There's nothing like playing Cards Against Downtime with colleagues while lunchtime :D

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

!(short rant)

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

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

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

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

I wanted a computer for my Christmas. Must have been 1987 and I just have been about 8.

A few days before Xmas my aunt gave me a card with £5 in it. I asked my dad “dad, if I was getting a computer I could use the £5 to buy a game”

My dad explained to me that we couldn’t afford it and maybe next year.

Woke up the next morning to a shiny new Commodore 64 AND my own little tv.

Never been happier.

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

I completwly hate windows. Tomorrow I've got an exam, I wanted to play for an hour before I go to sleep to relax. Boot into windows half an hour early because I knew it would fuck up somehow (I'm usually on linux, windows is there only for games). Graphics card driver isn't working anymore (AMD), uninstall with their tool, restart. And now windows goes like "FUCK YOU!!! YOU ARE NOT PLAYING SHIT TODAY YOU SAD FUCK!" in the form of "Getting windows ready for you, please don't turn off your computer" for the past 2 hours. I just wanted to play a game and now I'm so fuckin triggered by this non-sense of an OS, how can someone make something so fuckin shit

TL;DR; I unfucked a micro sd used by a nintendo switch with one command: fsck

I had noticed that the nintendo switch displayed way more storage usage then it should. I didn't mind at first, but at some point I couldn't download any games. When I checked I saw some ridiculous storage usage.

According to the system, all games summed up ~20Gb, but >100Gb was in use? Sounds retarded, so I did the following:
* Plugged it into laptop
* Spend one our searching for a way to to access this seemingly unknown filesystem
* Find out this filesystem is actually exFAT
* Find out that 2/3 sd adapters suck
* check filesystem with dust (A visually more pleasing version of du)
* Find 20Gb of files, nothing hidden or whatever
* run fsck
* "File system contains some errors want me to fix then?"
* "Sure"
* check usage
* 17%

As for the reason why this happened in the first place, my guess is that the switch labels the whole segment of the card as used before downloading a game and it something goes wrong, it shits itself.

Anyways, fsck is a pretty useful command.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

A blockchain trading card game

An easy version of Spot-it for devRanters generated by match-it

I gave you a chance, Nvidia. It could have been a good thing, but no. You are still crap. About two years ago, my son's graphics card (an Nvidia) died, so I thought, I'll give him my nice Radeon card, and got myself a new card. For some reason, reason failed me, and I got a GTX 1070. It's been a nice enough card, and worked well. And then the last driver update happened. Fallout 4 started to CTD before it even booted to the main menu. Me, not thinking (again) thought it was a mod, so I uninstalled and deleted and reinstalled again, with all 120 mods. Nope. Still crashing. Then I noticed, as the game booted, the fans started to ramp up, and I could tell exactly when it would crash be the sound of fans. I was expecting the computer to taxi out the room. Rolled the driver update back to the last one that worked. Now I can log in again, and things are mostly stable. Still crashes, but not as bad, probably due to reloading the mods and missing something. When the RX 3080 hits the market, bye bye Nvidia. You haven't changed a bit over the years. We're through.

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

Windows - how can someone possible get something done?

I gave up and are now installing windows for my son so he can install a game that only exists under windows.

Did a clean install, no network drivers found. Looked under device manager and tried to find out what network card there is on his computer. Unknown device :@

Finally found the manufactures dvd, ofcourse we get some bloatware, killer network manager.

Tried to uninstall it, the drivers was also uninstalled. :O Had to install it again and do some googling and finally found some pure drivers. Uninstalled the f*** Killer software again, and then installed the pure drivers. It works :)

Then I tried the speakers ... :@

Thank god my son is in school and can't hear my language right now.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

Last night: Wow, I just finished that massive feature and I still get some time left! Why not play something?!

Oh crap, this game is so cool but my video card drivers needs an update (AMD Radeon on a Fedora system).

The proprietary drivers don't run on this version of Xorg server... Fine, let's search for some solutions online and... Hey! Found it! Let's see: downgrade Xorg, download the driver, patch it for your kernel version...

Did I just fucked my display? Oh yeah... Let's try to fix it........

Fuck...

5am: Finally got it all working perfectly again... Fuck this game, I hate it!

On your standard epitome of being a geek, I started to show my coworkers how to play Cardfight Vanguard, a TCG since we all love TCG's (we play Magic, Pokemon and a few others) and we had made Friday our official "TCG or Board Game" day.

List of games we have played:
Star Wars CCG (dear lord this game is BEAUTIFUL shame it is no longer being published)

Magic the Gathering, we have a love hate relationship with this game, mana plays a big reason as to why we do not fully love it, it sucks getting stuck with no possibility of drawing proper mana.

Pokemon - Easy to get into, easy to play, there is nt much more to say, by far, our favorite in terms of how much money we can make out of selling rare cards that we do not use.

Dice Masters - My Personal favorite, and I am also the undisputed champion of our group

Cardfight Vanguard is my current favorite, very tactical in a lot of ways, luck of the draw hits in a funny way, I feel it is properly balanced, not much bullshit ass rules or mana issues. Reminds me of Duel Masters, I used to LOVE that Game, but Wizards of the Coast and the anime fucked it up so well....

Anyone here likes playing card games?

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

Spot it like card game generator

Fuck you Steam, just fuck you and your price politics.

I have a Swiss and one Russian Steam account. I have on my Swiss account over 450 Games and on the russian one around 4.

I have a friend in Russia and to play some games with him, I need a russian account.

Guess what? Since the last change to Steam Shop I cant use my Swiss Credit Card anymore to buy games in Russia.

Now when I want to test a game first on the russian account and when it's good to buy it after on my main Account, I can't.

Why should I pay for a game in Early Access the full price, when the game is bad and will be abadoned in a half year?

Sure they are some good early access games, which I payd the full price for (Switzerland has the highest Steam Game prices). As example ARK or Battlegrounds. I love these games and like to support the Devs.

But I get really angry when I have to pay for a Game which is worth 5 $ and sold in my Country for 20 $ and will be unsupported after a year.

Really fuck you Valve and Steam 🖕🏻🖕🏻😡

Atleast refund the people the money, when the game is abadoned! But sure, you're just in for a Cash Grab...

when I was like 11yrs. old, my father has bought a new phone for himself. I used to play a lot of gta vice city those days on my PC. one day i got to use a card reader to exchange multimedia between PC and the phone.
so, i copied gta vice city in my phone. bcoz i knew that i can move around the players using the phone's d-pad. I was left broken when I saw the error msg. in the phone: "file not recognised"
:-/
After few days, my friend wanted to play gta-vc, so he asked for the game CD. but this guy didn't have a computer in his home and he won't listen to me when I try to tell him, "you can't just play a video game in your DVD-player with a TV remote??" So, I gave it to him.
Next day, he was angry at me, bcoz the game didn't worked, obviously it was me who hve messed something in it. :-/

What utterly stupid things you guys or your friends have done?

I had a guy ask me to write a simple script for a simple card memory game. He wanted it scripted in JavaScript. Already I hate my life but I say alright and spit it out to him quick. Now he wants it on the web, Android, and iOS...in JavaScript 😓😅😂

alright so I've been at my new job for 3 days now. I got a complain that I was talking too much or was just in general to noisy.

I'm sure alot of other developers do this but when I am programming I talk myself through steps. I understand that this is an office environment and I need to keep quiet. But what I don't like is that other full time employees are being hypocritical.

One other worker had a 40 minute conversation, that I'm sure the entire office could hear, about the card game bridges.
Another was full on yelling at a team of devs over the phone about how they should get the entire team to work on a bug that he had found.

I made a script that performs some analysis on data from a trading card game tournament and I would appreciate your input

Def not dev oriented.

I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.

SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.

This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"

Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.

So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.

My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.

I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.

This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.

Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.

These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.

Kings

Spending 40% time I'm playing a game waiting for the game to load :/
Should have gotten a laptop with a graphics card... :(

Today I got hit in the balls by finding out that my idea of a videogame already existed in the form of a game called Phantom Dust, originally released for the first Xbox series, before the end of turn into the Xbox 360 series.

What adds insult to injury: The game is absolutely beautiful, fantastic and I have no gripes about the gameplay. It is everything I was hoping to develop.

This just makes my venture into game development in the land of Vulkan C that much more interesting.

If you LOVE card games(read Trading Card Games) like MTG, Pokemon, YugiOh etc, then you owe it to yourself to play this game

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Why do all my scammers on telegram say on telegram that they're currently chatting on business account and if you can add them on private? Is it so that they can see more info about you since you have them in your contact list and see how willing / naive you are? I always play the game along and did once added it to my WhatsApp. Maybe that's the reason why I had two human phone calls by scammers now. They labeled you as "easy" and now send the heavy weight scammers to you I guess. Recently, I got a call from PayPal, automated, and they said some suspicious thing was going on at my account and that they want to verify a big purchase. I do have my card attached - so, who knows. Sounded realistic but already was sus ofc. I had to press one to talk to someone. I did, why not. So then I got some Indian or do on the line saying bought iPhone blablabla and I was like. Yeah sure.. I wanted to play the game along to find out what the scam was - but his English had such huge accent that I've just hung up the phone.

It's impossible to find out how scam works, they always notice at a certain point I'm scamming them.

But because of going far into these games, I think I'm on some easy list and that's the reason I've encounter so many. So just playing the game along isn't without consequences.

I've teached my scammer using a translator I had just now how to properly scam dutch people. Don't be that formal, that word is outdated and also, dutch people can't speak Dutch at all. So if quality of dutch has a certain level you know they want smth from you. If AI did beat us in one thing it's languages I guess. It can even speak Gen z and formal and informal

Becoming one of the world's top players in the card game of Yugioh.

A long with actively getting good at other card games and board games.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

Been wanting to develop a card game app. This time I'm actually gonna do it.....ok I'm gonna go ahead and install android studio :) first of many mistakes to come

Learning to tech to speed up learning.
Using a new cooperative learning technique, AI Lab researchers cut by half the time it took a pair of robot agents to learn to maneuver to opposite sides of a virtual room.

A combination of deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms are responsible for computers achieving dominance at challenging board games like chess and Go, a growing number of video games, including Ms. Pac-Man, and some card games, including poker. But for all the progress, computers still get stuck the closer a game resembles real life, with hidden information, multiple players, continuous play, and a mix of short and long-term rewards that make computing the optimal move hopelessly complex.

Image: Dong-ki Kim

WCF doesn't like me adding to lists...

I have to make an uno game that supports multiplayer with WCF for school...

I have a player class that has a list of card classes.

I have a function called dealHand, it adds Cards to the hand list...

I also have a callback function for updating my wpf gui...

For whatever reason if when the gui calls dealhand and I try to use myList.add(new Card()) then the updategui function in my wpf client doesn't fire...

But if I take a seperate method called makeHand which returns a list of cards, and just do myList = makeHand() then that works fine...

Never been so baffled/cursed so much at code before... Is there something about Lists that WCF doesn't like? Seriously... was weird...

Hopefully that was somewhat coherent...

I created a 5 card draw poker game in vb.net in 11th grade and afterwards knew that I wanted to write code for a living.

I once was sitting in a somewhat boring class on networks and computer architecture towards the end of the term. Nobody was really listening and the lecture was kind of a collection of random bits and pieces related to the subject matter.
So I tried out playing Duke Nukem on my rather weak laptop on DosBox. I was sitting quite in front of the class room, and the profesor could clearly hear my fan working like crazy. Later in his lecture he did a short excourse on cloud gaming, showing us nVidia's graphics card cloud where you could do remote gaming, the graphics being rendered remotely and streamed to your box over the interwebs.
I looked up from my game and said to the professor: "If I had this now, my fan would not be that loud." Even the professor laughed.

Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?

They added Fail Mode to Super Mario Odyssey — a set of ridiculously hard maps where you’re expected to fall down, but your gameplay is recorded, and in-game NPCs laugh at you. But, if you jump really far using boosters from Mario Kart, you can end up in rock climbing mode. When you reach the end, you get to a half-oasis, half-purgatory where there is a poker table, and other NPCs greet you.

There are a lot of chips, but they mean nothing — you got to invent your own rules.

Among those chips, I found a surf green-colored micro SD card. I put it into my Switch, and the whole new game opened: a hybrid of Mario and Subway Surfers where I’m being chased by half-Peach, half-Thomas the Tank Engine.

When we reached the end, we lost our furry friend. But he was hiding in a dresser drawer, with a sex doll. Not an inflatable one, mind you, and not a silicone one either: the material resembled that of Barbie dolls.

She was a human-size, pretty Caucasian girl. I talked to her. Yes, she could talk, and the voice wasn’t robotic — she was definitely alive. Despite being a completely empty shell, she was conscious, albeit very dumb.

Her name was Near. This is the joke she told me:

— Knock-knock.

— Who’s there?

— Andy.
— Andy who?
— Andy who was imprisoned for sexual assault five years ago, duh!

Do you think is it worth buying macbook air or some other laptop for the same price? I know I can get better specs for that money but I dont game or do a lot of video editing so I Don't need a beast graphic card, I just need it for coding. What do you think?

A multiplayer client-server card game that has remained half-developed for far too long

So my mom really really dislikes the Xbox text system. Everytime I would ask for a game on Xbox (when I played Xbox) she would just fucking throw her card at me and bam free games. Not really help, just kinda less stress.

I'm pissed at my laptop. Its using the on board graphics instead of the dedicated graphics card. I've searched everywhere and can't find a solution. I've tried just disabling the on board graphics in the device manager, but then I can't plugin external monitors. And on top of that when opening a game it doesn't even use the GPU it uses the CPU

Anyone have advice? The onboard is AMD Radeon R7 and the card is an AMD RX 560

Has anyone heard of The Great Dalmuti?

it's a card game for those of you who don't know

🎮 Why do so many videogames have bad anti-aliasing implementation? It is so easy to implement: just draw on a larger texture, then scale back to the target resolution

I've been playing Forza Horizon 4 and League of Legends lately and both games have terrible anti-aliasing; I can see pixels and cringy blur around the edges. Elden Ring is another game where anti-aliasing sucks

I understand that not every user can benefit from anti-aliasing because you need powerful graphics card; but still. Feels bad

Card Game
I use it very often for explanation...

"being gifted is a curse. You are f*cling crippled, you believed you were gifted, but you have been crippled the whole time."

I never could agree more to these words (healthyGamerGg, a youtube therapist specialized in people with issues related to videogames)

If you read my last rant you may in fact know i have a lot of issues with the implications of our jobs and truth be told, it all boils down to my iq.
Or better: to the fact i have a decent skill for abstracting stuff (iq is so freaking generic)... It can be a blessing while solving issues, but it feels awful when you realize that no matter the amount of money, you will still need something else to be happy the first day of work.
Sometimes I really wonder if I am an a-hole, stupid or if i think these 2 things to deny the fact my reasoning is correct.

On a side note table top games are very easy to enjoy: as soon as I sit at the table my brain goes: "the game is gonna be very boring if you play normally, at the best you are gonna learn a new strat, at the worst you are winning and it'll be just an ego jerk off... What if you play stuff you feel like to play and enjoy the ride and the conversation without planning to win?"
Except cards against humanity and yogi. Those two must be won!
(Yogi is a game where you play cards which give you restrictions e.g: "keep an index on the tip of the nose for the rest of the game" or "place this card on your head for the rest of the game" you lose as soon as you fail any of the cards you played or if you declare you can't draw)

Let’s play a game :
With some spare part you have somewhere in the boxes, what can you build “best” and what’s missing ?
I’ll start. With unused parts in my boxes I can build :
• Core I7 3770k on Sabertooth motherboard
• 16 GB of RAM
• GTX 770 as video card.
• 4K Asus screen
• Creative sound card
Missing :
• The case
• PSU
• Hard drives/SSD

I format the memory card of my PS2 with Free MC Boot. 👨🏻‍💻*Hackerman*
Mhe is not that hard just need to play from my HDD I'm kinda bored.

Have any game to recommend?!