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Search - "dangerous code"
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wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.
Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".
T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:
- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).
... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.
Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!11 -
My boss isn't really a developer. He isn't part of the development team and doesn't know any technical details about the product. He doesn't want to code, "too much effort", he just wants to boss. But he wrote some php in the early 2000's and is really, really proud of his codecademy html/css badge...
And that makes him dangerous.
Today I hear him talk from behind his laptop: "Right, we have this page for creating management groups, but we can't edit them yet. I can fix that!"
This task is literally on the current sprint, but he doesn't know that because he doesn't attend scrum meetings and ignores everything people say to him.
Me: This smells like probable cause, let's look with suspicion over his shoulder.
Boss:
"OK, right-click create.blade.php -> copy.
then right-click directory -> paste.
now just rename file to edit.blade.php!"
I start walking to the office kitchen.
Boss mumbling in the background:
"Now all I need to do is just copy the whole method in the controller, change the post url in the form, and modify the <h4> at the top, so it says edit instead of create."
Boss, looking at me now:
"This is so easy... creating and editing is almost the same thing, you can just copy paste all the code from one template to the other! I don't understand what you developers are always complaining about!"
Me: *Hands him a roll of paper towels*
Boss: "What is that for?"
Me: *points at code*6 -
Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.
If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.
First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)
So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.
What the fuck, Dell.
As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?
Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.
Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.
VS Code is pretty good, though.20 -
Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?
Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.
During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.
The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.
Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.
The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.
They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.
I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)
Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.
And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.11 -
Why do otherwise intelligent people think chatgpt code is a good idea if they don't know what the code does?
I am a bit in shock by this prospect. I asked about some lines of code that was using some templates I had not used before. The response was "I dunno, chatgpt." This person is really really smart. Yet deploying code that they don't understand completely. This seems dangerous and irresponsible. I ended up rewriting the function I had questions about. It was significantly shorter and didn't do a fuckton of copying strings around.
WTF is wrong with people? Are people afraid to think? Now I want to get out before this kind of shit becomes the norm.13 -
I seear man fucking shit php devs make it hard for people to appreciate the language.
To start, i don't think there is anything wrong with php. As a language I know damn near all of its pitfalls and have successfully deployed huge applications with minimal fuss.
The thing is...this shit seems to happen only when I AM THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT DOES IT
In any other scenario i am constantly cursing the original author under my fucking breath hoping that they choke on their own dicks. Fucking cunts.
Really man, some of the fucking code i have seen. This shit is dangerous as fuck and i can't believe that in 2019 motherfuckers would not have the decency to google for best fucking practices or learn it from a fucking book and shit.
Writing proper php code is not that fucking hard people, every fucking update to the language, every fucking tool that comes out is for the betterment of it.
Guess proper oop or functional paradigms are too complex for some dickheads. Hell, not even top to bottom procedural code.
Fuck me. Good thing is, boss is happy, the entire faculty is happy, the board is happy. Everyone is motherfucking happy.
Dez negroids better remember this shit cuz I just asked for a $20k raise.
I got a raise literally every time i ask for one so this one better make the cut.
Fuck shit php developers man. Y'all don't deserve the language, y'all make the language look bad, y'all make the community look bad.
Fuck you, die and eat a dick. Do all that shit in whatever order you prefer.15 -
Sometimes I see advice given to others that is either clearly wrong or even dangerous, but it's not socially acceptable to call them out on it because 'everyone is entitled to their opinion'.
Yes, you're right. I'm entitled to my opinion based on doing this for 20 years and facing your exact, usually "junior" situation a hundred times. You did a code camp earlier this year and still think JSX is part of the Ecmascript standard.
There is a difference, and not being able to point it out without being scolded for being "entitled" (ironically) is slowly draining me of any interest in helping others.
How the fuck do you cope with this?18 -
My boss knows nothing about development. JUST buzzwords.
*in regards to a project* Boss: "just write it in PHP; it'll be easy!"
Me: "you know PHP?"
Boss (fully serious): "...enough to be dangerous."
He has never written a line of code in his life, let alone has any clue about what PHP does. Whenever I want to fuel my rage, I think about this moment.7 -
I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.
At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.
At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).
At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.
So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.
The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...
I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!3 -
REAL Programmers Don't //COMMENT their </CODE>.
If it was HARD to WRITE
It Should be HARD to UNDERSTAND
Comment if you "Agreed"8 -
I can vaguely remember the 4 year old me turning the computer on while my cousin starts a dos shell to play Dangerous Dave.
5 year old me finds wolfenstien installed on my windows 95 , doom a few years later , quake after that .. one masterpiece after another.
Little did I know that software can make memories.
I grew up with software made by these legends and nothing excites me more than the dream of one day being in a team just like theirs with the goal of having fun and spreading it.
Carmack and Romero .. the people who architected fun from code.2 -
The people. I find devs to be (obvious generalization) prone to: not take criticism, not understand the difference between fact and opinion, not understanding that it is perfectly acceptable to change your point of view when presented with new information that will conflict with what you currently believe in. It is a sausage fest brought to you by eons of very fragile male ego in the making, and many other qualities that were very much diluted in a lot of the other fields I have worked on: from retail (shitfest) to import/export all the way to military (another shitfest, for different and rather dangerous reasons).
I have met some amazing people in the field, don't get me wrong, but the quirkiest of mfkers i have met make me believe that maybe I AM the one that does not belong in the field (top kek).
On a more technical side, basic stuff like reading comprehension, attention to detail, the ability to translate complex problemd to pieces and that interconnect among the themselves, the ability to understand the grand mathematical scheme of things, the ability to be patient and despite what the above generalization would have you believe...the ability to communicate with other humans with tact and understanding as well as a spirit of collaboration, etc etc, are definitive traits to consider if you want a career in software development that leads above just being a code monkey.
Shit like that.8 -
One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.
Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.
Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.
A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.
After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.
Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)
As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.
However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports
They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.
After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...
The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.
In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs. -
So a junior at Twitter created a linter that detects harmful language, then twitter decides to migrate all of their code and documentation to avoid “dangerous language”. The twitter handle of said junior - “negroprogrammer”. The only words twitter should start including in their business is cognitive dissonance.
Ok this should be interesting but this is devRant after all and I couldn’t just not mention this. Cancel me.6 -
Joomla, motherfucking Joomla. It was supposed to make managing content easy. With just a little coding you could make a fully functional, multi page website. Ugh. It took more time to master the oddities and weirdness of Joomla than it would have to just code the fucker.
This taught me the painful lesson that there are no REAL shortcuts. Useful “shortcuts” in development are just abstractions over mastery of a task. There are many more shortcuts that are more like dangerous hacks, and Joomla is rife with them and opens a lot of opportunities to make more.2 -
Data wrangling is messy
I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.
And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."
yeah, no.
(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)
Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.
So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.
Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.
But for now, flora.
For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:
* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.
For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)
Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.
The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).
Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.
As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.
Data wrangling is fun.1 -
How dangerous am I?
I code it live.
I code while people are working on our website and make all the changes live. And if I notice an abrupt stop in responses to our logs I git stash my changes.5 -
It's really sick how beginners start to code in Javascript and CSS, and their complex frameworks, without even understanding atleast the paradigm first. Googling your way up can be fine for smart ones, but as least time optimal this learning method sounds, it's as dangerous and non-productive too.
Also once project gets to a certain level, it's practically impossible to revisit and refactor old codes in front-end languages which kills the maintainability. Views?3 -
Important merge request howto:
- Hey, I implemented very important server change and it doesn't break compatibility with current clients!
- Cool, but we don't need this compatibility code. We'll adopt our clients as soon as the merge request is accepted.
- Ok, I removed support of current clients.
- Cool, but it's too dangerous to adopt our clients rights now. We'll accept your merge request later. Some other day... somewhere... some other time... -
Hackerman strikes back. Always thought the new knowledge about stego tools, reversing, enumeration, privesc were just my private amusement. But could now use it, hopefully resolving a severe crash by dropping our binary into radare2 (cutter) and ghidra, identifying some dangerous code.
Also it gives you new angles to look at things. E.g. the vectors your code might expose...3 -
man if i could figure out how to do stuff and had the money to do stuff i'd be dangerous as fuck, but as of now i can only posit questions... it sucks.
Examples:
- What do modern browsers/crawlers do when hit with, say, an "HTTP 450 Blocked by Windows Parental Controls" or an "HTTP 374" status code?
- What happens if I do <xyz minor edge case thing> on <system?> (just use your imagination, this happens for every edge case i can think of for every system and the list wouldn't fit in a few megs' worth of half-byte ASCII, much less *here*)
- What if I made like a board to fuck with busses while systems were on? Press a button and for like five bus clock cycles pins like 6 and 7 are shorted? That sort of thing. As for system/bus types, *literally any* (old consoles with expansion ports, PCI/-e/-X/whatever, southbridge, etc.)
- What if I did <filetype> shenanigans by doing <something indescribably horrible> to this file? How do things react?3 -
been taking tryptophan for a few months which basically makes you happy cuz it gets turned into serotonin
at first it was like a mild psychedelic a bit and you were really happy (and less extreme than 5htp...)
then I stopped feeling it so I wanted to get off it. plus I had some weird strangely pissy days which might point to tolerance issues
serotonin withdrawal would've probably been 3 days, or 1-2 weeks, of being irritated and miserable
instead I braved trying a new drug I bought a long time ago but didn't bother trying for reasons. I'm taking extremely small doses cuz it could be massively dangerous. been weird lately. brain kind of good but out of it in a different way. well turns out today I was reading up on it (I always take drugs then read up on what they do after... life skills!) and it increases serotonin receptor sensitivity lol
why go through serotonin withdrawal due to tolerance when you can just take drugs to decrease tolerance?! bet you this means you'll have a MEGA withdrawal, not just from your receptors becoming insensitive, but also the receptors for making your receptors more sensitive becoming insensitive!
anyway music sounds amazing and I really should stop wondering about random shit for no reason at all. as is typical in psychedelics one can have amazing thoughts and can't iron out all the details so communication goes to garbage. fun fun fun fun
it's also apparently a pretty amazing nootropic. unexpected. and cures cancer. like a bunch of other shit but this crap apparently reversed literal fucking radiation exposure and super aggressive brain cancers? bruh. was taking it for the chance I had polio lol. jury's still out on that. left side still numb, though I'm getting a bunch of minor sensations back all over the place but it could just be the nootropic aspect. apparently it does brain growth factor like other stuff I've taken but this feels stronger
the reason I didn't take it is cuz it comes with scary warning labels for autoimmune conditions and the most likely theory is that my immune system is attacking my nerves. but this might be misinformation again because it's also given to conditions that are autoimmune and might lessen their symptoms or fix them... grrrr I hate modern "science". money > lives and fuck you. and don't let that sentence fool you into thinking if you have money they'll help you, they can't help anyone, they're just there to misinform and trap you so they can milk you. pay to play MMO but the developers can't even give you good gear they're too incompetent to code the numbers in, they're just designers changing the icons around2 -
Learn git. Contribute to open source projects - you may learn more from code review on a single PR than from a whole tutorial. Ask questions constantly. Learn more git. Look for the cleanest solution to a problem. Write code that is easy to improve, easy to expand, and easy to debug. Learn even more git. Don't limit yourself to thinking only in terms of OOP, or functional, or procedural, or whatever type of programming you may be comfortable with. Don't be afraid to do some work by hand. Learn git, so that when all comes crashing down and your team crumbles to pieces, when your relationships fail and your friends disappear, when you're down on your luck and there truly is no hope left in life, you can check out of the dangerous world of your current HEAD and return to the home and comfort of your master branch, which you've kept safe, secure, and functional.
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Possessiveness over one's code is more dangerous than possessiveness over his girl - codes are getting closer to heart