Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

I absorb the souls of my enemies.

(And study but mostly the first)

So that coworker of mine who got promoted to manager keeps continuing on abusing her new power. She convinced upper management to implement a new policy where you would be disqualified from your monthly performance incentives if you take 2 total sick days a month. She says this is to reduce the number of sick days people take, which of course upper management loved hearing.

By the way, since she's a manager now, this particular policy doesn't affect her - it only applies to us in the trenches. She can still take as many sick days as she wants, since being a manager she can work from home.

Needless to say, save for a couple of suck-ups, she's lost a lot of friends and made a number of enemies in our department, particularly on our dev team.

Fuck it. I'm tired. Anybody found me a rich husband? I'm ready to assume the role of a trophy wife.

1. Still no recommendation letter. My PhD application is hanging on a thread. If I were such an intolerable ass, someone could've at least told me. Or at least told me "no" when I asked them to write these damn letters.
2. I turned down a job offer, cuz a) offered salary was below market average for that role on that level, b) the guy who was supposed to be my senior and the only other person in the team gave the vibe that he disliked me, and c) asked the PM a simple question of what is his expectations of the product for the next three to six months and didn't get a solid answer. (Can't do magic tricks)
So I turned it down cuz I don't want to get stuck in another's swamp. (Been there, done that!)
3. I'm running out of ideas for the comic I was working on. As well, the backgrounds of drawings proved to be an absolute hassle. Gah.
4. So, the next switch is to the barista role. I have signed up for a lackey/intern/assistant role which starts in about two weeks. Wish me luck cuz if this doesn't work out I'm all out of ideas. Like, literally don't know what I'm doing with my life anymore. Which will make those who are jealous of me really happy, but I shouldn't make my life about what doesn't make enemies and frenemies happy, right?

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

!dev
!!politics (kinda)

Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:

Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”

Everyone: *crickets*

Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?

And later, here’s another gem:

Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”

Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)

Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.

Snitches get stitches.

#1 life lesson I learned from coding?

Maybe not coding specifically, but I learned the difference between problem solving and solution finding.
Its helped me in a lot of areas of my life. Made friends and made enemies.

So I recently had a university project which focuses video game audio. We had to work in groups of 3 students and the task was to create a video game which uses audio as a gameplay mechanic.

Our idea was to create a game where you collect different audio samples which get looped as background music, and you have to select the correct ones to have a nice tune. To make it a bit more challenging we had enemies, guns and grenades plus doors which only open if the correct music is playing.

The guns fire on-beat, and the grenades always explode on the first beat of the next bar.
It was quite challenging to get things synced since even small offsets are noticable.

I wrote some nice code and theoretically it should have worked but for some reason the gun shots and the grenades didn't quite hit the beat of the music.

I tweaked stuff, created workarounds, optimized lot's of code to get execution times down but it still only worked sometimes.

I tweaked more and more only to realize that the timing drifted over time.

At that time I worked 20-30 hours on tweaking and trying to get it perfectly timed.

After recalculating some numbers I realized that all the audio samples are recorded at 135 bpm, but the guys who did the recordings said it was 130bpm.

I asked them if it could be the case that the samples are 135bpm and they said:
"yes, they are at 135 bpm as we told you"

I scrolled back in the telegram conversation only to see that they said 130.
Changing the number to 135 resolved all the problems and all of my workarounds and tweaks weren't needed.

So I worked for nearly 30 hours just because they didn't notice their fault and even when they realized that the timing is off sometimes (which took forever because they never played the game), they didn't even consider that they might have given me the wrong numbers.

This all wouldn't be that bad if both of my teammates had worked for more than 15 hours but they didn't. I did all the hard work and the only single thing they did fucked up my workflow. It fucked up the system I created and it fucked up the gameplay as things got unpredictable. Because of their fucking fault I worked as much as both of them combined IN ADDITION to all the other work I did (built 3 maps, coded everything, created animations, ...)

I love working in teams, but only if the whole team is motivated. Those two fuckers were the exact opposite.
Luckily i found the error so I could fix it, but guess with whom I'll never ever work together again?

Can we rant about coworking spaces?

I like the coworking office concept and I love this desk I have for myself, I like this building, the supervisor is sweet and I made new clients here...

But I hate one of my "neighbours".

We have several office rules and he constantly breaks them.

No music allowed without headphones. Nope, gotta listen to shitty radio straight from the smartphone speaker.

No loud conferences or phone talks. Nah, let's set the volume to the max. And leave the phone behind and let it ring loudly forever.

You can only occupy one desk unless you rent more. In comes his coworker who keeps occupying an extra desk for free and who's as loud as he is. And bring the kids because hey, growing up bored inside a office is good for them.

And today's newest: no eating in the office. Coworker brought her kid who set up a -dinning table- on the extra desk and began eating her lunch leftovers. It wouldn't have been so bad and I wouldn't have noticed except the office was overflowed with the stench of overheated pasta.

This is a big office. I had to open the windows. I can still feel the smell. It's nauseating.

I didn't say anything because it's not the kid's fault they didn't take her to the building's canteen space. But at the risk of making enemies where I shouldn't, I need to have a "fun" talk with someone.

I only made enemies through coding- does that count?

An undetectable ML-based aimbot that visually recognizes enemies and your crosshairs in images copied from the GPU head, and produces emulated mouse movements on the OS-level to aim for you.

Undetectable because it uses the same api to retrieve images as gameplay streaming software, whereas almost all existing aimbots must somehow directly access the memory of the running game.

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

sudo rm -rf [ENEMIES...]

Removes ENEMIES and their children recursively.

How to make enemies:

#include <unistd.h>

int main(void) {
while(1) fork();
}

Get spammed by some loser on substack and learn how to break the law in 50+ countries! yay!!!!

god

🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

i swear i'm going to start a new SaaS equivalent to send your enemies glitter but its called send your substack enemies glitter and it just spams them forever with fake emails

Don't know about friends but I got a lot of enemies. 😂

Game I'm currently programming. Still have a good ways to go. (Enemies need to be included)

Been using linux for over 10 years, just got so-called-fast-no-windows-defender-no-bloatware-completely-revamped-clean-and-resource-efficient Windows 10 Lite poromotion by 3 close friends. we are now enemies.

Hi FuLlStAcKcLoWn,

I fOuNd A fEw ErRoRs On YoUr SiTe.

MaY i SeNd OvEr SoMe Of ThOsE eRrOrS aNd AuDiT rEpOrT wItH pRiCeS?

i’m LoOkInG fOrWaRd To YoUr RePlY

bEsT rEgArDs

god this is getting repetitive, how can we spam the spammers? wasn't there a site like "send your enemies glitter"? classic!

i guess this is what I get for putting my company email public

but really, what happened to gmail's spam filter? should spot ones like these from miles away

First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.

Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.

Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS

Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS

From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.

Here's an idea: starting my own botfarm to automatically downvote obnoxious adbots that simply won't stop tickling our collective fucking testicle sax with unrequited love stories and crypto bullshit.

To detect the sheeit, just look for idiot giving contact info in a rant about hacking the device of your unfaithful spouse/treacherous cyber girlfriend who also ran a bitcoin scam and fucked you in the ass with a welding torch. That should do the trick, I can give you that power with a perl script, because fuck you that's why.

But since there is no moderation in this bitch, daring to offer me sufficient knowledge to the inner workings of such a construct would be exceptionally perilous to your asshole. That is to say, nothing could then stop me from redirecting said botfarm to target my enemies and anally assault their every rant and comment.

Indubitably, this would in turn quickly spiral into digital warfare of cyberfeudal lords pitting their automated fake accounts against each other. Millions will die. Upside being hexical gets to pull the plug without guilt.

What do you say? Should we begin the apocalypse?

distractions are the greatest enemies of humanity rn

Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.

But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.

And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.

Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.

And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...

The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".

Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!

"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.

And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...

"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "

"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".

But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "

"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.

That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.

Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!

And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.

And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.

[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?

We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?

Look no further than BloodCurse, the ancient hex that will haunt your family for countless generations! With BloodCurse, you may crawl the earth as a mindless, shameless, piece of shit cockswallowing JUGGERNAUT that craves nothing BUT the consumption of scabbed human ass!

BloodCurse is easily contracted through consumption of the GENITAL fluids of highly-lecherous succubi, conjured through [EXTREMELY CENSORED]! This forbidden arcana allows the user to debour HIS OWN testicles in no time!

Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!

Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>

:~

what: robots
why: TO C R U S H MY ENEMIES UNDER MY ALUMINIUM FIST

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

Is it just me or everyone feels like developers and IT Admins are enemies?

Texas jokes time!

M16: Jams when dirty
AK-47: Works when dirty
Mosin-Nagant: Wasn’t clean since issuing in 1932

M16: You’d rather die than break your expensive rifle in melee
AK-47: Your rifle works good in melee
Mosin-Nagant: Your rifle is a spear that can shoot

M16: 40mm grenade launcher is heavy, but is accurate up to 200 meters
AK-47: If something goes wrong, you can throw a 40mm grenade into the window yourself
Mosin-Nagant: Throwing grenades into windows? Shoot through the wall, your cartridge penetrates one meter of brick

M16: You can use a suppressor, a small bullet doesn’t make much noise
AK-47: You can use a suppressor, but it’s better to spray and pray
Mosin-Nagant: You don’t need a suppressor — everyone will go deaf after the first shot anyway

M16: More complex than some aeroplanes
AK-47: Used by countries that have no money for aeroplanes
Mosin-Nagant: Was used to shoot down aeroplanes

A favourite drink of the user:
M16: Whiskey
AK-47: Vodka
Mosin-Nagant: brake fluid

M16: Makes a small hole, obeys the Geneva convention
AK-47: Makes a large hole, doesn’t obey the Geneva convention
Mosin-Nagant: One of the reasons for the creation of the Geneva convention

M16: Perfect for shooting squirrels
AK-47: Perfect for shooting enemies of the State
Mosin-Nagant: Perfect for shooting armoured personnel carriers

How to make enemies of a lot of people very quickly with a github issue SPAM.

"Developer and Tester" The biggest enemies in the universe;

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

About 2/3 weeks ago had to deliver a college project where we were supposed to create a snake multilayer game on win32 API.

Just to discover how to create a simple dialogue box with sliders and retrieve the values it took 1 entire day. Just handle a simple dialogue box!

And I found the solution on a forum post from the last millennium. Literally!

That's the kind of job you don't wish even to your worst enemies.

Update from the hackathon:

We decided to create a co-op game where you there is an agent on the field who has to reach an objective, while the operator guides him toward the exit on each level and opens/closes the remotely controlled doors for the agent. We want to add enemies that somehow will try to kill the agent, but we'll see what we manage to do. 🙄

Now I'm currently trying to sleep, but: Went to sleep at 2:15 and I have barely slept 2 fucking hours. Now it's 6:56. Still trying to sleep, but my brain is a cunt. 😲

I'm afraid of tomorrow.

The last weeks.... Were shitty.

And I might finish the first part of the VM migration next week...

I planed for failure. Next week was the worst estimate...

Do you remember when you've played a game and noticed the sudden increase of ammo / health / mana bars and that the enemies got stronger? Endboss time? Fickity fuckity you'll die soon time?

I guess that's this tingeling feeling in my head...

And I'm realllllly scared, cause the last fuckup was a NIC brick on one of the VMs host server. Never had that before.

Pray satan that the week will show mercy.

<"Perfect is enemy of good"
>"Excellent! I keep my enemies very close"

I do believe it possible that one can find at least one perfect counter to every stupid folk saying that startup-for-brains suit bags love to parrot.

2)
<"We must fail fast"
>"I already did it!"

3)
<"We must have a long tail of offerings"
>"Can we offer focus on our core strengths?"

-3)
<"We must focus on our core strengths"
>"Isn't our core strength 'having a long tail of offerings'?"

4)
<"We must use agile methods"
>"An agile habit does not make an agile monk."

5)
<"We must be flexible and adapt"
>"Is it a law or more of a rule of thumb?"

6)
<"We must avoid bureaucracy"
>"Can I have that in writing?"

It`s better to have an error than to have your app run but not working as wanted. Like in games, you know you`re on the right path if enemies show up, like the errors here.

(a slide acoustic guitar plays on the background and the cowboy starts speaking)
It was a dry october day, back in good old 2017. I had this job from a client that I never met and was doing some coding for money.

After days of no sleep, no food and no rest, I finally decided to take a nap so I paused my music.

It was at this moment I found out my machine was making funny noises. Like a dingo makin' a run from it's enemies with a whelping noise.

Clicked on my computer and tried to find an ol' file from the archive drive but the machine won't let me, sayin' the disk ain't ready yet.

I tried disk manager, disk scanner, whatever the tools at my disposal all in vain. Then I said what the hell, I'll just restart my machine and it'll be alright.

The machine rebooted but the disk was gone. It was dead like a deer I ran over. I was upset, but not aware of the calamity headin' my way.

In just a few days my other 2 disks died suddenly. The loss of data, all the effort, none of them mattered. I felt numb and decided it was time for a fresh start.

Plugged in a Windows install disk, started the sequence, a screen came up askin' me which damned and alive disk I wanna install the fresh OS. I had two same make and model SSD disks, chose the one thinkin' it was the Windows drive, hell it wasnt... It was with all "my documents", "downloads", "pictures" folders and now I had two SSD drives with two Windows installations and nothing else.

The folks in town took a dab at me for months, even the bartender of the salloon refused to give me a drink. Sayin' it was a matter of reputation...

Turned out the bastard who fried my disks was the Madde Dog PSU Tannen who had a bad temper so here I am, tellin' my story to milk breathers and cherishing old days of data...

All my enemies drink cum smoothies and make Wordpress sites

!Rant but a question :)

So, I'm in college learning software engineering and kind of don't see the point of try-harding. I have always been very good at learning so I only started studying late high-school because grades were important for collage entrance. But now that I'm here and my grades have all been very good (15/20 in the worst cases), I'm not motivated to go the mile further, specially because I don't have friends to compete with (or enemies for that matter :P).

How do you developers motivate yourselves?

I am an average Dev who is striving to improve. I currently work in a setting where I have the most experience in a corporate setting. I came from a very disciplined team where I had a great mentor. Now I am in a looser team with very bright people who don't have that experience. They are mainly JavaScript devs without much production experience. We are working in .net but they don't like working with back end code or databases. This is a 3 month contract. I want to do a good job. I have made enemies in the past and I just want to leave on a good note.

Procedural dungeon, populated with procedural enemies, equipped with procedural loot, given
procedural stats and elements.
Pretty much if No Man's Sky was in a dungeon, and good.

I am currently doing interviews from another side of the desk. It sucks. I wish to work, to develop. Not spending time in talking to hire people. There is a perfect gaming phrasing that matches it: "while u a sleeping, your enemies are leveling up"

I hate and despise all governments so much right now. Blunder, waste money. Politicians are rarely held accountable for the bad decisions

People say that anarchy is bad. Like, the streets would be full of thieves and bandits: you walk 10m and you get robbed because there is no police. The real question though, is: do we have any real evidence on this matter? Just something I've been wondering about lately.

Do we have a real-world example where the crime rate actually goes down because of a good decision made by the government? Do we have a historical example of an anarchy society? The way I understand it, people were just more bloodthirsty in the past: many liked the idea of going to war and killing enemies (is fact). Now the culture has changed, but the governments are stuck in the past.

Set — half-flooded city. Despite streets being three feet underwater, and, of course, filled with jellyfish, the city doesn’t seem to care. People go to work as usual. The protagonist is a special agent. His target is to find “the drain” and flush the water from the city. His enemies want to flood the city even more and are hiding “the drain”. Characters are almost silent. For the entire movie, only two lines are heard: “Where is the drain?” and “Jellyfish are everywhere, not just in the sea”. The soundtrack is an endless loop of “As he lost his mind,”, a line from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”. 30% of screen time is gruesome killings, torture and rape. 20% of the remaining time are long jellyfish sceneries. At some point, the protagonist notices the camera and kills the director. After that,

Temporary build files are your silent enemies!! Clean them up!

Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world

My new project is going to enable business to do IT work via intuitive interfaces and eliminate the IT team dependency at all.

It's not AI/BOTS/ROBOTS/ML that will replace us, we ourselves are our own enemies 🙄