I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

Today is finally the day of my hackathon, have been working with my team for about a month on a personal assistant already. I think we may stand a chance to get in the finals this year, unlike last year, when we started working only on the day of the hackathon.

I love this database primarily because it is cross platform and can be easily understood by anyone unlike SQL database files.

"Your code is just about as useful as the __pycache__ folder"

Yeet I just made a brainfuck compiler with python

Have any of you ever done this or worked with people who do this?

I finally found something to rant about! So what happened is that I am participating in the Digital Ocean competition (I need to do 5PR's). So I find a report with a lot of scripts. I decide to contribute and write a discord webhook API (send messages through a webhook). The next day, the guy goes "No thanks :)" and closes the PR. Words cannot express how triggered I am. I ask him if I can make anything else out of exasperation (I did not intend to do anything for him anymore, I can't explain why I did that), he tells me no...

;(

Does anyone else get triggered when you use the python socket .recv() and the server does not return anything so the program just stays there indefinitely? For me, I can't even Ctrl+C it so I have to close the entire window. It's especially annoying when I start a server in the interpreter (quite a bit of lines) and I have to rewrite it afterwards.

So, I've been trying to learn assembly. However, I can't find any assembly docs online, so I can't really do anything. I tried NASM and FASM but I just can't understand assembly. Do y'all know any decent way to learn assembly? (My dad said it's better to do it on my pi or should I do it on my desktop?)

Damn you LEGO, you get more than 450€ for this shit, but it's as fast as the brick it is. Surely, even back in 2013 you could've dome better than bloody 300Mhz and 64MB RAM?! This is the bloody hello world project and it takes you an hour to create it? And you also want like ten minutes to start maven in the first place?

Tried to install MS-DOS 6.22. Was not fun at all. Tried 3 iso flashers in total. The closest that happened to DOS was unetbootin getting bootlooped on the 10 second countdown to automatic system start. I gave up on it eventually.

:\