I've told this one before, but the guy had his platform bought with a promise of partnership. they kept stalling the contract, and he would repeatedly ask when he was gonna get paid his share, and eventually they said "we never promised that". he deleted everything from the team's computers, revoked all access and left. since there was never a contract, they didn't do anything about it

I’m happiest about code I deleted.

Deleted code is easy to maintain, easy to read and it makes applications run faster.
Moreover applications take less disk space and are faster to download.

The more happy than about deleted code I’m about deleted software or destroyed computers.

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

Best
- got sick of computers, lost all my passion for this field

Worst:
- got sick of computers, lost all my passion for this field

I hope I'm just tired.

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

When I was in school, I had a period called "computers" every week. We were told by our computer teacher to remove our shoes outside the computer lab to prevent viruses from entering the computers.

For the Project Management exam, my university requires us to install a program on our PERSONAL laptops that is meant to take over the control over the entire system during the exam, monitor any “suspicious activities”. The software is closed-source (it’s called Schoolyear Exams), does god-knows-what in the background, takes the control over the entire system and can be summoned through any Chromium web browser.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that you want to make sure nobody is cheating - but at this point, I’d rather write it with pen and paper. Or just provide us with computers for the time of exam.

I decided to whip out my old laptop instead, installed a Windows 10 on a separate SSD, and installed that software on it.

Also it’s very amusing that this software is also mandatory for the Linux exam… But the program can’t run on Linux (it’s Windows and Mac only and doesn’t even support M1 chips).

EDIT: typos

The IT guy my parents had often at their home.

This guy thought me how to manage our network, how to create mobile apps. How to debug problems and so on. He sparked so much interest for computers in me and now i can't stop fiddleing around with computers.

Also this "electrician" who worked for my parents.
Basically he fixxed old keyboards, loudspeakers and stuff like that. He thought me about resistors, transistors, blue prints and how to solder stuff.

"Lötzinn blödsinn"

They both started my journey into the rabbit hole of technology.

In my current company (200+ employees) we have 3 guys who deals with everything related to service desk (format computers, fix network issues, help non-tech people...)

The same team is responsible for the AWS accounts and permissions, Jenkins, self hosted Gitlab... anyway, DevOps stuff.

Thing is: only one of them have enough DevOps background to handle the requests from the engineering team (~15 people). Also, he usually do anything "by hand" clicking trough the AWS interface on each account, never using tools like Infrastructure as Code to help (that's why I started to refer to his role only as Ops, because there's no Dev being done there).

Anyway... I asked my manager why that team is responsible for both jobs, despite the engineering guys having far more experience with those tools. He answered with a shamed smile, as he probably questioned the same to his manager:

- Because they are responsible for everything related to our Infrastructure.

Does it make sense for anyone? Am I missing something here? In what universe this kind of organization is a healthy choice?

Grandad showing me a commodore 64 that he had gotten for my uncles. shit was legit, had a bunch of games and cool shit in it. He also showed me BASIC (not programming or anything, but that it was a thing in it and the booklet explaining how to do games and stuff)

Mind you, the commodore was way beyond my years, I am a 91 baby, but he had it and kept it working and in good shape, the booklet was pristine (none of my uncles wanted to fk with that, neither did my dad).

He only showed me the machine because my mother had more vision that a lot of my family members at the time, asking him to let me use the computers that he had because she was sure (just as he) that computers were the future and a good educational tool for me.

Mom played a big ass role in me getting my comp sci degree, she was the one that celebrated it the most with my wife (wife pushed me through that degree to be honest) and my gdad is dead now, but he would have thought it would be cool to have another engineer in the family (he was an industrial engineer)

I lost 2TB of family photos and videos a few years ago by dropping a single hard drive. Nearly all of it was later found on people's computers who forgot to clean them up when we got the NAS. I'm not so eager to delete data once it's backed up ever since.

I can't believe fucking Google, aka me cha for SWEs decided that the best they can do is shove all that ram into our computers for Chromium. All of the major apps decided Electron was a good idea and now all of our computers are bloated with fatass memory hogs taking 600MB RAM.

Fuck you Goog.

Absolutely nothing excites me anymore in this field. Tech is such a commodity and I’m just so over all of it. Not gonna go all Ted Kaczinsky but I find myself longing for a time when not everything and everyone was controlled by computers. We’re not far from total transhumanism and despite what some may believe, that’s not a good thing.

Make sure to check out the latest Veritasium video. It's mostly about the analog computers of the 20th century. At the end he teased that part 2 will be about using analog computers for neural networks.

There are a couple:

A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)

A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!

A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss

Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P

git checkout origin/develop
git status
You are not currently on a branch.

Only computers and nerds can argue like that.
Expected behavior: I'm on branch develop, but nevermind, let's overcomplicate everything.

When at School there was a hack that went around all the local schools that caused computers to shutdown as soon as it gets to the login screen.

My parents didn't care at all. I guess they were just glad that they didn't have to pay for my expenses anymore, which they barely did anyway. Both have worked in physically demanding jobs and were extremely restrictive in the amount of time I could spend with computers.
Fucktards.

This is a sad story of bad recruitment in my school.

One day I had my computer class in school and my teacher was on leave so the substitution department sent another teacher to our class.

I have 3 computer teachers in my institution, let us assume their names for this rant as A, B and C.

A - The most learned teacher who has a lot of experience and also writes books. This teacher is the head of the department and wants students to explore coding.

B - A teacher who sticks to books and writes books on Excel and Powerpoint for small children.

C - The youngest teacher who has almost no experience at all.

What happened was that during the substitution, teacher C was sitting and doing her own work. I thought she might know java and other fundamentals of computers. One of my friends asked her about some bug in his program. She went to his seat and said that teacher A would come and help you out. To this, the student said ok.

I thought that the teacher had something fishy going on.

A few months later teacher B and A were talking about some coding competition and I was alone in the lab cause I am the only one in 11th with computer science.

The problem here was that C came to the room and quietly asked what is an object and class in java. I was shocked! I mean how could that happen, she is supposed to know everything in the comp sci syllabus. This was a disaster, teacher A was explaining to her about classes and objects. It was clear to me that she didn't know anything about programming in Java.

This is the fault of our school.

My school wants a good rank in the lists and for that they cut down the budget of teachers and remove old, experienced teachers for cheap, newer teachers.

This was shocking as a person who doesn't know much about something can't answer the doubts of children, this is a wrong way of teaching.

Hope you have a good day :)

i was probably 4 or 5, my mom brought some educational games from school and I'd often play them. I don't remember a time before computers though

Computers have threads. Computers are sewing machines

For all you chuckleheads that think the government will save us with a UBI and other free shit, consider that when I went to apply for unemployment, I got this message: "This website is designed to work with Internet Explorer version 8 and 9, Apple Safari version 4 and 5 or Mozilla Firefox version 16 and 17." Also, the website is mysteriously unable to allow you to apply for unemployment on any day other than Monday through Friday and at any time other than 8 am-5 pm. Those computers the government has have better time off constraints than I do!

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that will say gaming.
Because of gaming I've been in contact with computers a lot and learned a bunch of things that would become useful as the base for learning coding.
Things as simple as using and abusing the file system, file locking and files principles, Googling stuff, etc.

My dad saw an HP computer with wireless printer on HSN (Home Shopping Network). I was on the point of ordering it. I looked at their privacy notice wh. pretty much says we're going to know wh. porn you watch, with whom and when. Then we're going to sell the info. to everybody who might use it against you. Fuck that. Then I googled reviews of this outfit. Then it finally hit me: you don't order computers from home shopping networks. I'm glad it occurred to me before taking the plunge. They pull this shite telling you how much cheaper they're selling it for as opposed to retail, wh. is a complete lie because they jack up the retail price to make their selling price look cheap.

How we used to treat our computers back around 2000-2010 when they don't respond.
SLAP SLAP SLAP SLAP SLAP !!
SLAP THE MONITOR !!

Someone, a few years ago, tried to tell me computers don't have apps, only phones have apps. It still makes me wonder wtf from time to time.

Harari said of the idea of Data-ism:

---

In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.

We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering emails.

---

I was initially entertained by the punchline, but that was soon followed by the rather depressing realisation that my only value to greater society is essentially as a data processing unit

How did the good teacher know how to teach computer programming to the inpatient boy? He taught the kid about computers bit by bit!

Question - How are computers and air conditioners similar?

They are both useless when you open windows.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

Thats top notch design.
All actions happening on the page go to one endpoint. Removing old trusted computers, changing the password, changing 2FA, you name it.

Now if you want to remove all old trusted devices, you cannot remove all at once, there is no button for it. So you click one after the other. And then it stops working. Ok, then do the normal password rotation. Hmm, button has a loading spinner and then nothing happens.

Looking into the browser console:
- All requests go to /myaccount/security/graphql
- All requests get a 429 Too many requests
- Even if you just click a panel, it tracks the action to the graphql endpoint. Or at least tries to because even that gets shot down with a 429

Pretty dumb, eh? Must be some small shitty website. It's not. It's fucking paypal.

Had a dream about computers on earth mostly stopping working for no apparent reason, yes, again. But this time, they still work on Mars, so we go there, at least some of us. UAC-esque, Doom 3-ish aesthetics, but in a good way, no death and no darkness. No hell plot though, we’re all fine. Both earth and mars are equally semi-livable, but in different ways. For some reason, we can’t ship new CPUs to mars, and 775 pentium considered a good CPU. We use SQL and HDDs. Elon is also there, but he’s nothing, a peasant compared to other scientists and engineers who are a part of the exodus. I had some problems with food and shelter initially, but @netikras helped me

You know what, fuck this. I want a functionality that is supported on browser versions back to 2016 of the major browsers... Besides IE, where it isn't supported.

But honestly fuck IE users, they can have invisible characters. Certainly no other people above me in the management structure will be using old computers enough to lose it, or at least the head honcho should be able to overrule, as from past experience if it works on my machine and my boss' boss' machine, my boss' machine doesn't matter.

computers are fuckin weird sometimes.

Was just playing some hacking game, where each level is it's own user, acessed by ssh.
And suddenly copy-pasting passwords when prompted doesn't work ...

like, I can paste it in my terminal to see it, it can manually type it ... but I can't paste it into the prompt anymore.

It always worked until today, I could swear that!!
Why not today?

Went to my friends house and he had a new Amstrad CPC464, with ’Oh Mummy’, a Pac-Man close with better music.
Fell in love with computers from the moment I saw it and bought a Spectrum 128k+2 not long after.

What's the difference between computers and sex?

In one you put the software in the hardware, in the other, the hardware in the software.

My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games

A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time

My first interaction with a computer was probably playing Parsec on an old TI-99/A we dug out of the attic. After that there were a lot of troubleshooting sessions with my dad on various computers trying to get some game up and running. I still remember the IRQ/DMA combination needed to get sound in Duke.

It really is no mystery why I ended up working with this stuff.