Manager: Why are you always refactoring?

Me: Refactoring keeps the codebase's entropy in check :)

Manager: mind blown!!

There used to be a CLI utility for ordering dominoes pizza online, and I wrote a patch for it to have a .pizzarc and read entropy from standard in and randomize not only the size and contents of your pizza but how many of them you wanted to order in case you couldn’t make up your mind.

So you could do “dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=1 | pizza -“ and it would look for your address in the configuration file and pizzas would show up but you never knew how many. This was more than ten years ago and I have since lost it.

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

Tesco.com, you deep pool of creamy baby shit. I've tried to reset my password three times already. My new password has way more entropy than your mathematically impaired rules command, but apparently using password managers is bad practice. It should be about having at least one special character, not EXACTLY one. I've got lots of uppercase characters, not PRECISELY one.

"Not enough random bytes available". Whaaat? How? I don't uderstand?

Was going through some old books and found the mathematical proof that building good software from the beginning has positive long term effects... in case anyone had any doubts

would software product companies plz start describing what the product *actually* does on their homepages? if u say ur product/framework/tool will help me leverage this or collaborate that, it's an almost zero entropy statement, because everyone says so. Are u selling coffee or a .net gui library? because both can help me make my software better and leverage whatever it's supposed to leverage .. so, pleaaase, just say what ur product does, if that doesn't sell it, using hyped catch all phrases won't either ...

oh, and stop calling ur products somethingfy or somethingly .. just stop

Bought my first VPS, because the shared plan we are using is shit.

Spent just half an hour trying to log in, because upon registration they encouraged a strong password with simbols and everything.

But in reality a root password can only contain letters, numbers, underscore and minus sign... The fuck is wrong with you? Reducing the entropy is one thing, but really fucking up the most essential part of a VPN setup?

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

Php:
hey, we added new function (random_bytes) to generate secure random strings, so you don’t need to do that manually anymore.

Documentation:
If it’s not possible to gather sufficient entropy, exception will be thrown.

So just in case, I still need to implement fallback method, well, because that stupid php designers team were fucking to lazy to provide it by default...

And that’s how programming in php is like, half the time you spend catching exceptions and extending native functions and other half implementing business logic.

After listening to the deadmau5 plane crash story on h3h3 this exact thought play went on in my mind.

The universe wants to be uniform. Everything is the same, nothing reacts anymore.

Humans like the complete opposite. We like complexity and entropy. We create and we destroy.

But we are part of the universe.
So if you break this down into absolute math statements, they are contradicting.
So are we breaking the equasion?
Or are we part of the equasion?

...Are we the universe's self made antidote to itself?

In university, I got really into cryptography. I wrote software that was testing the entropy of lots and lots of HTTPS encrypted packets, for sites that also supported HTTP. Meant that I had a pretty good idea what the plaintext was, and the quality of the encryption algorithms used. In the end, I got into lots of trouble with my university because apparently what I was doing could be deemed 'dangerous'! Never felt more like a hacker in my life.

I'm going through a KhanAcademy course learning about cryptography. I learn better by doing, so I wrote a script. It shifts bytes up depending on a random int produced by a high entropy pseudo random number generator using a sha256 hash as the seed. I'm trying to find information on the flaws with this method, that lead us to create DES, and then AES.

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

"Designers deal in ideas. They give shape to ideas that shape our world, enrich everyday experiences, and improve our lives. Where there’s confusion, designers fashion clarity; where there’s chaos, designers construct order; where there’s entropy, designers promote vitality; where there’s indifference, designers swell passion; where there’s mediocrity, designers imbue excellence; and where there’s silence, designers lend voice. " - Ken Peters

Usually an idea comes up in the back of my head... Then i wait. After some time, the idea comes again. Now ill think about it, when i lay in bed, when im in a train, everywhere. Ill think about the technical implementation. How ill present it to someone else. To my boss. To my little brother. I think about the counterarguments, ill simulate discussions in my head, how ill defend it.

And then, one day, while thinking about it, ill start writing it.

Edit: Its like my brain needs enough entropy to do something. Then it works, then it generates entropy again, eg youtube, gaming, working on something else, dreaming etc

Entropy wins. More useless accumulated historical nonsense in each programming language. Complex software stacks impossible to reach the bottom. However C and C++ still there possibly even some Cobol and Fortran zombies. And we devs still writing our ifs and loops for that kind of legacy stuff.

God damned you java and God damn you low entropy VPS you get me for the last time I swear...

Hasn't technology become magic - and we ignorant sorcerer's apprentices who can perform a video call to the other side of the globe perhaps while we understand only some bytes of the thousands software snippets that were piled up by us code monkeys to perform the miracle? ...

This however has always been the state of software (for us developers): that this house of cards needs constant care by our hands to not collapse - in constant fear we may preserve the facades while the number of components that interact, the sheer mass of code only allow for guesswork and hotfixes accumulating the technical debt. Yes, we have all that terms for that. The problems are known since the 80s or 60s, so we might be relabeling it once in a while, but mainly it is just: complexity.. or entropy.

Has anyone experiences with hardware entropy generators like OneRNG.info? Any useful usage scenarios? VeraCrypt doesn't yet seems to support it.

TIL that Debian package names are not allowed to have underscores in their names. Toast my tomatoes. As if file name conventions, like discouraging colons, would not be enough, you just added another useless bit of entropy to all the clusterfuck information just because you established a naming scheme yourself where you delimited the versions and date with an underscore from the package name.