions.
Privacy on the internet is one thing, but scanning people's devices is a whole another thing. This is unacceptable no matter the rationale behind it. Expect more measures like that in the near future.
Research Linux. Find a distro that suits you. The notion that you can't switch because of apps/UI/etc. may be dictated by our brain's tendency to conserve energy and avoid the change.
Take a look at mobile distros like Graphene OS and LineageOS. The former only supports Pixel devices, the latter supports a wide range of devices including OnePlus and Xiaomi. They'll have FAR better privacy than iPhones.
Consider switching. It's easier than you think. Yes, it's me who's saying this. I do and will always protect people/companies from unjust criticism, and I consider myself an Apple fangirl for personal reasons related to my childhood, yet I won't fight blindly. CSAM initiative is a valid criticism, and there's nothing preventing me from saying this is unacceptable, and Apple deserves the backlash they got.11 -
Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.
Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.
Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.
(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)
When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.
After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.
She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.
So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.
The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟23 -
Yesterday I bought myself a PSP to relive some of my childhood memories, run custom firmware on it and so on. Unfortunately however, the battery on this one is seriously puffed up, and I need one in order to update the firmware from 5.50 CFW (the seller actually modded it too!) to 6.61 OFW (to then install CFW from there again).
I figured that I might as well have a kick at disassembling the battery for good measure, to take out its controller and power it from my lab bench power supply. I set it to 3.70V, double-checked the connections.. nothing. I raised the voltage to 4V, still nothing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the controller from looking at it. The magic smoke is still in there, all I did was removing the housing and snipping off the battery. I measured the cell voltage and it was only some residues at 0.01V. Might be internally shorted or something, normally even dead cells settle back at 3.7V unless you keep them shorted externally.
After seeing this so many times now with controllers, I'm starting to get a feeling that manufacturers actually program these things to look at the battery voltage, and when it reaches 0V, to just make the controller kill itself. Doesn't matter if the controller's electronics are still good, just fucking kill it.
If true, that is very, VERY nasty. It would also explain why batteries in laptops especially all have different form factors, despite having used regular 18650's internally for a very long time. It would explain why they're built like tanks. It would explain why manufacturers really don't want people in there. Yes there are safety issues and you're literally diffusing a bomb. Since recently we've also got space optimization.. anything for half a mm of thickness, amirite? But doing it this way is fucking disgusting. There is absolutely no reason for the controller to kill itself when the cell dies. Yet it seems like it does.
PS: I've posted the original picture on https://ghnou.su/pics/... now if you're interested. I noticed in my previous rant that devRant really squishes these down.
12 -
Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.
The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!
The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.
A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!
Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.
This one was no exception.
This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.
Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!
And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?
An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!
After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.
As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).
And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)5 -
I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.
Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.
However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.
The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.
I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.
Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.
What a fucking asshole.
So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.4 -
I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.
Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.
I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.
The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)
6 -
Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.6 -
Gather around folks, I'll paint you a nice picture based on a true story, back from my sysadmin days. Listen up.
It's about HP and their Solaris 5.4/6 support.
- Yet another Prod Solaris dinosaur crashed
- Connected to console, found a dead system disk; for some reason it was not booting on the remaining redundant disk...
- Logged an HP vendor case. Sev1. SLA for response is 30 minutes, SLA for a fix is <24 hours
- It took them 2 days to respond to our Prod server outage due to failed system disks (responses "we are looking into this" do not count)
- it took another day for them to find an engineer who could attend the server in the DC
- The field engineer came to the DC 4 hours before the agreed time, so he had to wait (DC was 4-5 hours of driving away from HP centre)
- Turns out, he came to the wrong datacentre and was not let in even when the time came
- We had to reschedule for two days later. Prod is still down
- The engg came to the DC on time. He confirmed he had the FRU on him. Looks promising
- He entered the Hall
- He replaced the disk on the Solaris server
- It was the wrong disk he replaced. So now the server is beyond rebuild. It has to be built anew... but only after he comes back and replaces the actually faulty disk.
- He replaced that disk on the wrong Solaris server2 -
TL;TR
My mum just came to me asking me why the mouse is not working ...like I'm GOD of electronics :( (I'm just a simple dev) I simply though that the battery is dead because it's old. Soooooo.....
I showed her how to open it and how to change the battery. After 5 min she came back with a new battery and the same mouse asking me to fix it for her....
In my mind I literally snapped my brain was bleeding and exploding at the same time.
I just cringed a fake smile and changed the battery in front of her very slowly. I sure she won't remember how to do it next time.
At the end of the story I can't talk back or be angry to my parents I have to much respect for them. They though me everything from how to poop, speak, dress, eat and so on.
Be kind to your parents.5 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
How many times, like a broken record, do I have to tell the managment team that the "what's new" text is 500 characters max for the google play store? How many times? Surely it's more than 5 times, since I've already told them 5 times! I'll report back in when it's 10 times, although by then I may have bashed my head against the wall so many times that I'll be dead, and finally freed from these clowns.6
-
My day.
07.25 early ringing of phone.
I'm usually dead asleep till 9 o clock.
Went to bed at 01 o clock.
Something crushed at work, needed to be fixed ASAP.
No coffee. Tired. Stinking peace of garbage
08.45 o clock - super market delivery came earlier than expected, while la me was still trying to communicate necessary steps to resolve the issue.
Forgot to pre pay online.
Still had no coffee, still a piece of stinking shit, still tired.
Took me nearly 20 mins to get my PIN right.
Poor delivery guy had unpleasant call from chef, I needed to deescalate.
Back to work, people angry for me being 20 mins away in midst of chaos.
Me back to fixing stuff.
Done at 09.30.
One of these days where everything you touch becomes a large pile of poop and no matter what you do it's wrong.
Yep. The rest of the day went pretty much as bonkers as it started.
At least no work on weekend.
Yay.1 -
Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.
It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.
Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.
And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman. -
I work at a 6day work week company and this week it was 7. We work more than 10hours a day in a 7×27 foot co-working office space. My manager sits just 2foot away from me to my back. He is toxic as hell and nano(micro) manages the team. I stay very near to office and I feel like I am a dead person just living to work.
Is this a good reason to change the job after an year ? I feel lonely and negative. My manager sitting just few inches away from me makes me feel like a fish trying to behave outside water.
But the best part is I got to work on many things that helped me gain lot of tech expertise still he wanted control every piece of code.12 -
In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.
Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).
One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".
Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.
To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.
Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.
It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:
"Listen, mate..."
And I had him in check mate.
"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"
He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.
However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.
Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!2 -
TLDR So according to our managers, our company is not dead yet, but very close to the edge. And there's nothing I can do about it.
Basically, they are asking the software devs to twirl our thumbs while we wait for other departments to pull us out of the dirt. Meanwhile, those people who can actually do something to get everyone back on track are running for the hills, looking for greener pastures (you know, sinking ship, turns out rats can swim).
I was told that I shouldn't leave as I am a 'vital part of the team whatever and so on'. But that is difficult to believe when I'm looking at 2 years minimum, in which nothing I will develop or have worked on in the past will make any difference. Whether I keep my job is determined by people who love numbers and have little concern for me as a person (not that this is new, but at least I was contributing before).
Guess I will be spending all that extra time at work reading and programming personal projects, since aside from no new projects, there will be no budget for taking courses that were promised before. Oh, and polishing my resume so I'll be ready when this ship finally goes down.8 -
In fact I'm a sinful dev, so that I can't easily decide which one is worst. From indenting with tabs, or using nano instead of vim/emacs, to hardcoding database credentials on server, to many hacks and workarounds I use as actual "fixes" when the deadline is upon me and I've tried all I could. But it always led only to my own regret. For instance, my latest sin was that I prefered Debian over Arch and used proprietary graphic drivers to speed up my new setup. But ended up with a curse from St. Ignucius. (check my last rant)
But my worst sin probably goes to when I was "printf-debugging" some issue for a GSM controller on a raspberry pi. I forgot to remove one little print line and deployed the new "fixed" version. I didn't follow that project after that for like a month or so, when the client posted back the device and said that "it just doesn't work anymore". It seemed that raspbian didn't boot beacause the sd card was curroptted. I dd'ed through the card and I noticed that there are billions of lines of "DEBUG:: reading stream from 192.some.shitty.ip", took almost all over the 32G sdcard. Just as I suddenly remembered the cursed line I just added a month ago, I declared the sd card dead with no hesitation, dunce-commented the line (so the history would remember), implemented a time out for the thread containing it, setup a journald unit for my service and removed the redirection of process output to a log file, found a new sd card and installed everything again, and finally posted back the new "fix" to the client.
Moral: Never comfort yourself for the sins you have commited in the past kids, they certainly will come back to you. And also not to do any io especially write to a file on an SD card with ext fs, in a potentially infinite loop with no timeout.
P.S: I'd posted my last rant just before the new week rant last nigh. I really liked the St. Ignucius meme so decided to create a new one. He's very adorable :)
1 -
I was a tad drunk last night because the week was... more than exhausting.
I felt like a pinhata yesterday - pretty beaten up and gutless.
Woke up this morning still a lil tipsy and decided to just be happy and don't give a damn.
Decided to take a hot bath to get nice and relaxed.
My smartphone decided to commit suicide and slided in the bath tub while I was in the kitchen making coffee.... And water was still running.
:) Bye bye smartphone, no more annoying messages.
While bathing, I relaxed a bit too much I guess.
Felt a bit of pain but then so much better because something in my back "plopped" back to where it belonged I guess?
I managed to rip off the shower curtain with my foot since it was a very short moment of "fucking frigging shit that hurt".
During that moment I also created a great flood, bath room is still wet...
And the funniest thing is: I don't give a damn.
Smartphone is definitely dead, ordered a new one, will arrive next week.
Guess I should stay the weekend on the couch before I accidentally blow up the mansion.
:)
I don't know where this good mood is coming from, but damn it has been a long time.15 -
Jase deleting his accounts (yes, that plural) and creating new ones, is the only dR tradition that is alive till date.22
-
this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.
2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.
The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:
1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck
3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/
4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"
-
!personal
So, I was diagnosed with congenital nystagmus at an early fucking age. This is complicated for people who've never heard of it before to comprehend, until they notice the eyes of the person in question. Think of it this way: I lack the biological form of optical image stabilization. Because of nystagmus, I can't fucking drive.
Now, let me tell you, it really fucking sucks. I've never had a girlfriend, never been able to get a job, basically never been able to do the type of shit most of you can already fucking do. Pile that on with college, where I don't really fucking know anybody, and it's really fucking easy to see why I've had depression and nearly fucked my GPA over last semester (2.08, yeah it's embarrassing but fuck it).
That out of the way, nystagmus is rare. So rare that any surgeries to fix it aren't guaranteed to fix the problem, and are only marginally better. I have strong skepticism for any optometrist who acts like they perform this surgery every day, because the numbers simply don't back them up. If there's so few who have this issue, then the amount of operations and opportunities to do them are fucking slim.
Today, my mom came over to Indiana from Ohio, and took me to the local Cheddar's (do other countries have those??). We sit down, and she wanted to re-hash this surgery idea. I have made the statement before that these are the only two eyes that I will ever have, and there's no guaranteed ROI on any procedures, and is probably going to fuck me over if shit hits the fan.
Then she tells me there's this doctor in Maryland. I might be geographically challenged (lol), but I'm pretty sure that's over on the east coast. It's forever from here, we'd probably have to take an airliner.
This doctor made some pretty bold fucking claims. Not only was it possible he could fix the nystagmus, but he could help me use a special form of glasses that would enable me to learn to drive. Knowing that R&D on nystagmus was sketchy because of the aforementioned conditions, I had to tell her that I still don't know how I feel about it. Also, if this doctor moves from Maryland to any of the other states, would he still be allowed to do these things?
I told her I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure it's worth the money if we follow through and come to find out it's not enough, and I still can't drive. She acts like this stuff is dead simple. I don't think it is. You have perceived benefits, but there have to be caveats. This would be a major change, and I don't know how I feel about following through with it.9 -
I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.4 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:
I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'
Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.
I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.
But it ended and I let it go.
In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.
I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.
And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*
And that's how I got my current job.
*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.) -
Covid-19 quarantine checklist:
> isolate yourself ✓
> wash hands ✓ // duuuuh
> work from home ✓
> buy normal quantities of TP ✓
> get attacked by a bat (from Wuhan?! O.o) ✓
> buy some favourite bar soap
> ...
W8 wut?!
Yeah...I saw a bat fly by the balcony.. I thought: oh, how nice, they never fly so close.. Wait...a bat?! Aren't bats supposed to start all this shiiii...O.O
Thoughts interrupted by a bat flap tap (sound it makes when it hits something) behind my back..
Quickly pull hoodie over the hair..and jacket hood to, just in case.. friend once got a bat tangled in her curly hair.. I didn't wanna test if straight but longer hair also make problems for them.. Some more flapping & scratchy noises (I think it fell on the umbrella) then nothing.. OMG did it die on my balcony?! How the fuck am I gonna explain a dead bat to the authorities who remove dead wildlife?! >Yeah, a funny thing happened the other day, I got a message from Wuhan and the messenger dropped dead on my balcony..< Yeah, this would totally work.. o.0 Anyhow, once the noises stopped, I turned around to check on it..but couldn't find it.. so I just hope it managed to fly away and I won't find it after 3 days in the middle of my apartment... o.013 -
So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.
Now...
I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.
I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...
I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.
Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.
Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.
Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.
Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.
But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..
Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.5 -
So, first: I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code and love to think I know everything.
We had a group project at university and me being laid back but unknown to the other people, the "rest" of them was together with me in a group. We got to know each other and actually we were a pretty cool group. I guess "the rest" in a computer science course means you get the cool guys.^^
1/6 of us did ever code in C# and 2/6 even knows what an engine is and how unity works. I was in both sixths, got group leader somehow (if you'd know me from school. Omg. I was that one guy not knowing what went on, saying my two sentences at the presentation and took the B-.:D), so what to do to have a nice 2 weeks with them?
We did a crash course, I taught them some basics and everything.
The point is, i was hella nervous and i really get anxious if something is expected from me.
Long story short, I talked a whole week for 5-7 hours straight without real pauses and eating wayyy less a man should. Dude I was literally dead on my way home on friday evening. I felt like I would fall over any fucken second, i was all shakey, dizzy as hell, weird vision, everything. It felt like I was about to die on the spot.
I got home though, ate like 1/2 kilograms of pasta and felt myself coming back to life.:D
What to learn from this:
Keep the fuck calm, do pauses, drink and eat enough and don't rush all in for a fucken week without real rest..^^
It fucks you up and doesn't do anything good for your productivity.
We got an A btw, so in the end, all went good.(: -
I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.
MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).
- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.
Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.
- 2 app info pages?
Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.
The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.
Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.
- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app
It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.
- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken
Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?
They really, REALLY want to be Apple.
Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.
Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.
They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card
If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:
- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM
What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.
So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.
11 -
The company I work for uses Coldfusion which is a dead technology in my opinion. I was tasked with using a data grid for our data from our mssql databases. This data grid I was trying out uses ajax to make a call to the server and expects the data transfered back in Json format. well coldfusion sucks balls because it's serializeJson function returns a outdated JSON structure and I can't use it. So obviously this datagrid throws errors and when I try looking up coldfusion solutions online or scope out stack overflow, the posts are dated like 6 years back because no one fucking uses CF anymore. My boss loves to jerk to it, it seems because he refuses to change languages cause its all they have ever used. -_- this is 2016 bitch lol6
-
Eloquent is so fucking slow, my (dead) grandma queries faster. It takes the fucking double of time on a simple query with only one join for maybe ~200 rows... From now on I go fucking back to raw SQL in my Laravel projects. 😤16
-
TLDR;
When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.
When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.
I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.
It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.
I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.
I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.
After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.
People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.
I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.
Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.2 -
A Rant that took my attention on MacRhumors forum.
.
I pre-calculated projected actual overall cost of owning my i5/5/256 Haswell Air, which I got for $1500.
After calculations, this machine would cost me about $3000 for 3 years of use.
(Apple Care, MS Office Business, Parallels, Thunderbolt adapter to HDMI, Case... and so on).
Yea... A lot of people think it's all about the laptop with Apple. nah... not at all. There's a reason Apple is gradually dropping the price of their laptops.
They are slowly moving to a razor and blade business model... which basically is exactly what it sounds like - you buy the razor which isn't too expensive, but you've got no choice but to buy expensive additional blades.
I doubt Apple is making much money from laptop sales alone... well definitely not as much as they were making 5 years or so ago (remember the original air was about $1800 for base model, and if i remember correctly - $1000 additional dollars to upgrade to 64GB SSD from the base HDD.
Yes, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR 64GB SSD!
Well, anyways, the point is that Apple no longer makes them BIG bucks from the laptop alone, but they still make good profits from upgrades. $300 to go to 512GB SSD from 256, $100 for 4GB extra ram, and $150 for a small bump in processor. They make good profits from these as well.
But that's not where they make mo money. It's once you buy the Macbook, they've got you trapped in their walled garden for life. Every single apple accessory is ridiculously overpriced (compared to market standards of similar-same products).
And Apple makes their own cables and ports. So you have to buy exclusively for Apple products. Every now and then they will change even their own ports and cables, so you have to buy more.
Software is exclusive. You have no choice but to buy what apple offers... or run windows/linux on your Mac.
This is a douche level move comparable to say Mircrosoft kept changing the usb port every 2-3 years, and have exclusive rights to sell the devices that plug in.
No, instead, Intel-Microsoft and them guys make ports and cables as universal as possible.
Can you imagine if USB3.0 was thinner and not backwards compatible with usb2.0 devices?
Well, if it belonged to Apple that's how it would be.
This is why I held out so long before buying an apple laptop. Sure, I had the ipod classic, ipod touch, and more recently iPad Retina... but never a laptop.
I was always against apple.
But I factored in the pros and cons, and I realized I needed to go OS X. I've been fudged by one virus or another during my years of Windows usage. Trojans, spywares. meh.
I needed a top-notch device that I can carry with me around the world and use for any task which is work related. I figured $3000 was a fair price to pay for it.
No, not $1500... but $3000. Also I 'm dead happy I don't have to worry about heat issues anymore. This is a masterpiece. $3000 for 3 years equals $1000 a year, fair price to pay for security, comfort, and most importantly - reliability. (of course awesome battery is superawesome).
Okay I'm going to stop ranting. I just wish people factored in additional costs from owning an a mac. Expenses don't end when you bring the machine home.
I'm not even going to mention how they utilize technology-push to get you to buy a Thunderbolt display, or now with the new Air - to get a time capsule (AC compatible).
It's all about the blades, with Apple. And once you go Mac, you likely won't go back... hence all the student discounts and benefits. They're baiting you to be a Mac user for life!
Apple Marketing is the ultimate.
source: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3 -
Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit
Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.
I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.
I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:
- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10
uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.
So here's where the story becomes a rant.
In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.
And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.
So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.
The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?
gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3
(:1 -
After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.
During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.
After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.
After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...3 -
What was supposed to be a simple HDD to SSD upgrade for my brother ended up taking 3 fucking days.
His computer's idle temp was fucking 90c because of fucking YEARS worth of dust preventing fans from breathing, one of them was even dead so I had to go to best buy to get a new one.
Had a power outage happen in the middle of cleaning the damn dust out before replacing the bad fan. It took close to 24 hours for it to come back, and I just didn't bother until the day after cause fuck that.
When I go back to it, I finish cleaning the dust, clone the old HDD to the new SSD, do the swap out, replace the thermal paste on CPU cause why the fuck not at this point. Then turn it on to test, yeah from 90c down to 20c : |
Yeah... so I charged him for the new fan, and the hour-ish it took me to clean the damn dust and replace the fan... (drive was agreed to be done for free as a favor) Yeah not really worth charging for but I was pissed and that was the 'nicest' way I could show how annoyed I was with him not properly caring for the PC. Like honestly 90 degrees celsius. I refuse to believe he didn't notice impacted performance in his games
7 -
I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.
But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.
And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.
People treat me like the adult that I am.
I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.
I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen. -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.
Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.
So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.
As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.
It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.
I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.
Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...
Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.
Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.
In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.
After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.
What a beautiful search result that was to find.
I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.
2 -
I haven't been able to work on the computer without getting a headache very soon after for almost 2 weeks straight now.
I presume I have grown a sensitivity to bright light, stemming from the time I dimmed my phone all the way about 5 months ago and never set it back until just now.
In my classes I will get random headaches that hurt like heck and make me feel groggy, making me unable to focus at all. And while doing computer work, I'll get the same thing.
I've tried getting my eyes checked again, and got new glasses about a week ago - still no help.
Prior to this incident I was working hard on a volunteer project with a small team. Since then my progress and commits have dwindled greatly, and I feel stressed out because I can't do what i want to do without hurting and feeling like absolute shit!
I'm currently trying to get my eyes used to bright lights again by setting things like my phone screen to a brighter setting, changing some dead light bulbs in different rooms of the house, and getting more involved outside.
I hope this goes away soon - I don't want to have this stupid headache every time I go to code or work in class.12 -
Junior dev here. Finishing a boot camp, actively going through a few job application processes.
One of the companies has given me a tech assignment (for a Graduate Junior position, mind you) that was titled Full Stack Mid Level Challenge. It took me a week to build an app they asked and do analitycs and refactoring of the second part of the task (I only had late evenings free to dedicate to that), it was my first time doing back-end in Node (my boot camp teaches PHP) so I basically learned to do it while doing this challenge.
They asked testing and clean architecture.
I submitted the assignment (I thought I would die while doing it, exhausted, I think I was brain dead for a short perio of time, but I submitted it on time).
They got back to me and we had already have a tech interview with the Leads that had live coding at the end. Don't have feedback yet, really won't be surprised for whatever comes, it was literarly my first interview, treating it like a valuable learning experience.
But. This rant is not about this. Thsi is just to put you in my mood.
This is the !rant:
My classmate from the bootcamp is probably already hired, or will be one of these days. As a tech challenge she was asked to do FizzBuzz kata. I repeat, FizzBuzz bloody kata!
Now, I am very happy for this person, the situation is complicated and this job is extremely needed.
But, please, explain to me, HOW??? How is it possible that selection criterias vary that much?
End of rant. Thank you very much.4 -
Bootcamps get you up and running in coding quickly. If you are a programmer, companies are only interested on how quickly, error free and cheaply you produce marketable output. Bootcamps enable this.
More or less you are not more than a former assembly line worker putting parts on a car platform. Your value is not very high as you may be exchanged at any time at their will.
Nevertheless, you can earn money quickly. You trade in your youth and time which might be a dead end in the long-term. Trends go to machine learning, artificial intelligence. They will not need Bootcamp people and code workers.
It is better you set up Bootcamps and sell them versus absolving this. Like selling shovels during the gold rush, but not working in the mud of Alaska by yourself.
Your choice is: Making quick money, which fades anyway; or striving for the long-term future proof career.
C/S degrees from Technical Universities of reputation give to you the right direction under a strategic consideration. Companies which pay well, or freelancing with a solid acknowledged background, will always look for top graduates. People from Bootcamps are just OK for hammering assembly line coding. Even worse with SCRUM in one noisy room under enormous team server pressure controls, counting your lines of code per minute, with pale people all around. And groups of controllers never acknowledging nor trusting your work.
To acquire a serious degree, a Bachelor is nothing. Here, in INDIA, Bachelor now is what a former high school grade was. You must carry a diploma or Masters degree combined with internships at big companies with high brand recognition. This will require 4–6 years of your lifetime. You can support this financially by working part-time freelancing as making some projects front- or back-end web, data analysis and else.
Bootcamp people will lose in the long-term. They are the modern cannon fudder of software production.
It is your choice. Personally, I would never do Bootcamps. Quality and sustainability require time, deep studies and devotion. -
TLDR; windows sucks donkey balls
Sometime ago I started to get battery issues on my laptop using windows. Even with 100% charge it would soon display 0% when unplugged.
A few months back I switched to linux on my laptop and on my desk station. And to my surprise, battery issues dissapeared while using linux (manjaro i3). Anybody had that same problem?
Anyway I dual boot win 10 and linux just in case I'd need windows, and this week I noticed my root parition didn't have any space left.
For the next few hours I'm in a car so I thought hey great time to reinstall linux with a bigger root partition. I already had reinstalled windows, and with all the bloat removed, I could shrink my windows partition to make more space for linux.
Now all I need to do is prepare a usb stick with the manjaro iso. I could do that in linux, but since reinstalling windows killed my grub bootloader I couldn't boot up manjaro.
Right, so in windows I go and want to create this bootable EFI usb stick from the manjaro iso. Now the battery issue kicks in again, stating 0%. But with luck, the usb creation finished without my machine dying. Now I just need to restart my laptop and boot from the usb and .... Crap. my Laptop doesn't boot up anymore
-_-
Now i need to wait for a plug to be able to power it up again. Once I boot from the usb I'm sure I could use the laptop some more hours until the battery is actually dead. Fuck windows5 -
wwoooo..
back from the dead with linux :)
like i said my internet wasn't working last time. trying to fix it i uninstalled something essential and obviously at this point im banging my head lol managed to get files back and wiped for reinstall. the wireless is back though!!
2 -
Finally back at the HQ and away from Offsite Hell after 18 months!!!!!!!!!!!! Real internet! Coffee on tap! Community of practice meetings! COOODDDEEEE!!!! Also back to devrant. Goodbye Indian devs from hell, j/k they still suck life out of my day with their deprecated ways.
Side note:
Switched to Unreal Engine from Unity recently and my god it is amazing! I definitely prefer being able to use C# with unity vs c++ with unreal but the blueprint system is a great visual programming system.
Unit testing is my new side chick. She wants me to leave my wife; I'm considering it.
Unrelated: Read Dead Redemption 2 is amazing.1 -
You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.
And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.
He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.
He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him
He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.
You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.
I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.
I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.
The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .
He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.
You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.
I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .
Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.
I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”
I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.
You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.
I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread3 -
I'm back from the dead to rant again. This time it's punycode.
My job has to do with processing the commoncrawl web archives, and for some reason one in 20.000.000 archived webpages crashed my program. After some debugging I found this issue that seems to be the reason my code crashes https://github.com/servo/rust-url/...
To summarize the issue: Since punycode unicode characters can be encoded into domain names. But not every character is allowed. Not only do these invalid domains get registered, I need an in-depth knowledge about unicode to understand what is wrong here.
How did we turn domain names into something so complicated?3 -
Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.
During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.
I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.
Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)
I never want that to happen again -
Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.
I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.
I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.
It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.
Back to my iPhone for now...
🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵9 -
Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.
Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.
The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).
One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.
The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.
The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.
The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.
A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.
So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?
My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.
Cheers!
PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant14 -
Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.
VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.
Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.
This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead
Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.
The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.
I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.3 -
FUCK YOU MyThemeShop FUCK YOU with your shitty licensing solution. I'm just trying to develop a fucking wordpress site on my own fucking local computer. Why TF will you not allow me to fucking sign into my own account. all it fucking does is infinitely load and it does not do fucking anything. you advertise 24/7 support but it takes your fucking bitch ass support team over 10 hours to reply to my dead fucking simple email. ALSO why the fuck can I not change what domain my theme goes to from the online panel. I'm trying to fucking use ngrok and now i cant because it is by domain and not by site. FUCK YOU AND YOUR LAME ASS FUCKING COMPANY GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY BACK RIGHT NOW YOU FUCKING BITCH.7
-
How do you guys motivate yourself to work out.
Its been 2 times... First i tried 2 years ago in Aug 16.
Back then , my college started and i got busy in that so left the gym after a month. I blamed myself, the tiredness it gave me and lack of friends/work out partners there at that time.
Second time, i tried more hardly in jan 2018. This time, i had my gym companions, nd i was doing better. At the start i was handling the stress well, since it was just the clg and gym,then came along the internship, but i still handled it. But after the internship, i felt the need to up my skills and do more personal projects which was still not happening because of the gym tiredness. And then came along a scholarship into one of my favorite courses, and then the papers, and then.... A lot of 'other' things started happening, so i leftthe gym jn may 18.
I am concerned about a few things. 1)These days, I am usually entangled between entertainment, clg work, self learning/ scholarships. I used to do gymming in evening hours after clg and self learning on weekends, but now i am like everyday am straight to home from clg, onto bed, into the sheets, laptop on, and am doing scholarships task till late night. I fear that my work is now so important that i cannot push it to weekends. How do you guys manage learning and maintaining your body together?
2. Gym is a sick environment. We see pumped up people with 8% body fat , skin sticking to their ugly muscles while i am there , juggling my belly fat on the treadmill. For 2 months straight i was just doing the cardio. It gave me some results i guess, my belly got a Little loose but no one really saw much changes. I am not concerned about other people or fast results particularly, but when combined, i feel like am going to a royal house party everyday, where everyone except me is a beautiful king or queen , except me, a lowly peasent . Those pumped up kings are beating their bodies and getting more beautiful, while i am trying to beat these dead belly meat which won't flatten up .
Meh.2 -
Tying to make something of myself without working for anyone else.
It used to be easy for me, but fear kept me from perusing things all the way thru when I was younger. I never wanted to leave what were decent jobs at the time.
I finally did it. Threw away a very good job to bet on myself.
But the difference is, now I have a family and finding free time in itself isn’t that hard, but finding free time to code uninterrupted for hours... the way one needs to in order to hold a program in ones mind... yeah, near impossible these days, haha.
I have great ideas but I need help to get things to that ‘next level’ where an idea could take off and get real investments. And I need money to pay the help... Just getting the ball rolling would be nice. I used to take it for granted how easily I could get side jobs and be literally the best in town. But now it’s insanely competitive. I don’t even consider Webdesign an option for side work anymore, with sites like Wix and customers that don’t appreciate what I do vs a kid that gives them a Wordpress theme for just the cost of dirt cheap hosting... traditional Webdesign is dead.
But that’s all well and good, i saw that coming over a decade ago and focused more on coding application. I do think there’s a niche for my programming skills, so my current goal is trying to exploit that, or at least see if it’s viable. I just need something to get money to invest in my real projects.
I’d love to hear from people with similar situations! Not sure if I’ll pull it off before I have to go back to work. Although, I viewed never returning to the workforce haha. We’ll see... -
(a slide acoustic guitar plays on the background and the cowboy starts speaking)
It was a dry october day, back in good old 2017. I had this job from a client that I never met and was doing some coding for money.
After days of no sleep, no food and no rest, I finally decided to take a nap so I paused my music.
It was at this moment I found out my machine was making funny noises. Like a dingo makin' a run from it's enemies with a whelping noise.
Clicked on my computer and tried to find an ol' file from the archive drive but the machine won't let me, sayin' the disk ain't ready yet.
I tried disk manager, disk scanner, whatever the tools at my disposal all in vain. Then I said what the hell, I'll just restart my machine and it'll be alright.
The machine rebooted but the disk was gone. It was dead like a deer I ran over. I was upset, but not aware of the calamity headin' my way.
In just a few days my other 2 disks died suddenly. The loss of data, all the effort, none of them mattered. I felt numb and decided it was time for a fresh start.
Plugged in a Windows install disk, started the sequence, a screen came up askin' me which damned and alive disk I wanna install the fresh OS. I had two same make and model SSD disks, chose the one thinkin' it was the Windows drive, hell it wasnt... It was with all "my documents", "downloads", "pictures" folders and now I had two SSD drives with two Windows installations and nothing else.
The folks in town took a dab at me for months, even the bartender of the salloon refused to give me a drink. Sayin' it was a matter of reputation...
Turned out the bastard who fried my disks was the Madde Dog PSU Tannen who had a bad temper so here I am, tellin' my story to milk breathers and cherishing old days of data...3 -
So yesterday, I got a call from some cousins saying my aunt broke a toenail and (since she's diabetic) she could now either lose both legs due to gangrene or die if they amputate. 2 hour drive to get them and me up to see her, 2 back, all the while having to be stone-faced to console 2 grown men. Today is finals week, and I could also get a call any moment from the hospital to tell me she's either dead or now unable to take care of herself. Could even be mid-class with one of those "well put it on speakerphone" teachers.
On the tech front, i'm trying to compile a toolchain from source. But, oh wait, one of the binaries it needs to configure (pkg-config) is self-calling so it crashes my machine. Let's build it from source, then? Nope, it requires a working copy... of... itself? Well, fuck. A "yum reinstall" doesn't help as it just reinstates the self-calling version, and I can't outright remove it because systemctl needs it. Well, apparently it's like a binary but is a text script, somehow, so I removed the recursive line and configuring works. Now though, I'm worried it might be broken, so i'm gonna try and compile from source. But, despite it needing itself, it also needs a SUPER FUCKING SPECIFIC version of libtool, so that's gotta be compiled...
I really wanna fucking shoot myself.3 -
It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.
About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)
I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)
Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.
TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.6 -
!tech
i was feeling very disturbed thinking about this thing, so just wanna share here. trigger warning : this is about 2 recent news (1 national and1 international) about crimes against women and its affect on me, a male , somewhat privileged guy with rarely any women in life.
news 1 : some lady in iran getting killed by police due to religious laws . news 2 : a receptionist girl in india getting killed for not providing sexual services to hotel people .
i will come back to first news in a bit, but second news has shaken me to the very core. i saw a post where her dead corpse was being taken up by her acquitances and she is just ... lifeless, hands going sideways, face hung at one side, mouth open... damn :'(
read more here : https://indiatoday.in/india/story/...
i am not at all related to this news, but somehow, i as a guy feel disgusted and being responsible for this sad event. this is not an act of power or lust , this is an act of a horrible mentality.
i come from the city where the world's most number of hate crime and crime against women take place. and pathetic politicians and people of power blame it on women's dressing and mens "naive nature" and , "boys being boys, accidentally making mistakes" . little did anyone know that this mentality has been cooking in the streets for last so many years.
i am a single child with no siblings or grandparents, my relatives rarely visit me and my last 24 years on earth rarely involved any female companionship apart from my mom.
i like girls, i find them cute. i really want to be with someone, to have a consensus relationship. but the talks among my homie groups and other male friends have gone toxic to the level that a national issue syarted feeling relatable.
the feeling of getting affection from someone has somehow turned into a lust, a "game", a "service". one guy( who recently shifted to other state) would use to tell us how he would visit " red light areas" , another one(also left) once tried to ask for that "service" in a camp where we were staying during a trip, and used to tell how he would hook up with girls on Instagram.
we used to laugh at those things, find them interesting and enjoyable. i would think about them in deep, thinking that this is something possible, a transactional access to sex, with me now earning enough to afford it.
now, seeing this news i feel so shitty and being a horrible human. those thoughts were not originally mine, but i didn't opposed them. rather i laughed on it , and thought that once am even more powerful financially and politically, could even entertain that approach.
As a guy, i want to say i am deeply, terribly sorry.
This mentality needs to be changed. my homie group is not just the only group of males that has such vile thoughts having openly propagated. every park, every company meeting , every library, every gym, anywhere i go, i can just show up a coffee cup and shout "women,huh" and can get a laughter followed by several low voices whospers on which girl is a "s***" there .
there are multiple points of failure in our society that are causing these. the news 1 from the start of this rant is the very first : role of government and religion on controlling "dresses and behaviour" of women
another comes the role of sex, culture and gender education in institution. institutions in my areas are so fucked up: they teach how plants fuck and bees suck honey to a puberty hit student, but doesn't teach consent, relations and personal behavior at any age. my school would even try to sometimes make all girls sit in a seperate row and other times would force guys to sit with girls. don't know what they got for this authoritative behaviour, but that sure didn't impacted our brains very rightly.
lastly this needs to be made clear in evevry guy's mind that paid prostitution, forced prostitution and consensus relationship are 3 different things, and only a respectable , consensus relationship is something you should think about and prepare for.7 -
I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.
I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.
This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.
The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.
For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.
I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.
Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.
I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?
I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?
I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?
i will leave here my relevant social presence:
https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42
Thanks in advance!9 -
I kind of need to replace my ThinkPad T430 soon. I bought it for about $200 3 years ago, and I love it and it just works and does it's job. But the fan noise is getting annoying, the battery is pretty much dead and yeah well, the screen does suck.
I've been thinking about replacing said parts, which would cost me about $150. Which is almost what I paid for the device back then, but I don't know I don't really want a new one. The T430 is a sexy old lady, just needs some polishing.
Now to my questions..
Would you say it's worth it?
Is there a big noticeable difference from a glossy 1366x768 LCD screen to a matte 1600x900 LCD screen?
Would you pick matte over glossy?
Do LCD screens always suck?
In case you would just buy a new notebook, can you give me any recommendations? The notebook market is huge and I have no idea what to look for.
I'm not a big Hardware guy as you can see, I have honestly no idea about screens and panels and such.16 -
I have some app ideas and improvements I'd like to add to some existing apps. Currently these are just end up as notes in my to-do list because I don't want to setup the dev environment again at my parents place... On an ancient desktop...
Which I just use to download anime since jdownloader can be installed... But apparently all the download link are either dead it it can no longer get around the latest truck AdFly is using...
TLDR I'm procrastinating from all coding projects that I would be doing if only I we're back at my place and instead binging on anime and tv -
I could write a fucking dissertation on why snek is objectively a piece of shit, together with all your favorite dumbass collections of syntactic diarrhea full of needless operators and toothless fucking conventions that make no sense in retrospect.
By that I mean to say among all of it's real world uses the foremost is screwing yourself, which is analogous to utilizing the fine hands of a classically trained violinist for virtuous masturbation. And you cannot fix it, you can only Keep It Solemnly Sucking.
Now I'm not saying that if they were humans their lot in life would be to get down on their knees and passionately blow me until my eyes pop out. All I'm saying is their lot in life IS to get DOWN and passionately BLOW me until my eyes pop out, to which the general scientific consensus is indeed yes, it is, and they absolutely should.
But back to commanding the demons trapped inside the sillicon and all the existing ways to to do so being terrible half-assed abortions that serve as a perfect encapsulation and prime example of mankind's greatest shame and failures. If I had to volcanically ejaculate for each time I heard a thorough and perfectly valid critique of insert flavor of fucking stupid, I'd be long-rotting dead from dehydration.
You think that's funny? A man just died creaming in his pants and we are all wiser for it, show some respect. Some people simply do not understand the value of humility, and I will be *proud* to anally humble them for it, free of charge.
Anytime, I swear, ANYTIME that I come back to a language I fucking hate and I'm immediately reminded of why I do everything in my power to avoid it, I invariably come out with the feeling that it wasn't quite as bad as the last time.
THAT is how I measure my progress: still swimming in a sea of deeply decolored and fermenting alien reptile excretion -- but I'm a much better swimmer. This isn't so bad, I may even ignore the burning desire to kill myself next time.
But I'm so blinded by your plump fucking tits that I can't even remember what was my point, I may have just delivered the verbal equivalent of complete mental castration. Again.8 -
#Suphle Rant 7: transphporm failure
In this issue, I'll be sharing observations about 3 topics.
First and most significant is that the brilliant SSR templating library I've eyed for so many years, even integrated as Suphle's presentation layer adapter, is virtually not functional. It only works for the trivial use case of outputting the value of a property in the dataset. For instance, when validation fails, preventing execution from reaching the controller, parsing fails without signifying what ordinance was being violated. I trim the stylesheet and it only works when outputting one of the values added by the validation handler. Meaning the missing keys it can't find from controller result is the culprit.
Even when I trimmed everything else for it to pass, the closing `</li>` tag seems to have been abducted.
I mail project owner explaining what I need his library for, no response. Chat one of the maintainers on Twitter, nothing. Since they have no forum, I find their Gitter chatroom, tag them and post my questions. Nothing. The only semblance of a documentation they have is the Github wiki. So, support is practically dead. Project last commit: 2020. It's disappointing that this is how my journey with them ends. There isn't even an alternative that shares the same philosophy. It's so sad to see how everybody is comfortable with PHP templating syntax and back end logic entagled within their markup.
Among all other templating libraries, Blade (which influenced my strong distaste for interspersing markup and PHP), seems to be the most popular. First admission: We're headed back to the Blade trenches, sadly.
2nd Topic: While writing tests yesterday, I had this weird feeling about something being off. I guess that's what code smell is. I was uncomfortable with the excessive amount of mocking wrappers I had to layer upon SUT before I can observe whether the HTML adapter receives expected markup file, when I can simply put a `var_dump` there. There's a black-box test for verifying the output but since the Transphporm headaches were causing it to fail, I tried going white-box. The mocking fixture was such a monstrosity, I imagined Sebastian Bergmann's ghost looking down in abhorrence over how much this Degenerate is perverting and butchering his creation.
I ultimately deleted the test travesty but it gave rise to the question of how properly designed system really is. Or, are certain things beyond testing white box? Are there still gaps in the testing knowledge of a supposed testing connoisseur? 2nd admission.
Lastly, randomly wanted to tweet an idea at Tomas Votruba. Visited his profile, only to see this https://twitter.com/PovilasKorop/.... Apparently, Laravel have implemented yet another feature previously only existing in Suphle (or at the libraries Arkitekt and Deptrac). I laughed mirthlessly as I watch them gain feature-parity under my nose, when Suphle is yet to be launched. I refuse to believe they're actually stalking Suphle
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