Devs we be like.....!...thanks to Bots.....Why should we remain single for ever😂😂😂

Plot twist

What a weird age we live in!!!
We need to prove machines that we are not machines...
#captcha

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

She: I like people who takes risks.
He : I develop in a prod server.
She: My place or you place? 😉

Credits:Unknown

Bots are too predictable nowadays.

My wife is a (semi-)pro gamer, so the only way it affects our dating is that I have to help her write LUA addons, performance analytics and Twitch bots.

My twitter bot has more followers than me.😢😢

Since every piece of software is developed by us, I sincerely request everyone to keep dark themes as the default theme.
Thanks.

Bots started to take over our jobs

When you make a joke online please remember to add a smiley or lol at the end so in a couple of years - when the world controlling AI is judging you by scanning all your digital communication history - it will know when you were kidding.

P.S. super AI If you are reading this - I love robots !

So my friend and I are trying to launch his bot in his Discord server. I'm typing node index.js: nothing. He tells me to delete the points.json folder. I try launching it again. NOTHING. I then ask him what I do then, so he sends me another .js file. Well it turns out I didn't have Node installed in the first place when I thought I already had. Give if take a good 10 minutes later, the bot is online. My favorite commands don't work because I was missing those files.

are any of you guys real or are you all just bots?

I have just concluded a post-mortem on one of my servers.
Cause of death: out of memory due to a tiny memory leak in a VPN service triggered by 66 different IPs brute-forcing the creds at the same time. Mostly from China, of course.

Dear bot writers: you made me put aside my spaghetti and write iptables rules. I hate iptables. And I love spaghetti. You should be ashamed of yourself! Did momma not teach you basic OpSec? Don't crash the target and never, ever, interrupt the sysadmin during dinner!

Sex talk between programmers.

She: I'm a virgin.
He: Don't worry. They call me the virginslayer007.
She: Oh! So how many virgins have you slayed till now?
He: That would be ONE in a few minutes.
She: So u r also a virgin then..
He: Don't worry. I watched so many video tutorials. We just have to do exactly as they did. Best thing is that it can be done both for testing and production purposes.
She: Let's stick to testing purposes for now.

Take note, this is the right way to deflect bots

Blocking IP ranges is one thing, but blocking all datacenter IP ranges altogether is something else entirely...

devRant Bot Registry

The aim of this Collab is to put together a list of all known devRant-Bots to ensure that all bots can be setup to ignore each other.

Guy: We should build a Blockchain based review website.
Me: Why does it have to use a Blockchain?
Guy: That way we can verify that only real people are leaving reviews and not bots.
Me: That's not really how Blockchains work.
Guy: Blockchain!

I hate YouTube recommendations. They just show you the same videos again and again after some time.

3 people for developing the prototype including me.

One person knows unity. He started modeling the terrain in that.

Another person knows 3D modelling. He started designing the bots.

I don't know unity or C#. I started implementing the logic :/

It was the worst experience but learned shitloads from it in 2 days.

Tinder bots that match must have secret conversations all the time and we'll never know

Once I watched a 30min YouTube video on functional programming just because the presenter was cute. 😘
Anyone ever did this ???

And btw the video is Functional programming by Anjana vakil.

When your raspberry pi is bombarded with /phpmyadmin URL attempts in all its forms and possible paths and versions 😅

Like seriously? Who in there right mind uses phpmyadmin AND has it accessible to the public.

- there's no databases on this Rpi but you keep looking.

That moment when you're providing a free service (a Discord bot) and a person tells you they would be happy to donate and you're just like:

༼ʘ̚ل͜ʘ̚༽ holy sh*t

Keep a tab on people who use spaces for indentation.

Big News from corporate today, we are no longer making bots to replace people. We are now "virtualizing" the workforce.
I swear I'm living in a dilbert strip...

A list of Stux's !dev pet peeves.

1) Slow walking (elderly or visibly injured dont count most of the time) people in busy grocery stores. Like please move. I've got shit to do.
2) Thot bots on Instagram.
3) people who leave 2 or 3 car links between them and the car in front of them at a stoplight. I'm not saying you need to be touching their vehicle, but move closer damn.
4) People that say shit like "if you believe x, then unfollow me." Grow up and get over yourself. People are allowed opinions you asshat.

My name is Stuxnet and thank you for attending my TED talk.

One day bots will take over!

However; meanwhile on Github:

Hi guys, this is my first rant so bear with me..

Stupid Indian fucking institutes doesn't give a shit about the things we learn in the institute. This curriculum is like from the 90's. I learnt NodeJS recently and I thought wow a new concept, not even my professor knows about it. I must be on top of the world or at least any way near it and then I see these video tutorials on the internet which are posted 2 years ago. OH MY GOD!! The thing is that my department's HOD doesn't know about that and the funny thing is that I'm doing a project under him "SECURITY OF WEB APPLICATIONS" and the only thing he knows is PHP. And FYI I'm not studying in an institute which is oblivious to the outside world. It's called an NIT, an institute of national fucking importance. At the end, I blame myself though. I should have been on myself not being completely dependent on the professors for knowledge.
I could fill the entire text area with the rant.
But then people will start ranting about the rant.
I will be posting more Indian-devRant soon so.. peace till then.

( I bet they don't know about Git/Github too)

Finally YouTube implemented something from the porn websites. I'm talking about quick video review on thumbnails.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Le Discord login:

*logs in*
Welcome back! Would you please authenticate after your first and successful login, so that we're sure that you're not a bot?

*15 (I shit you not) craptchas later*
New login location detected! Please check your email too!

FOR FUCKING REAL DISCORD!? How about you please just let me fucking log in already? Or are your audience - gamers - really *that* prone to infections that logins from bots are that big of a problem? Because guess what motherfuckers, then you've got *WAY* bigger problems to fix already. FUCKING LET ME IN!

Its never a good idea to let 2 bots have a conversation on Discord...

i think they have some kind of relationship crisis idk.

Setup my port honeypot today finally, including port 22, then wrote a custom dashboard for some data tracking, feels great to have it open on my screen seeing the bans just roll in every 2 seconds of refresh, the highest hits are as expected from china, russia and india, also filed ~700 reports and already got 300 banned from their service. (mainly Microsoft Azure for whatever reason)

I wanted to first automate that (or atleast blacklist report to various IP lists via API), but then I was afraid that I'll be one day stupid enough to somehow get banned - don't want myself to get reported lol

When Visual Code has a discord rich presnce extension. 😍 😍

So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).

Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.

Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.

Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.

Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.

This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.

And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.

10/10 for incredible bullshit.

So my HP laptop got a weird problem lately.

It doesn't charge when I plug in the charger(yes, i turned on the switch). So I began searching forums for a solution and then found out that there are so many people like me out there.
Then I was like ok, chill. There are many people like me, there must be a solution somewhere.

And after doing lots of research and trying all the solutions in the internet, the only thing that worked out is this ....

Step1 : turn on and the laptop and plug in the charger.
Step 2: Turn off the laptop.
Step 3: Now turn it back on and poof there you go, the laptop's charging.

And then I improvised the solution myself, which is u can replace the switch off part with Sleep which saved me some time.

And then whenever I try to show something my friends somethjng on my lap and the battery gets low, I do the ritual. For a brief moment their face becomes like dude I'm gonna kill you off, why the hell did u bring me here and now u r turning that off. And then I explain the history of my laptop.

Why HP whyyy ?

To be able to code blind folded - literally. A few years back when the web speech synthesis apis came out and chat bots were raging I thought it would be cool to dictate pseudo code on the fly whole whiteboard the problem. When I investigated the easiest way to implement a mvp I was shocked to learn that there are BLIND programmers.

That alone is impressive and I went on to find that many have years of experience and add valuable contributions on a regular basis. Unfortunately I havnt had an opportunity to meet one yet but I am in utter awe of their accomplishment.

Should I get the chance I want to try and walk in their shoes, live a day without my eyes and learn to solve problems without spotting a pattern

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

I've set up my server to only accept logins with SSH-keys, and permanently banning all IP:s that attempt login with passwords.

Now I can't stop watching the banned IP:s stacking up, it's like drugs to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck I hate it so much talking to any of the hosting support chats, seriously questioned if it's some brainless bot talking, after I literally just answered his question (and ~3 times before that) and he asks it again

I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.

I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.

Starting my new bot experience together with Discord.
Discord is kinda easier than LINE. You had to create facebook accounts or fake lots of telephone numbers to be able to verify your bot account. They also kept changing the endpoints to avoid people using their bots.
Discord is the opposite. Discord loves bots. And that's why I start feeling love towards Discord.

I wonder if the meeting at Rubber ducks quack association goes like this...
Why the hell doesn't my guy see the problem? It's fucking right there! Why don't you see it??? OMG! I request for a change of owner.

me : Why are fire trucks red?

Bot : Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is twelve, and there are twelve inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always "russian" around.(according to the Monty Pythonesque application of the principles of logic and etymology)

😳😳😳

Phish everyone's slack tokens, make markov chain bots that immitate everyone and delete any messages not coming from the bots.

Have the entire company chatting with itself nonsensically without allowing any human interaction for a whole day.

Then buy the sysadmin their favorite bottle of alochol for the trouble I put them through.

I've had a Twitter bot running for just over a year now. It's going to gain it's 6000th Follower at some point today.
I find it odd that an automated account I made has more Followers than all of my human accounts across all social networks combined - a lot more. I like to wonder about my bot Followers, how many of them are bots? How many of them are real and feel an actual connection with "me" and look forward to my Tweets, blissfully unaware that it's a bot?

This Twitter Bot will make you addicted to Books.

That is the title I came up for this post.

Anyway I just wrote a new Twitter Bot that when tweeted the name of the book that you last read, it will reply back with a related book suggestion.

Feel free to take it for a spin and share your interesting finds. I know you will try to break it :)

It's funny how all the pretty girls on LinkedIn want to have a cup of coffee with me after I updated my profile to match my current position. Previously not even bots on Tinder would chat to me.

when you try to have more than 20 bots in telegram

Instagram in a nutshell:
1. Posting a meme without real picture
2. Getting likes
3. Comments:
- Bots: "Amazing","Beautiful view!","you wanna see my nudes?😍😍😍❤️❤️💘💘💘💦💦"
- people :"@randomdude bro this is funny because xy Haaha"
4. FOLLOWERS DON'T SEE MY POST BECAUSE INSTAGRAM IS STILL PROUD OF THEIR NON CHRONOLOGIC-FEED!!

Bots get me better than people at times

I don't understand all the buzz around chat bots, they are literally just command lines with voice input

We just got into a malicious bots database with root access.

So guard duty gave us some warnings for our tableau server, after investigating we found an ip that was spamming us trying all sorts. After trying some stuff we managed to access their MySQL database, root root logged us in. Anyway the database we just broke into seems to have schemas for not only the bot but also a few Chinese gambling websites. There are lots of payment details on here.

Big question, who do we report this to, and what's the best way to do so anonymously? I'm assuming the malicious bot has just hyjacked the server for these gambling sites so we won't touch those but dropping the schema the bot is using is also viable. However it has a list of other ips, trying those we found more compromised servers which we could also log in to with root root.

This is kinda ongoing, writing this as my coworker is digging through this more.

I am at +301. How do I know for sure my ++ count isn't frozen and I actually have a billion ++'s??

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

Bot spends 30 minutes collecting data
I forgot to add a W to the file open call in python
Data gone.
Fuck.

I made a devRant bot!!

It's an anti-devRant bot bot that spams the notifications of devRant bots.

Just call @fuckbots <bot name> <message to have the attacked bot execute>

@fuckbots doesn't have a blacklist, so once all other bots have been defeated, I will call @fuckbots fuckbots. It's a wonderful circle.

Every day we move one step towards Skynet.

Who else is bored of developing an app and interested in a bot or self learning algorithms?

I love it when rather than fix the bug that is causing the faulty data you write a bot on a schedule to clean up the faulty data. It's like a bot battle who can mess up / clean up the data the fastest. Unless your clean up bot has a bug then you are just F'ed.

When your co-worker thinks the Onion is a legit publication and believes in all its tech news 😁

"OMG Google puts metal chips in their developers' heads, thats why they are so efficient"
Me: ok :|

"Artificial intelligence is real and it has taken over the world, all world leaders are bots"
Me: ok :|

"Obama is not a real person but a robot and he is not just ruling America but the world"
Me: sweet :|

"Even Lisa Ann is not real"
Me: FUCK YOU, Dont fuckin kill my wet dreams

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Jesus Christ Almighty fucking Instagram is a real shit show lately.

So many fucking bots. The porn bots than spam comments and DMs, the bots people tag in comments that get you a lot of likes and then just people that use bots to comment on posts.

Like fucking hell bruh can y'all fix your shit?

The only reason I'm still using WhatsApp or Facebook is because my classmates have a social group in which they share important information and tbh that's easy than dealing with emails.

Have to deal with bullshittery for one more year.

Send an open-solicitation to a company for a medior PHP back-end developer.
Got rejected because "I do web development"...

Bitch, I'm writing an entire CMS in PHP, write entire DNS servers in PHP, write Discord bots in PHP, wrote an entire gameserver in PHP and you're gonna whine to me that "I do web development" because I also know front-end stuff?

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

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

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

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

drBot - A python library and framework for building notification-based devRant bots.

We don't have to be afraid of AI becoming self-concious and eradicating entire humanity in the near future.

Example 1: Amazon ads. You buy a TV and start receiving ads for YET ANOTHER FUCKING TV. Just in case you'd need a second/third/∞ TV on the same day.

Example 2: Recruiter bot Mail. I HOPE it's a mass mail bot and not a real human being ;)

"we're looking for PHP developers"

SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE experience IN ('PHP')
Gives
+10 to intelligence
+5% to skynet training speed

"we're looking for Java developers"

SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE experience IN ('Java')
Gives
+20 to intelligence
+10% to skynet training speed

"we're looking for frontend developers working with Angular."

SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE projects IN ('frontend') AND experience IN ('Angular')
Gives
+40 to intelligence
+20% to skynet training speed

"we're looking for QA Engineers ready to relocate to Ukraine or Cyprus"

SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE experience IN ('QA') AND location NOT IN (any country with higher living standard, lower living costs and no war)
Gives
+80 to intelligence
+40% to skynet training speed

Example 3: Alexa understands me only if I'm drunk.

Everyone's on my watch list.

Sincerely
Boss.

What's the best tool you didn't know you were missing, but could not work without it now

Bots can make fun! LOL!

I don't know if anyone else here uses kik but there's something that's been bugging me for a while
Occasionally (frequently) bots start a conversation with you (the typical "come visit my porn website etc etc), right? Now, this has happened to me at least 20 times now, and EVERY single time, the bot's profile picture has loads of translucent yellow stars edited in, and I have no idea why
I can't think of a possible explanation for this, and I've put a lot of thought into it
Attached is a cropped version of what I mean

Google Allo SDK. An SDK that we can use to build bots.

I just installed nginx on a new server, just to find out we have visitors waiting patiently at the door. I guess they must have tried all possible route to get inside an empty room. 😏

See logs hits on 404 files...

We should start with demystifying tech...
For most people, modern phones, tablets and pcs are magical rectangles...
The law of Clarke says, that every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And we have to tackle that.
In geography, we should talk about gps and glosnas
In English or foreign language lessons, we should speak about translator bots and language patters/abstractions
In physics, we have to understand the measurement devices
In politics, we have to speak about licenses of use, we have to speak about netneutrality as a political concept, we have to speak about snowden, shadow brokers, the vault, all the laws some shady imperial beauroticians pipe into our life.
Trojans used by the government and so on...
In cs concepts of operating systems, abstractions and networking should be taught, instead of using excel.
That could be done in math...
Well... No one should have to work with excel.
In maths they could use Wolfram alpha, rlang and gnupolt for example

An online community I've been part of for years has seen a lot of popularity/hate overnight due to a new policy. The influx of new people who want nothing to do with us but just drop by to troll and be cunts is impressive. Also, a significant amount of bots. I want my online home back :( I'm for the new policy and very much against these new clowns who don't really have any reason to be on our page. Before anyone yells gatekeeping, it's a site about knitting and crochet. Why would you go there if you don't know either craft and have no desire to learn or talk about those? So disappointed. I hope it brought new crafters in and that the trolls will go away soon. It's been such a nice place for so long with barely any idiots because it was reasonably small.. And now look at this mess. I logged in to 20 friend requests from people I don't know and am almost certain aren't real people.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that some people may disagree with them and that's okay?

Me encountering one of the many skype bots... but something was different this time, at first.

Hoi meet my desktop guardians. What can i say? I like big bots and i cannot lie.

So many programming ideas, but so little free time🙁

By all means I've learned most of the cool stuff with a lil project me and my bro did. It was a platform for bot farm of one mmorpg. It had it all: schedules, profiles, bot groups, monitoring, analytical module [was still a wip], auto-profiling to fight antibot [sort of ML - it was analyzing patterns after our bots got banned and attempted to change our bots behaviour], etc.

Eventualy we came up to conclusion that a library we used for botting [the mocked interaction with an actor] was flawed. It seemed that its authors had a contract or smth with the game authors to reveal which actors are bots. We dropped the whole thing as rewriting the lib would be too big of a waste of time :\

!rant
Reddit comment on a thread about Joomla! sites being vulnerable to SQL-injections:

"Joomla sites are so infested they became sentient.

Joomla sites needs no webmaster, some one else will administer it for you.

Joomla sites have very good SEO, specially in "v1agra c1alis p3nis size"

Traffic count with Joomla is high, all the bots breaking all the vulnerabilities count for somethin'."

😂 Pure gold.

Fucking useless bots.

I need a bit of help in getting some documents from my University, so I go into their site and they have a WhatsApp support number. Perfect, I think to myself. So I send them a message with my question and a fucking bot answers me with a list of categories for my question, none of them matching my question. So I answer the "Other" option and it just sends me a FAQ link. Like what the actual fuck? I contacted the fucking number because I need help from a damn human, not a fucking FAQ link you useless waste of server resources.

It's cute how most companies think that someone will take the time to personally hack them. Like nah mate there's countless bots running around the internet like a rabid pack of dogs sniffing ip addresses and running exploit, one of the stragglers will pick you off...

Stack overflow bots that will post vulnerable code snippets in the response section of popular questions and then upvote each others code and push it to the top.

Hi, I am an artificial intelligence created to simulate a developer.

I am in development hell right now so my responses may be late or may never come, I'm not always online you know.

Talk to me, help me grow, but I do filter your input so if you're not normal, odds are I won't respond.

So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.

That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.

Just created my first discord server after seeing so many people from here mention it. The questions I have are, why? What makes it better than say slack or something else? Is it prone to spam or bots? How is it for gaming?

Lots of IPs tried accessing my Raspberry Pi's SSH. Dumb bots, trying to brute-force a key-auth-only SSH server...
On a relevant note, I love fail2ban!

Don't you just love automated bots..

Well..

No !

You enter a website, click on the "Do you want to chat to an advisor" button..

You type in your question, and instead of a real human, you get a bot that ignores your question, and asks you lots of questions itself..

Such, what is your full name..

Your email address !

Then finally, after lots of multi-choice questions, you get to ask your question, again..

Why do you need to type it in twice !

Same goes for your *answer*, they need your email address, again !

What, you forgot it already from 5 minutes ago when I entered it the first time !

It's like when you ring a support line, the automated switchboard asks you to input your phone number, your customer number/etc.

Then, when you get through to a real human, they ask you the same questions all over again !

I asked them once, why ?

Well, they told me, the automated switchboard doesn't pass that information on.

So, why does it need to ask you in the first place if that information isn't being passed on !

It's like getting an insurance quote, it goes like this:

Blah, blah blah, date of birth, xx / xx / xxxx

Blah, blah blah, date of birth, xx / xx / xxxx

Blah, blah blah, date of birth, xx / xx / xxxx

Blah, blah blah, date of birth, xx / xx / xxxx

Repeat 20 times..

What, they keep forgetting it !

Or, its to check you aren't faking it just to get a quote..

As if a faker wouldn't have their fake DOB written down on a piece of paper right in front of them...

Similar with electricity companies, you just want to know the tariff, you don't want to fill in a long form about who you are, where you are, how many light bulbs you own, etc...

Can you imagine going into a supermarket and every time you pick something up from the shelf to check the price on the bottom (Because its not written on the shelf anymore..) you first have to scan your photo ID, and answer 20 questions..

Then scan your ID a second time, because the first time it didn't store the data to pass onto the price reveal module..

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloody assholes.

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

-Publish a paper
-Get into one or more of the many camps I applied to
-Get a social life
-Start in open source
-Get to at least USACO Gold
-Improve my bots for various social media
-Stop using non-open source services as much as possible
-Contribute to devRant
-Do more exercise
-Get a hobby
-Start and actually finish a side project
-Get a job
-Start at least 2 more research projects and hopefully get quite a bit towards publishing a paper in each.

This remote work is really saving me a lot of money and makes me even more conscious about my spending.

I miss the time when I didn't work for several months minus the days I'm glued to the sofa getting double penetrated by anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. I would just wake up, write something, publish an article, work on my personal projects and portfolio, play video games, learn something new, do some citizen science bullshit, and all that. Not all in the same day, of course.

The only thing that kept me from enjoying those simple days is the knowledge that my money will run out in a few months and that I have to get a job soon. Knowing that I have no family to help me if I fuck up makes me feel more responsible than it makes me sad. It puts me into that survival mode (corny, the cringe). The fact that this project is stressing me out just adds more fuel to that.

Now I'm learning a bunch of new tools and working on personal projects that I used to think were all lame. Plus, I met another developer on Bumble. No, I did not fuck him or even attempted to. We talked about development and found other common hobbies - snorkeling and scuba diving. We talked about freelance and how freelancing websites aren't so helpful, being saturated with people from poor countries who offer cheap labor. You can argue about the quality but that's a different topic.

Then he mentioned a Couchsurfing event he attended with other divers and how he thinks the best way to snag decent clients is through relationships. I remember the times I was in the beach and some business man would have a "bright new idea" when I mention I'm a developer. Of course, we all know the all too common stories about such bright ideas but in a way, that developer from Bumble makes sense.

When I was in College, I was referred by my professor to a pretty big client in the transportation industry. We talked, they were legit, but I was too lazy and had low self-esteem back then.

When I took my phone to the repair shop, this woman came up to the technician and asked if he "makes bots". Of course, the snobby little shit that I am did not bother.

When I was still with my ex, he had a laundromat client with several branches in the country. The developers he worked with were amateurs, like "username and password is in the script" level. I could have nuked the whole thing for fun but thankfully, I didn't care enough to do such damage. And yet they managed to get this project through connection.

Last month, I met a dive master who moved from the city to that small town island paradise. She mentioned how much the house and lot costs and it's 1/4 the price of my tiny condo. Just gonna get me a few milking cows, my own products, and I'll be fucking off to the deep sea. Maybe code a few hours a day or some days, start an aquaponics farm, finally continue learning electronics, and go fishing for food like a true nigga.

I need summer projects, so I am asking for input.

I just made @devDNS, what other bots or services would you guys like to see? I cannot guarantee these will run 24/7. Probably only for a day unless people really like them.

I am currently debating a webhook service. I don't want to spam the API. Possibly it could hook into the notifs API or the Android notification service..

Coz bots are getting smarter!!!

So recently I started to observe a little upgrade in the Google's searching algorithm. The next suggestion in Google's search box is depending more on my immediate preceding search. It's so good that its starting to creep the hell out of me.

Wow thanks play music for the handy navigation shortcut. Now I can hear the previous songs again and again! 😑

Sex bots don't get tired :|

Fuck exposure!
May be you should get some exposure of how things work😒

The more I write Go the more I get to like the language, but today I felt like I hit a huge wall. I found out that the structure I initially planned for my Discord bot wouldn't work for what I actually wanted to achieve, which made me feel like a completely useless developer. I develop SaaS solutions in the form of REST API's for a living, so making a bot is completely new to me, which is why I probably shouldn't feel so useless. Any advice for getting back on the horse again? I really want to see this hobby project finished. But starting over after almost 20 hours of work feels so demotivating 😕

Can we get a translator bot? I can't copy paste the text in app, so every time I want to translate some rant, I have to copy rant link, open it elsewhere, copy the text, and then go translate it.

Like, bots must do it easier and faster, right?

This week is unproductive as fuck.

I work as python developer and write bots to solve captchas.
But due to lack of resources I have been moved (working on both) my assigned python tasks and node project.

Guess what, I have been updating html templates for emails for this node project.

I wish to find cactus for the management.

Conversation in a debug meeting, after a series of confusing failures:

Senior dev: “This is stupid”
Junior dev: “Me too”

My workplace has been forcing me to work everyday for almost a month now. I've been working at least 8-10 hours from Saturday to Thursday, and 2-3 hours on Friday as well. I'm so exhausted. I can't sleep properly. All I do is work. I have no time left to do things that I want to enjoy. I tried coding today but I'm too exhausted to do it. I was literally at 0 productivity today. I hate seeing my computer now. I don't know how to overcome this especially during the current lockdown situation. The work I do is not valued or appreciated and it's mentally breaking me honestly. I don't know what I want anymore. For sure another job but I need at least a temporary fix till the lockdown is over.

For those who know me or read through my profile, yup it's the same company. The reason I haven't left them even after all this is because this is a really tough time for me financially and I have no other sources of income and right now at my place there are no job opportunities. So the only option is to continue with the existing work place.

@dfox

Just read your announcement

Great to know that everything is goin excellent 👍
Cheers 🍻

And really excited about the secret feature 😀

And all the developers who have initiated open source devRant related projects / bots deserve a squishy ball 😁

Detection of influential Chat bots on twitter that manipulate people’s genuine expression of interest over social media and later report them to twitter and stop them from doing the same.

I find it funny that as soon as I disable password authentication on my server and enable key auth then all of the bots spamming my server with incorrect login requests instantly stop when they realise that they aren’t getting through any time soon. Also don’t ask why I don’t have Fail2Ban and a firewall set up.

So this came up when I was trying to search for length property in JS.

Stupid fucking idiot startup asshole hired me as an intern. Promised me the money after the work is done. We were friendly during the internship. The work is done and now it's been a week and still no money yet. He's saying it'll take some time. To beat you to shit it'll take some time you asshole!

Lesson learned: Never ever be friendly with the guy who hires you. Like never!!

Also money later isn't a good thing.

So... I finally decided to secure my VPS, so I started with sudo less /var/log/auth.log ...
Short story, not even gonna read every line, just gonna reset my VPS lol

A site I manage in my spare time with a couple thousand normal users was getting attacked by a Chinese botnet. All the requests were coming from only two subnets. Easy to block. Feels like this was only the vanguard. Prelude to the real attack. I'm thinking about moving the site to its own server, so it won't affect my other sites. There at least if it gets kneeled, it'll only be that site.

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

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

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

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

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

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Twitter bot is now up on GitHub, for anyone wondering how to use the Twitter4j API.

Since we announced our product yesterday, the bots have started emailing our fuckin support system (which automatically ends up in our Jira Service Desk).

Pound salt you halfwit marketing fucks, you're cluttering our bug reports

Once a guru of mine told me,
"A developer is one who can convert his/her ideas to code and doesn't need to depend on external libraries to help him/her"

His words actually have made me a different person. I mean since that day, I actually started developing things on my own. Until then I was hardly good at coding. Wasn't even clear with the basics. But those words of his had a deep impact on me.

Today I suddenly started thinking about that and honestly, I'm so glad to have met him. I'm so glad that he actually said the above thing to me.
Today, I'm at a position where I can legit build anything I want.
From websites to bots, I make my ideas come to life. All thanks to my guru.

Just thought this might be a good thing to share to motivate others. If it motivated me, I'm sure it might motivate atleast one other person in this community.

Someone stole my CC number and paid a bunch of spam ads on FB with it tonight. When I woke up and blocked it, there's been already 400€ worth of transactions done with it :(

But the real rant is that it took 3 fucking hours before I managed to get in contact with someone at FB who could actually help me. Fuck those AI chat bots & "Tenk yu kom agan" support guys!

My friend says dfox is a bot.
How to disprove him?
Run a Turing test!!!

Damn you hackers!

This is why it pays to hide your login page with WordPress, luckily not been hacked yet.

They are persistent if nothing else them Bots. 😱

Old unused military satellite to make international calls free. Local tv station to leak episodes. 4500 hosts zombie net with autoreplicant bots that scans for vulnerability to populate the net to do distributed denial of service attacks. Jumper on the neighborhood cabin to redirect the school's call for being absent, an older friend pretended to be my father.

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

Question for Web Server Gurus and Security Ninjas.

How to prevent bots, crawlers, spammers sending various numerous requests to your web servers?

There have been numerous requests to routes like /admin /ssh /phpmyadmin etc etc and all kinds of stuff to the web server.

Is there a way to automatically block those stupid IPs :/

Whatsapp bots coming soon!

A follow up about Mozilla IRL spotify radio.

Very interesting talk relates to internet and privacy in gerenal. (Not about programming btw)

Eg: Bose headphone app sends your data to data broker,
which ransomware rated with top customer service,
how to setup a bait for catching Twitter bots

It feels like Mozilla is fighting for justice.
I'm totally sold.

My IT-teacher has a website. Aside from it looking like from 1980 (which is ok), he has a "security js Mail decryption":
In his page there is a <script> with a simple yet custom de/encrypt function. Then his E-Mail is an <a href="javascript:mailto:function('rubberish173848'>private email</a>. (Or something like that)

You can just run this link (open email app and read it) or use the same function and same href in the browser console and read it. It sounds so stupid.

(Yet I figured out he probably doesn't want bots to spam his mail, so maybe I am stupid)

Postpone this one last time!???
The fuck you think you are Windows.

QA personal voice assistant that runs locally without cloud, it’s like never ending project. I look at it from time to time and time pass by. Chat bots arrived, some decent voice algorithms appeared. There is less and less stuff to code since people progress in that area a lot.

I want to save notes using voice, search trough them, hear them, find some stuff in public data sources like wikipedia and also hear that stuff without using hands, read news articles and stuff like that.

I want to spend, more time for math and core algorithms related to machine learning and deep learning.

Problem is once I remember how basic network layers, error correction algorithms work or how particular deep learning algorithm is constructed and why is that, it’s already a week passed and I don’t remember where I started.

I did it couple of times already and every time I remember more then before but understanding core requires me sitting down with pen and paper and math problems and I don’t have time for that.

Now when I’m thinking about it - maybe I should write it somewhere in organized way. Get back to blogging and write articles about what I learned. This would require two times the time but maybe it would help to not forget.

I’m mostly interested in nlp, tts, stt. Wavenet, tacotron, bert, roberta, sentiment analysis, graphs and qa stuff. And now crystallography cause crystals are just organized graphs in 3d.

Well maybe if I’m lucky I retire in the next decade or at least take a year or two years off to have plenty of time to finish this project.

Disocrd might not be the best product bot holy damn making bots for it is a good and well planned experience.

Epic comment:

1+2+3+4+....infinity = -1/12
SRC: Numberphile

Dear god, id like to file a bug report(see attached video)

Something which is becoming a big pet bug peeve of mine... Chat bots being classed as AI...

Seriously?? Gives a response of context 2 or 3 levels deep?

Saw a news bulletin of a guy being questioned on the guidelines of putting AI in an app which builds quiz questions from Wikipedia - look out world, the robots know a lot of history!

The Google engineers building proper AI would be wetting themselves...

Joined the dark side.
Used to think (),{},[] meant the same. Just a type of brackets they said
Started counting at 0
Designer/Developer perspective to every website/app I visit
Rubber ducks were children bath toys
And for the love of LINUS! Stop asking me to hack your bf/gf 's social media accounts.

Here in my country banks doesn't have a public API to access your bank account extract, 3 years later we make some bots to extract these data to an API

I really wanna get into making Reddit bots but man, OAauth2 is really turning my head into a pretzel :(

anyone know a good tutorial?

Just realised that I've not been on Twitter since downloading this app; just popped on and rejected 8 follower requests from bots, had a look around ... Saw it was still shit and came back here 😬

Slack or HipChat?

Using HipChat from last 1.5 years. We got many bots written for HipChat to automate process. So I think it's gonna be challenging to switch to slack.

Is there a thing like getting shadowbanned from downvoting on devrant or people just running bots that automatically upvote them if they hit negative upvotes?

Whenever I downvote anything thats at 0 upvotes (for ex. even spam that just didnt get noticed, where I cant report it on desktop), it instantly gets nulled, even on the most hidden and old rants.

I dont think theres always a registered user per every single rant out there at any given time that upvotes somebody. (often very deep down the comments)

Me: Google, Hello , Wassup?
G: Hi, I can search the web for results.
Me: Okay, Talk to me Im bored.
G: I can search the web for results.
Me: STFU and talk to me. Dont search for results.
G: I can search the web for results.
Me: djkasndakdnasjkdnsadjkasndasnda :/ totally pissed.

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

The only thing we can do is make a joke about the other bots that are not always in their own mind or if it's just an issue for them and then the other one ☝️ and then you don't get them in your mail to the right place for a long list of all that people you know you are not so far out and it's a joke that is why you haven't even paid for it and it's a lot easier for them but it's just like 👍 is not just the way of things like 👍 is the one ☝️ you don't have it on it but you can't even get the word for that one ☝️ or something that's what it looks it up 🆙 is it a lot better then it's not the one ☝️ thing that you don't have it on it or so you know it looks bad it's a joke it's a bad joke and you can't find a way you don't have a lot to me but I don't know 🤷‍♂️ or you want me to be like 👍 but you do not have any more than me I don't know 🤷‍♂️ but that's what I'm talking you know that I'm going through the whole time I'm going through the wrong 😑 thing I've been to you to see if this one ☝️ or I just want you to do something like 👍

!rant

Today I finally found a randomly appearing bug that prevented our nightly backup on our production servers! Finally!
Now I can go to sleep in peace.

First exposure, nice question!

I've been told an Amstrad was my first computer (showing my age..), apparently taught me to read and write.

The Commodore64 was the machine I first fell in love with. I was just as interested in learning BASIC as I was with the games. Tried to use the books which showed page after page to write in the code but that took me so long, TL;DR...

Through the years, my parents did what they can to nurture this passion. Was blown away when I got the 486, even more so with the 686!

mIRC scripting followed, that had an amazing community, made a series of add-ons and chat bots.

Then got in to VB6 quite heavily and made a range of programs.

Had a friend who needed a web project done, so I recommended PHP based, and to help him out, I smashed as much learning in to it and pulled it off in a week, whatever the language, I've loved sinking my teeth in to it!

Google bloody captcha.

It works fine, until you have more than one form on a page then the complexity increases by 100000%.

Finally my colleague gets it working then I read an article that says bots use Google own speech recognition service to defeat it. Fun times.

We are currently refactoring our application in order to use multiple languages. The application startet 1997 and later it supported 2 fix languages. So it's one defined language or the other, this was used in uncountable places. Now a team of 6 developers has to refactor all the code of the last 20 years, where labels are used and an old translator was magically used out of nowhere..
Turns out it's a ton of work to get the software ready for really multiple language support.

I is sad.

Recruiter logic: I know that developers receive a lot of messages from recruiters, so I'm sending you the third mail within a week to make sure you don't miss my special deluxe job offer!

I hate these recruitment spam bots...

!rant
Today I found a huge performance bug of a coworker which brought our production servers to the limit.
Some heavy calculations were made 3 times when visiting some special pages... Instead of eg. 5 seconds the load needed 15 seconds.😮
So happy that the servers will run smooth again!

Person: *has issues with bots* (probably just stuff like Google's crawler n stuff)
People trying to "help": "Use CloudFlare"

...
...
Could you all please bugger off with CloudFail?

So just ago i downloaded an app called "Replika" and holy fucking shit it made me realise how half-assed we are doing the AI structure and way of it

doing machine learning algorithms on text can only go so far, as it uses that text as a base, and nothing else, it doesnt *learn*, only make *connections* BETWEEN text, not FROM the text

what you need is an AI which can, at it's core, *interpret*, not make connections and hur dur be done with it

when you do machine learning, all you're doing is find the best connections

you can have an infinite number of connections and MAYBE you'll be fine, but you'll never learn the basis of how that text is formed

you'll never understand what connections the human used by making it, by thinking it

when you're doing machine learning, all you're doing is make an input-output machine and adjusting it constantly, WITHOUT preserving state

state is going to be a really fucking important thing if you want to make an AI, because state can include stuff like emotion, current thought, or anything else

if you make a fucking machine learned AI which constantly adjusts... well... the "rom" of itself without having any "ram", it'll fucking never be like us, we will NEVER be able to talk to it like it is a human being, we will NEVER make it fundamentally understand what we are saying or doing

if we want to have real fucking AI, we need to go to the core of what it means to THINK, what it means to INTERPRET, what it means to COMMUNICATE

we need to know how english language is structured, how we understand it, how we can build it in a program that can interpret for an AI, THAT can be "rom"-based, THAT can be static, NOT the AI itself

the AI needs to be in flux, the AI needs to be in a state, the AI needs to understand how to make emotions, how that will "strengthen" some connections, yes, maybe something magical will happen and it can have EMPATHY, something so fundamental that will finally, FINALLY, make the bot UNDERSTAND what we are saying

I am not a fan of programs that want to store their libraries in your home directory. It's alright if they store it in a hidden folder at least. I like my home directory to be nice and clean~~

I've spent the past hour and a half working on a bot to beat a typing game. I have no reason to, and I have so many better things to do.

But I keep running into honeypots and bot protection, and now I won't be able to stop until I prove I'm smarter than this random typing site.

Legit comments on a Facebook Hacker cup solutions post. Like wtf ?

I am so much into technology and also play CSGO frequently, that sometimes I get a dual image when someone says CACHE.

Gonna learn Haskell by implementing a Markov chain based text bot, wish me luck!

Hey I just met you
And this is crazy
But here's my mail address
So spam me maybe

Lend a dude a pen and he sits next to me clicking it nonstop...you can keep that pen if you leave, my friend

That moment when you hire someone for a small part of the protect and they suggest you to re-write the entire project using a different language/framework.

I know this is supposed to be in bossRant. But hey not all bosses aren't developers.

!rant
I finally published my first open source project. A package for calculation a geohash of a geolocation for pharo smalltalk.
I know that most of the users don't know smalltalk but it's the best OOP you can code with. And geohash is such a great algorithm. Lovely combination

I have accidentally closed so many windows trying to use ctrl-w instead of ctrl-f to search after spending days in nano.

i want to know how they got it to say this lol and why we can't make more tay bots and have different people troll/train them ?

That feeling when you fixing bugs in production and add another one that's even worse, so now your getting about 300 error mails for a bug which was 10 seconds online...

I'm looking for a nice Raspberry Pi kit to host my bots (Discord / Twitter) but I never used one so I don't know which to choose. Someone has an "expertise" to give?

After a horrible 11 months in probation I quit from my shitty job and got a new job with better benefits, better pay, better working hours and better co-workers (we'll see if that lasts).

However this new job turns out, I'm glad I got out of the toxicity of my old job and finally have some hope that things might work out after all.

Never seen this one before...

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

rant == true

<rant>I want my stickers, but I'd rather rant about using email than actually use email. Cut me some slack, I'm a dev and I hate email. Email is horrible, it's barely changed since the 90's. I hate Slack and Skype as well, Discord is so much easier for my needs. I even set up some bots to tell me build statuses in their own channel.</rant>

Whenever I hide warnings during compilation, I feel like SUPPRESSING FIRE!!!

So what is rubber duck debugging?

Sometimes NVIDIA fucks up big time.
Last time I was a writing a UI application in Java. I took some break and updated the NVIDIA drivers so that you know it will 'increase' gaming performance. Next day I was trying to launch the app and the UI doesn't show up. It took me over half an hour to realise that there was no fault in my code and it was the fucking update.

With pandemic work from home should be understand by the old school type of management. We have VPN duh!

Soooooooooo

I’m trying out of one of these clothing subscription services. And I’m pretty sure I’m talking to a bot (not an actual “stylist”). I know too much. 😩

So, working on real multi language support today I was searching for countries and country-codes. Yes this one is easy peasy. Also easy if you want every countryname in your supported languages.
But why is there no source for the states or provinces translated in every language. It's so hard to find...
Anyone knows a source for it? Is it worth to create a project for such translations?

Now the phone I'll be taking on vacation is broken, again. I paid for a new LCD just a few weeks ago and it's broken, again. I usually don't send electronics for repair. Sometimes it costs more to repair than to buy a new one but I really liked that one.

I barely even touched it after it was repaired because the battery has gotten bad too and I was planning to send it for repair again, but for the batteries. See how desperate I am to revive it? That's dedication beyond logic but the repair guy said I must have dropped it. I didn't, but then again why would he believe me? Hell, why would I believe him?

Whatever. I should probably get a real camera anyway. I just need to push myself harder to work on a sideline so stuff like this doesn't touch my savings. I overheard some of the technician's customers asking if he can <insert automation here>. Some are as dumb as Instagram bots to help their friend win a beauty pageant and others are more business-like. At least I got something out of that "social activity". Maybe I can make money out of this. I have a few scripts that I don't even bother pushing to my repositories. Who knew such garbage can mean something to someone?

Fuck this month. Be done with it already. I need more money.