We are devs right?
We have cpus and gpus lying around right?
We are still alive... right? 🤔

How about we do our part and utilise our PCs for helping with COVID-19 research.

I've stumbled across this little tool that not only keeps me warm at night but helps researchers with several diseases.

https://foldingathome.org/iamoneina...

It's like a a bitcoin miner but for research purposes, no it's not a dodgy bitcoin miner.

Oh and feel free to keep yourself anonymous as there are stats that will identify your username - when they work.

There are installers for windows, Mac, and linux distros so everyone can get involved.

And once again, Spotify just leaves me speechless.

I guess I don't actually need to talk about this clusterfuck of a mobile app getting more and more slow and unstable with every update. So let's talk about something else.

When I cracked the first limit, I thought it had to be a joke. 9.999 songs can be downloaded at once. But not all on one device. You can download 3.333 songs each to three separate devices - regardless of the fact that there is more than enough space left on the device and you are not even using any other device.

When I read this one [-> https://goo.gl/43YwKm ], I really got angry:
"If you move, or enter the wrong details, you need to create a new account (make sure you cancel the plan on your old account beforehand, and sign out everywhere) and subscribe to Premium for Family on that new account."
I don't even know how to respond to this except with insane wrath.

So now I cracked the next one. My library is full. The maximum number of songs that can be stored in the library is 10.000 and not one more.

If they wanted more money for the additional ressources, I'd even understand that. Yes, the suggestion calculations become more expensive, I do know that. And I would even pay for that. But there is no such option.

Instead, the company is making the most customer hostile decisions I could imagine.
Even though the competition proves that a multiple of such a limit is not a problem at all (Google Music: 50.000 songs / Apple Music: 100.000 songs).

And you have to create a new account when you move? That's hard to beat for impudence, especially wigh regard of the fact that no migration service is provided, so a person like me would spend a long time transferring all the stored music and playlists.
I'm not even sure it's complying with European law not to be able to see your address online, let alone change it.

And all of that because they know they can afford it anyway, since although the competition is a lot better on that score, they simply can't keep up in the matter of spectrum and algorithms.
And if I can only take 70% of my music with me when I change the service, I can just as well delete 3.000 songs from my library and stay with Spotify.

What a fucking wreck. I really don't get it.

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/4676421/...

I told you all. I fucking told you. Nobody listened to me.

Good people just leave.

This dude who I look upto and is kind of my mentor in the org and has spent a decade here, just resigned.

What the fuck!!!!

And with that, the attrition in product team is insanely high, to the point that it's scary.

My manager is not responsive and is often reactive instead of being proactive.

While the leadership is super excited about the product and everyone says they are hiring more and more people in product team, the design says our product is not a priority for them and we are just left with one design resource.

I was conversing with my colleague and we both are super scared that they shouldn't scrap the product and fire us.

This seems unlikely with all the logical calculations that we did but in a capitalist system we have to be prepared for anything.

I am shit scared right now because there is no clarity on what could happen next.

On the other hand, my skip level manager is taking a lot of interest in my work and is working very closely with me and taking more ownership of our product than my direct manager.

Everyone says our product is a top priority and tech is super agressive about it.

One thing that could happen is my manager leaving and not telling us about it upfront.

In which we would just report to our skip level manager and growth chances would be even better.

But at this stage, this seems super scary to me.

-- This is my first rant so sorry if it's bad--

We have a nice project that I am working on that needs to store and interact with location data. It is a .NET Core API using Entity Framework Core to interact with the database. All good and well. Until today when I started working on the implementation of storing location data we retrieve from mobile devices.

SQL has a nice data type named: "Geography" which can store a location and do calculations on it with queries. Such as proximity and distance which is what we need.

But then it turns out that EntityFramework Core does not have support for the Spatial data types. even though version 6 did have Spatial support.
Then i found the following issue on GitHub: https://github.com/aspnet/...

Turns out this feature has been requested since 2014 and is even on the "High-priority" list and is still not implemented to this day. Even though in the issue many people are asking to have this implemented.

WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG MICROSOFT!!

So now i have to figure out how to work around this. But that is an issue for tomorrow.

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

I had the idea that part of the problem of NN and ML research is we all use the same standard loss and nonlinear functions. In theory most NN architectures are universal aproximators. But theres a big gap between symbolic and numeric computation.

But some of our bigger leaps in improvement weren't just from new architectures, but entire new approaches to how data is transformed, and how we calculate loss, for example KL divergence.

And it occured to me all we really need is training/test/validation data and with the right approach we can let the system discover the architecture (been done before), but also the nonlinear and loss functions itself, and see what pops out the other side as a result.

If a network can instrument its own code as it were, maybe it'd find new and useful nonlinear functions and losses. Networks wouldn't just specificy a conv layer here, or a maxpool there, but derive implementations of these all on their own.

More importantly with a little pruning, we could even use successful examples for bootstrapping smaller more efficient algorithms, all within the graph itself, and use genetic algorithms to mix and match nodes at training time to discover what works or doesn't, or do training, testing, and validation in batches, to anneal a network in the correct direction.

By generating variations of successful nodes and graphs, and using substitution, we can use comparison to minimize error (for some measure of error over accuracy and precision), and select the best graph variations, without strictly having to do much point mutation within any given node, minimizing deleterious effects, sort of like how gene expression leads to unexpected but fitness-improving results for an entire organism, while point-mutations typically cause disease.

It might seem like this wouldn't work out the gate, just on the basis of intuition, but I think the benefit of working through node substitutions or entire subgraph substitution, is that we can check test/validation loss before training is even complete.

If we train a network to specify a known loss, we can even have that evaluate the networks themselves, and run variations on our network loss node to find better losses during training time, and at some point let nodes refer to these same loss calculation graphs, within themselves, switching between them dynamically..via variation and substitution.

I could even invision probabilistic lists of jump addresses, or mappings of value ranges to jump addresses, or having await() style opcodes on some nodes that upon being encountered, queue-up ticks from upstream nodes whose calculations the await()ed node relies on, to do things like emergent convolution.

I've written all the classes and started on the interpreter itself, just a few things that need fleshed out now.

Heres my shitty little partial sketch of the opcodes and ideas.
https://pastebin.com/5yDTaApS

I think I'll teach it to do convolution, color recognition, maybe try mnist, or teach it step by step how to do sequence masking and prediction, dunno yet.

I made this: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1992288

Spare me if the title makes no sense grammatically, not a native speaker.

I'm building a microservice that keeps a check of the subscribers on my product, I wanted to keep an eye of those subscribers that may be missing the latest payment.

One way to do that is to make it work with my code and some ORM magic, but that may become unsustainable as the customer base grows, another idea that occurred to me was doing it fully inside (?) the database. The solution is to compare how many days have passed since the last payment and right now, if 'right now' is larger than 'last payment' then the subscriber is late with their next payment.

I did this as a PL/pgSQL function with an example usage accompanying that code.

Now, I just need to figure out how to use the result of those calculations in a WHERE statement...