Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Oh RLY? you want me to confirm my email address?

Shift+Tab - Ctl+a - Ctrl+c - Tab - Ctrl+v

Like a ninja...

could actually HEAR the knife swishing sounds there

Silicon valley season 1 - episode 10

Filename: devrewrite_v092.js

A javascript file running html code

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

Template for every Silicon Valley episode be like:

1. Start solving problem from previous episode.
2. Creating some shit that solves the problem.
3. Initialize new problem.

Damn it. I'm still hooked!!

{spoilers, i guess...}

In season 1 episode 4 of Mr.Robot, Elliott plans on using a Raspberry Pi to heat up the storage facility in order to destroy the cassette tapes stored there. If he can get the temperature high enough, it would render those tapes useless. I was just wondering, can a hack like this take place in real life?

After 1 month of not writing a single line of code in some language, I'm like ehhh: youtube -> tutorial (any programming language) episode 0 😰

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

So it's 23h30 last night and I've turned on the projector to watch the last episode of Mr Robot.
As I start the episode, I receive an email on my phone telling me that some important Azure webjob is throwing exceptions...
Fuuuuuuuuckkkkkkkkk
1 hour later it was fixed, and I watched my episode. Win!

Hey here we go:)
My first comic series - “DevStory”

A story of two devs aiming at changing the world’s impact about cryptos by their own token project.

Bugs, cheap scammers, money, flying unicorns and a lot of laughs!
(Episode 1)

My Little Pony, season 1 episode 14, "Suited for Success". Rarity wants to make dresses for her friends, but strives too hard to get it just how they really want it. The project becomes a stressing problem when she tries to make each dress specific to its wearer's taste. Each of her clients has requirements that don't necessarily allign with Rarity's vision, so she has to cope with changing demands and finish them before the Galloping Galla.

Rainbow Dash: I just want my dress to be cool.

Rarity: Do you not like the color?

RD: The color's fine, just make it look cooler.

R: Do you not like the shape?

RD: The shape's fine, just make the whole thing, you know, cooler. It needs to be about 20% cooler.

🎵
All we ever want is indecision.
All we really like is what we know.
[...]
Even if you simply have to fudge it,
make sure it stays within our budget.
🎵

Rarity first makes dresses that she herself loves, but her friends don't, and in the end she makes dresses that her friends love, but she doesn't.

I have sympathy for her.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Not a rant. Just how far technologie came.

on the right:
1 Episode of a new show, 4k hdr etc : 9GB

On the left:
Whole season (26 episodes) of startrek Voyager (DVD quality).

I find this pretty much fun.

Today's episode of Bluey is called: "I am not ready to go back to work after a week long mandatory vacation in which I will go back into a space that has made my passion into a shitless grabs for money"

Seriously, If I hear "the president of the institution does not like <X>" I will blow my brains out.

What is worse, every "leAderShiP" meeting I ask if shit is actually a policy towards were my department head says "no, but the boss does not like <X>" <--- then fucking make it a policy.

Seriously, I have a wife, I have but one woman to keep happy, I ain't about to break my back on dumb shit that some lady dislikes when I already have to keep 1 woman happy.

Going to work is a paycheck to me, but fuck man, I am seriously leaving. Good luck trying to find fkers this part of town that can patch my software be it that I wrote it in the most esoteric shit known to mankind on these modern days.

Might start listening to recruiters, I get about 50 offers a day.

Learn the hard way:
Episode 1:
Struggled 4 hours building my package. Some dependent package was failing build. Tried everything and atlast, contacted that package developer. He checked and said: "It seems it's broken. You can use v1.1 instead."
Lesson learnt: Sometimes, it's better to ask instead of banging your head and debugging things out.

another true story time:
be me
read about banned pokemon episodes on wikipedia
electric soldier porygon: an episode that red blue flashes caused 685 viewers taken to hospitals by ambulances
😈lets try it
write a simple program that makes same light effects
try it on myself
no kill
try it on roommates
no kill
try to send it as many people i can reach
omg people why don't you die?
gave up after 1 week of unsuccessful attempts

To anyone sufferring/going to suffer from kidney stones, here's a golden rule what to do when the episode kicks in [the sooner you start - the better]: 2 pills of no-spa, 1 tablet of painkillers [ibuprofen/dolmen]. As soon as no-spa kicks in and relaxes your spasm -- become a fucking breakdancer. I shit you not. Start bending, spinning, jumping, swimming like a fucking hurricane. The more you move, the better chances are you'll make that lump of rock move down the pipes and unclog your drainage.

Did it this week. Did not need to come back to the ER.

This was my 5th stone. Many more to come [Pending...].

I don't understand why do they make us lay in bed in the hospital if we have kidney stones. They should pump us with no-spa and make us do gymnastics, acrobatics and brakedancing instead!

checkout 'Pantheon' anime series

halfway through episode 1.

cool computer related things, tracking chat messages, lots of computers, tech things, etc. chill vibe.

so far so good.

@dfox just listened to episode 1 of podcast. It was great, so good to listen to passionate people like DHH.
Suggestion for new guest: Samy Kamkar

It is approximately 42 degrees C outside. And guess whose fucking compressor just went to shit? Mine. Fucking piece of shit. I absolutely fucking hate this shit. Finding the time to go to the shop is pointless when I can fix it myself, but IN the fucking event that the compressor is actually faulty and needs to be replaced then I would have to struggle to wait for the fucking part to get here. If my luck permits and this is an issue that is fixable through a simple relay change then fucking hooray.

But I know how fucking shitty my fucking luck is and its going to fuck me in the ass probably. I will troop through the heat, no problem, but I am the one that carries my 2 year old daughter everywhere and I am not about to put her through that bullshit.

So I call my wife and explain to her the situation, I don't need for her to do fucking anything, I can take care of it myself, but I tell her NOT to have me go out on random bullshit with the girl while the car is like that, I did it to make her understand beforehand because every day is an additional 1 and a half hours of driving around the city to take her do bullshit. I told her that in the event of me needing to go pick something up then it would have to be after the fucking sun goes out(which in this fucking bullshit ass town it happens after fucking 7 or 7:30pm) and she would have to stay home with the girl. What does she do? she gets upset. Of course she got fucking upset. Like if I need that fucking bs right now. OH and my fucking main Linux machine is apparently having battery issues.

OAN my manager gave me my performance review yesterday. The she made are outstanding and my score is perfect. The board is going to give a raise to everyone of us that got an high enough score so that got me in a good mood. I am holding on to that feeling before I lose my shit. Every single fucking time some bs puts me in this mood I am constantly wishing that a motherfucker would.

Fucking bullshit man. Can't have a FUCKING break anyfuckingwere.

This just in on an episode of Murphy's fucking law.

So I'm in the middle of writing a script for episode 1 of my how I would have done it series and fuck me, I feel so sorry for big youtubers that script every video, this is annoying me just from a basic script!!!

which is the title song of mr robot season 2 episode 1 daydream????

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

Episode 2 of taking a big ass dump. This time its 1:54 am and i had to get my ass out of the bed to throw this big nuclear bomb. My legs are once again numb and i cant feel them from dumping for too long. I had to hold on walls and crawl up the bed. But when i did get to bed it was majestic. Numb legs but i dont care. I took a dump and now im 10 kg skinnier and i dont care

Silicon valley season 5 episode 1 was awesome.But I still miss erlich

DREAM 1
(my comments look like this)

A kikiland metro system. It's extradimensional and shapeshifting. When you enter it, it adapts to your needs. The people inside (they're probably just vinyl shells), the social circumstances, all generated for you.
When you enter it, it knows where you want to go. It spawns exactly one train just for you. It will be the first, it will be the last. You have to catch it to go where you need. If you miss it, there will be no more trains, and you have to wait till the metro station closes for the night and reopens.
It's always you entering, catching the train that arrives just in time, going to where you need to go and exiting.
Because of its extradimensional nature, you cannot agree to meet someone there — every person has their own personal metro generated just for them every time, with exactly one train going exactly to the station you need.

It's used by BLA as a form of control. When they don't want you to go somewhere, the train won't spawn. Or, it might diverge and get you to some other place. It isn't known whether the map can be altered on the fly or not. So far, the consensus is that the map is persistent and is a public knowledge, and it's just the metro itself that is extradimensional. But, no one ever saw the real metro in its real form, and not the top layer that protrudes into the three-dimensional world you can interact with. It might be the case that they can make people disappear by creating ad-hoc stations that don't intersect with the real world, trapping them in places that are nowhere in particular.

(it took seeing BLA once in one dream to make all the following dreams include them. Sigh.)

Kikiland also has a school, and it always had it. I befriended a chemistry teacher there. His classroom is small — exactly as deep as other classrooms, but really narrow. There are no desks there, just his desk and some bookshelves. Chemistry isn't a priority there — his class exists only because it should. No one attends it. This is why he was so pleased to meet me. Despite his classroom being located on a busy floor, its door is overlooked by students, and NO ONE ever enters it. He just sits there, waiting for students to arrive, but they never do.
He has a secret, though, because of course he does. In the game Control, if you complete the main storyline before you complete some side quests, one of the main characters will be sitting in the C-suit hall, doing her things, waiting for you to come and talk to her. But at the same time, she will be waiting for you deep down the oldest house's mines, again, just sitting there, waiting for you to take the quest. This teacher is the same.

If you have a good relationship with him, and you attend his class, the classroom will change to a tunnel entrance, with him being the security guard. He's your friend, he'll let you in. It looks like Fallout's vault entrance. THIS is how you enter the REAL kikiland metro. (Dream 1 ends here.)

Episode 2
Tiny waterborne rat puppies whose mouth is their entire face unfolding like a piece of paper with teeth covering it as a grid. (I wrote about them already, but here they are again.) They are _tiny_, a bit like tadpoles. Also, like tadpoles, they die if you touch them out of water. As I was flying over some mountain resort (I routinely fly in my dreams, but it feels more like a very low gravity falling I can control, like using a parachute in GTA San Andreas), I dumped them to a location that resembled the garden level of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for my cat to eat. It didn't want to.

Silicon Valley season 5 episode 1 just aired on HBO. 10/10 would recommend to developers.

Who is going to tell Netflix that not every title need to be a 10 part series? A story that should fit into an 1 hr (maybe 2 max) is padded with unnecessary stories to be a 10 part series of 1 hr+ per episode.

Welcome to the first (and probably only) episode of Code’s Papercuts!

I don’t like Lua. I have almost no experience with it, but in my opinion any programming language where arrays start at 1 should be ashamed of itself.

This has been ~~Brady’s~~ Code’s Papercuts!

Holy fuck for me Mercedes episode 1 where the dysfunction is real but the descriptions of simple programs planted on someone’s computer make a delete command or patches email client look like the work of a god

And Omfg meanwhile
Why am I watching this ?