The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

Argh!
Me: "Are these Os or 0s? In this shit font they look totally the same!"
Me tries to gess if they look more like circles or eggs.
Me remembers that there are no Os in hex numbers.
Me: "Stupid me! Better go to bed now..."

Stakeholder: There’s a bug on the site.

Me: That’s not a bug. The site is supposed to do that. Your team asked for that feature and we implemented it last summer.

SH: They did?

Me: Yes, they did.

SH: You sure it’s been like this since last summer?

Me: YES!!!

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Android: where ProgressBars go around in circles and Spinners don’t spin

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

I am roughly 12 hours away from a deadline that seemed pretty impossible.
I finally got everything to work, it seems I'm actually going to make it.
After so many hours of frustration, despair and walking in circles, it is finally fun again :)

Android: where ProgressBars go around in circles and Spinners don’t spin

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

Walking in circles yeah I walk in circles when thinking

On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.

Manager walks in.

Here's the context.

We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.

I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.

My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.

He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.

We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"

That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.

So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.

As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.

The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.

“sEniOr tEcHniCiaN”: “I don’t know what Blazor is. I write my projects in ASP.NET. You should just use ASP.NET”

Me: …”Blazor *is* ASP. This project is running on ASP.NET 6.”

“seNioR tEchNiCiaN”: “As previously stated, I don’t use Blazor. I don’t care what version it is.”

Yes, this is a real exchange from my ongoing problems with this idiot.
His attitude is what ticks me off the most.
He doesn’t know what CORS is.
He doesn’t understand that “ASP.NET” covers Blazor, Razor Pages, the old MVC stuff, web APIs, and more.
He doesn’t understand the difference between a web request being initiated from the browser via Fetch and a web request being initiated from the server. (“My ASP site is shown in the browser, so requests to the third party API aren’t originating from the server.”)

And yet has the arrogance to repeatedly talk down to me while I try to explain basic concepts to him in the least condescending way possible.

After going around and around in circles with him, he finally admitted to me that “he doesn’t actually know what the CORS configuration looks like or how to modify it, to be honest.”

I just wanna go home.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

I've been working on a thing and running on 5 hours of sleep daily.

* This morning in class*
Friend: Look at the dark circles! You need to quit playing PUBG. You are addicted.

Me: Busted! *🤯😠😤*

Hey, it's 2023.

If your component isn't written in TypeScript, I'm not using it :)

"TypeScript is overly complicated!!!" why, because it pointed out everything wrong in your JS code?

"TypeScript is not flexible!!!" why, because it makes you not rely on fragile "only possible in javascript" patterns?

"TypeScript isn't needed!!!" why, because you've never worked on a project with more than 100 lines of code where dependency management and clean code policies were implemented?

god just stop with the JavaScript purist BS, you aren't going to win this battle, and it's even worse because not only are you injuring everyone in the software community, you're injuring your own productivity and skillset

actually, you know what, fine. just use pure JS and HTML implementations. see you in 10 years when i'm retired and you are still running around in circles wondering why the world has left you behind

This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.

I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.

I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)

In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.

Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.

So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.

If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.

Was venting to my sister about the BS I'm dealing with one of my projects at work. Specifically the convoluted way we're building a prototype and the way all the revision requests are just going in circles.

Sister: Your job sounds annoying.

Me: Only when other people get involved.

Truer words have never been spoken.

My first dev project was 6 years ago in which I made a fucking gui application in c++ using fucking TurboC++.

And used no gui libraries. Used to draw circles/rectangles/pixels right on screen using graphics.h library

Was fun though

So, I'm stuck...

I'm very passionate about technology. Coding and development and soldering together some raspberry pi or arduino project gets me all swept up in a false sense of belonging & sense of purpose. It's just always been my biggest passion...

As well as it has simultaneously been an elusive dream, driven away by circumstances and some pretty shitty decision making on my end... But, it's always a recurring theme and source of illumination through some dark moments... Abandonment of my dreams isn't an option.... I spent 10+ years on heroin and somehow still have the ability to dredge up some hope, surely I can finally get my foot/hand/ball sack in the door of my dreams... right??

Anyways, to sum up my ability in regard to technology/coding etc.... I'm a highly motivated and passionate Beginner-intermediate level tech enthusiast with a little html, css, Java, markdown/git know how, advanced soldering/PC building ability... With a high need to remain studious and get my ass balls deep in some computuh' learnin' circles.

In all seriousness, I really would like to be graciously provided with some communities and groups of folks that would assist me upon my path, and possibly ways I could slide into some sort of tech based career/job while amassing my IT abilities.

I am willing, but incapable of starting off in the right direction & in need of some guidance to firmly trod on towards my goals...

PS: I'm totally not a 32 year old man desperately in need of some guidance and reassurance... cause that'd make me some kinda loser or something... pfffft... I won't be 32 until 06/08.... so all is well and good 👍

Thanks in advance peeps. Later!

When the house is one fire, and all the devs are running in circles, trying to fix it, and you overhear the PM (while prepearing your 8th cup of coffee) complaining on their phone, about how hard he/she has to work, because the devs fucked up... priceless.

no fucking documentation

no fucking explaination

and your example doesn't even work

let's just run around in circles until we all die

waiting to exit this 🤡 world

yeah, i know, everyone is like "why can't you chill more"

because this what we are stuck doing 8-9 hour a day!!!!!! this is literally our lives just wasting away!!!! and it's not even fun anymore; you can't enjoy it if everyone is so fucking incompetant any step at being productive is fucking battle

god so sick of it

IF ONLY DOCUMENTATION WAS IN ENGLISH

In the past I've seen documentation that is great, and documentation that is conspicuous by it's absence.
Over the last decade, I've noticed documentation is getting WORSE.
I believe the reason for this is that those tasked with creating documentation have become so accustomed to the jargon in their own heads that they have LOST THE ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE IN ENGLISH, and as a consequence simply don't bother.
New terms such as "ThingamyJig" are defined as "A Collection of ThingamyJigs" — so you end up going round in circles and get back to square one.
They make little or no effort to provide simple examples.
If only companies who create languages understood that those who wrote the language may not be the best people to write the documentation.

I have been drawing nothing but FUCKING CIRCLES on pieces of paper, and it has slowly piled up on my desk over the course of a week. I have been getting stares from people in other departments, and I am pretty sure they think I am starting to lose it.

FUCK.

I finally implemented something today tho, and all that doodling and spaghetti code was totally worth it to see it actually fucking work on the first run. Jesus Christ, I fucking love my job.

the real truth is that web dev has been running around in circles on itself for over a decade now

"but every framework is 'new' and 'shiny'!!!!"

nah, just more sugar on the same exact concepts that have been around since day 1

Ok here goes me trying to explain some logic here, I apologise in advance!

I've been using an axis based movement system for my games for a while now but always had the issue of characters moving faster diagonally because the movement shape would form a square; meaning things would move at twice the speed.

Only now thought 'hang on, direction's act as circles when given a radius..'

Suddenly everything works perfectly fine and all it took was 3 lines of code... Well done Alex you tool.

So when code is badly written, more corner cases are unnecessarily introduced. And it’s sometimes tricky to find the corner cases and probably messy to fix the corner cases.
And so the code grows in size as a result. And when these fixes to the corner cases are not well done, they introduce more corner cases.
So what results is a large collection of corner cases. Only corner cases remain when this goes on for a while.
Because of this, every new feature can be effectively translated to a collection of corner cases to be implemented.
As corners grow, triangles become circles and tetrahedrons become spheres.

I live in such a sphere.

I like JavaScript as a language. But I hate absolutely everything around it. All of these tools just make things more difficult. Sometimes when I clone a project I want everything there. I don't want to then wait 30 minutes to download the latest version of every library used, with at least one of them always breaking something. I don't want to have to use npm or grunt or whatever. Just give me the damn thing I need not make me spend 30 minutes running round in circles! Never have these problems in any other language!

Come on WebAssembly!

C might be a pain to write, but holy cow does it run circles around python from a performance perspective. Easy to forget in fields like data science, where python is the default

What pisses me off most: on-site team/client team not specifying a non reproducable issue properly in an email and expecting a quick fix for it ASAP, making me run in circles.

For robotics I decided to write a program that would automatically tune a PID loop (a loop with three magic constants that tells you how much power to give the motors).

Being a high school student who hasn't been taught anything about the theory of PID loops or the right way to tune them, I had no clue what I was doing. So instead of actually learning the calculus to do it, I just made an evolutionary tuner that keeps guessing slight variations of the last-best three constants.

Basically, you press start and the robot spins in circles until you come back in 15 minutes.

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

I feel like um in a loop

while Alive:
wake up
eat
code
sleep

5 years of leetcode with no progress. I'm giving up.

First some background, I have an undergraduate degree in computer science and one and a half years of professional coding experience which ended when I got fired for performance issues. I have worked diligently at Leetcode for those 5 years (exceptions occurred when I got ill). I have been personally coached by a google software engineer for months. I have done and given 100s of mock interviews and paid for some to be done by professionals. I have spent 100s if not thousands of hours on Leetcoding and algorithms trying to improve in any way I can imagine. I'm still not good enough.
This all came to a head yesterday when someone on Leetcode made a post about being able to solve every single Leetcode problem in a year within a year while managing a post doc degree and having almost no programming background (link at bottom of post). It made it clear that Leetcode is a game of talent not hard work. The difference between someone like her and someone like me must be noted by the programming community. The majority of people would not ever be able to accomplish that. I dedicated myself for 5 years to Leetcoding almost exclusively and still am no where near what that person has accomplished. I have put in much more work than that person and have gotten much less from it.

I believe the programming community can learn from this contrast. The culture of always trying harder and thinking success stories apply to everyone that is pervasive in programming circles is toxic. The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off. I am proof of that and this is the type of story that needs to be shared and heard too.

I am quitting programming out of humility and recognition of my limitations. It’s ok to give up and wise to do so when you aren't good enough for something.

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

Struggling

Started a new job not super long ago with the intention of "learning new tech" and so I get my wish, I'm thrown into a project as the LEAD ENGINEER

And my junior dev proceeds to run circles around me and I know literally nothing about what is going on in this project aside from the architectural / feature planning discussions I've had with marketing/junior

I've been trying to learn vuejs for what seems like weeks and weeks and I'm just not "getting it" I come from a strong oop php background and this paradigm is using tons of tech I know basically nothing about. Every time I talk to junior I get super depressed cause he's speeding along and I'm still completely clueless.. what the FUCK do I do

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

Me: we are running in circles going nowhere 🤬
Manager: ok, from tomorrow let's try walking backwards triangles maybe that works better
Me: 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Now I am ranting, Everyday I rant, Yesterday I runt, Tomorrow I shall rant, Already I have ranted.

[Shaking my head, wagging my tail, moving in circles, no beer, for no reason]

Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.

I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.

Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.

Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.

But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.

So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.

But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.

I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.

Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.

The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.

By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.

Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?

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So are there WhatsApp users who now also would want to migrate after the new terms & conditions to something like Signal, but know that nobody in their contacts will probably migrate as well?
I hate it that you're basically forced to stay on WhatsApp because everybody (at least for me) is using it and 90% of the users probably don't care.
Im gonna try and see whether or not I can 50/50 them, but I'm scared that WhatsApp is simply too big to have people transition... Using it as a safer sms app is quite useless because well, it's basic sms and nobody in my direct contact circles uses texts (neither do I want to do that tbh).

So there is this social institute I invested three years in.
Left them a record budget to play with. After being chair person for two years before and even administrating the whole 1900 of em.

Turns out they're FRICKIN' MORONS!

Instead of welcoming constructive criticism
/* which is because they can not read one single line of simple text without a fidget spinner at hand. And the second line of text, they ask their meds being upgraded! */.
They start fucking people up by spreading lies publicly!
On the fakken Web!
In so called protocols
/* which they don't manage to spellcheck before publishing. As freaking "devs" they major in */.

Just because I told them, that another institution which is conjoined to them within the universities senate, DOES NOT STAND IN COMPETITION!

They don't get it.
Is it that difficult?
Downvote if it is.
And please help me with those worm infested no brainers marrying in circles.
Its incredible how much you can achieve in some years and still so many people stay ignorant enough to start spewing their verbal vomit all over the campus thus fist fucked professors reign in, because "muh truth! no development. just money, I like money. muh moving student, not like it! not like work!".

What the hell is going on in this society?!

People are usually better known for something special in their social circles, like a habit, or something they like, or a phrase they often use, like their catchphrase...
As a developer, do you think you have like a code leitmotif? A singular habit or a certain algorithm you like to use?

For example, I'm very mad about string quotes, so I tend to use strictly ' unless it's better / necessary to use ", ` or something else.

Feel utterly deflated today. Working with an API that gives no feedback what so ever. Going around in circles and making little progress. What’s worse is we quoted 1 days work.

With all my experience I should be better!

So in Ruby, everything is passed to functions by value. However, when you manipulate objects, you're actually manipulating references. A simple example:

```
a = [3]
b = a
c = a
b.push(2)
print a
print b
print c

# => [3, 2][3, 2][3, 2]
```

Here's a more complicated example from the problem I was solving:

```
table = Array.new(5) { Array.new() }
1.upto(5 - 1) do |i|
1.upto(5 - 1) do |j|
table[i] = table[j]
end

table[i] << rand(1..6)
end
```

I have been running around in circles this morning because I forgot that. This makes C++ for example, more clear than Ruby since C++ explicitly shows the intent to the programmer.

Tldr: boss needs his priorities sorted

So as I already wrote about this issue earlier (in a comment) now it's time to actually write the rant...

I'm working between the holidays, not much just doing planning with the boss. Mind you, startup company, so limited resources and all, that's why I'm on planning as well.

So he goes to the whiteboard and draws a line in the middle, writing headings to each side: Need (Panic) and Nice (ASAP). It's starting off well.
We add about 10-ish items to each side, which is kind of okay - then he starts highlighting with different colors within the Need list saying okay, red circles we need NOW, green circles... "Now but later".

How do I not laugh? And now he wants to do even more priorities within these sections and a Soon list just as last time...

This is getting really ridiculous.

Send help (and coffee)

Next to a large pond / lake, trying to connect to & debug & rescue a robotic boat that had gone haywire, flipped upside down and was somehow just spinning in circles.

Eventually realised it was spinning in circles because its props were stuck at full power in alternate directions and acting as fans, so eventually decided to just use them as fans to blow it upside down back to shore.

Crated a small program that would make life with an external hard drive easier.
Part of it includes copying music. Since I didn't have the EHD on me I decided to test this part on my music folder.
After going though circles because of a directory not found folder, I decided that the problem was that I workout one 0 in the spelling of my user directory. Finally, I thought that it was fixed, I was all excited and then "access to directory denied (I'm paraphrasing)", this is my music folder we are discussing here... 😓😒

Silent errors in web-y tech like html, jsp, javascript , etc can fuck right off. I wish they'd silently kill me instead and end my fucking misery.

On the other hand maybe I just need to git God and just write perfect code the 1st time the way an old prof of mine recommended as the best way. Just draw 2 circles and then the fucking owl right?

"Ventablack is the blackest object in the world"

Bitch my project manager makes me work all night and you haven't seen my Dark Circles :|

So here's what I'm putting up with for the last 6 months, clients..

A client proposed to me a project he had in mind. Project is pretty solid, could have a bright future. Since they didn't have the money to spend, we agreed on a % of the income they will earn from the project. So, let's say I get 20% of the income in exchange for building the application. I didn't receive any down payment or payment of any kind.

Just for info, project is a Web application/portal and it is ~80% done at the moment. Client provided a logo and a wireframe/ideas/pictures how he sees the project. I built everything, from DB to Frontend. Also, project is completely custom made, no CMS or anything. Project will make profit by subscription base, every user of the project pays.

For various reasons, we did not yet sign a contract. So, what is my issue...

Client sent me his proposal of the contract, said it's solid stuff, just sign it. In the contract, it stated that he owns the application in full, can sell it, etc. and I get % of the price. There were also other sneaky parts about me having all the responsibility but owning nothing. I naturally declined and took a lawyer to construct a normal contract.

My proposal was/is, I own the application(source code) in full. They are obligated to pay the monthly percentage and can use the application normally and make profit. At any time, application can be bought by the client if they pay for the development. So, basically, they are getting the application to use "for free" with no initial payment/investment. And this is a long term deal, they can use is as this as long as they want. Also, if they go bankrupt at any time, no penalty or payment is needed, the risk is mine.

The client refused and what he claims is the following...

His share in the project is 80%, mine is 20%. If project is to be sold, I get 20% of the price. So, meaning, if we go to production tomorrow, if I want to buy his share, I have to buy 80% of the application I built entirely. Also he is convinced that by "telling me" what to built he's owning everything. In his words, he dictated me the notes and I'm just playing the violin.

I am having trouble explaining to him that he is getting the application to use and make profit basically for free and cannot and does not own the source code unless he buys it off. We are going in circles, I send him the contract to review, he changes it and returns it back. Also, he removes the parts where it is clearly states what he provided and what was done by me.

So, we kind off agreed on the authorship but in the case we break the contract he wants to be able to use the application for 3 more years.

Was anyone here in a similar situation? How do you handle this kind of situations?

Fuck you shitty clean swift architecture. I need to learn swift and mobile apps programming. As if that wasn't already hard enough I also need to understand clean swift. This shit feels like going in circles for the most basic stuff without any tangible benefits.

Woke up and got a fking fever out of nowhere. My vision delays when i turn my head while walking, feeling unstable physically, brain feels like its melting, headache, im hot and have high temperature, burning from inside and at one point i started hallucinating the more movement i made, literally saw someone walking in front of my bedroom while no one was there. And then started seeing circles triangles and square shapes in my vision but for a short period of time. I live with my parents

Wtf is this???? Did i experience mental burnout from excess stress and studying???

In the past, apps I've written have used a flat file backend. It's very fast, but obviously clunky to have a big structure of flat files for an app. It ran circles around framework-based RDBMS backends, as performance is concerned, but again, it was clunky. Managing backups and permissions on tens or hundreds of thousands of small files was no fun. Optimizing code for scaling was fun- generating indexes, making shortcuts -but something was still missing. Early in 2017 I discovered redis. A nosql backend that just stores variables and lives almost entirely in memory. Excellent modules and frameworks for every language. It was EXACTLY what I'd needed, even though I didn't know I did. I spent a good deal of time in 2017 converting apps from flat files to redis, and cackled with glee as they became the apps I wanted them to be. Earlier this week, I started building my first app that started with redis, instead of flat files, and I can't stop gushing to anyone who will listen. Redis for president!

Somehow nextjs is super powerful and blazing fast. But the way how the fucking frontend and backend is cluttered together, intervined up down left right sideways and in fucking circles its SO fucking confusing and difficult as shit to work with

Is it just me?

OK I need some help. I need to make sure I’m not losing my mind.

We are using an ERP which is hosted by another company. We are supposed to be able to access the data via a REST API. This works fine using Insomnia or Postman, but when I attempt to hit the API from my web application, CORS blocks the localhost origin.

I contacted the company’s technical team to request that they change the CORS configuration to allow localhost. They keep running me around in circles telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about because localhost isn’t a DNS resolvable name and I’m doing something wrong and they don’t need to change any configuration.

They insist that if anything would need white listed, it would be my IP, not localhost.

I sent them screenshots and stack overflow posts and documentation links, showing them exactly what headers need to be set and where the configuration needs to be set in the ERP. They tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.

They tell me that if I can hit the API from Postman, I can hit it from my browser.

Am I losing my mind? Have I fundamentally misunderstood CORS all these years? I’m sure I’m right. But I’m starting to feel like I’m crazy.

Home grown coders or college grad coders?

For those of you that taught yourself too code, or those who studied in schools, which style has prepared you the most for the real world?

I've met so many self taught coders who can program circles around some of my colleagues, but does a computer science/programming degree ensure you success over those who may know more?

Thought it would be an interesting discussion for you lot, personally I'm a mix of both but primarily a undergrad coder.

Keep it clean :)

So this one is more for web devs out there, but is Adobe Experience Manager as popular in the enterprise works as my boss claims? I've never heard of it getting used much, and I don't hear about it in web development circles.

Exp. when programming deeply inspired you?

I remember being inspired in school as I learned to program floating colorful circles in a lesson. They "bounced" off the screen borders

🟠⭕🟣🔵🟢

I have come to learn that when you script nearly everything in your job, what remains are the real pain in the ass clients.

I have told this particular client before that the issue does not lie with our equipment. I have verified while on a conference call with the other vendors that I am out of the equation. They concurred while the client was on the phone.

And yet.... Today, almost two weeks later, I have been assigned a ticket to re-verify our settings and to potentially troubleshoot !OurEquipment.

What hurts me the most is that my CEO is the best boss I have ever had, but he panders to these clients that do not listen to the diagnosis.

I am literally doing the same thing over again. I am not expecting a different outcome. I don't know why others expect a different outcome.

Because of this one example (and other similar ones), I am so tempted to leave an otherwise great company and environment.

Started playing Skryim again. Playing a pretty big modpack with some really cool mods called: Lost Legacy. It has alternate skills like Pugilist and Unarmored. I can literally punch a bitch with a one shot to death. For some reason this is very satisfying. I wonder what level of my psyche this appeals to. Probably something really animalistic.

These two skills meld really well with playing a mage with no armor. Unarmored skill actually levels faster if you cast an armor spell. So it benefits mages. I also don't have to fumble with weapons with Pugilist.

I had to add Sofia as my follower. Her wit while I punch people to death just fits. I feel like my character is a grumpy old mage that just goes berserk and kills people with his bare hands when upset. Do not disturb my circles, bitch!

I like to name my characters with phonetic names that might mean something else. On the surface it looks like an RPGish character name. But contains another meaning, often vulgar. This character is no different. I have named him: "Rehkuuf". An old Breton bitch of a magic user. Whose only care is learning and acquiring power. I imagine this character doing anything to this cause. Definitely a ends justifies the means kind of person. I am thinking of making him notorious in at least one hold. Not sure which one. So every time I return to the hold I have to kill every guard. Punch a bitch time!

One goal I just thought of: Punch a dragon to death.

how do you handle the salary question among friend circles/relatives/strangers?

i come from a lower middle class background, and my friend circle's family were in similar ranges(some had richer families).

my parents struggled hard to get me into tech and fortunately tech is hot right now, so currently the today's situation is that if counting the individual's income (not the family) then i maybe the highest warner among them (1 is a lawyer , another is a teacher, another is an amazon delivery manager, plus there are a few others).

my problem with this question is that its none of their business. firstly, i am all that my family has. these guys have richer brothers, fathers and sisters their total income is way more than mine. and even if i earn more, i don't earn to be the rich spender of the group. and i neither can be their sole source of hope in case anyone ever needs any money.

and more so fucked up shit is the fact that friends are ruthless and starts discussing this stuff anywhere. like we are among the strangers for fucks sake!! and knowing the state i live in , some of these guys could follow me and burst my guts in the name of money, which i fucking don't have!

Just today.

A production issue was assigned to me a while ago and the OSE and I were volleying it back and forth (I don't have access to even see anything production) because neither of us had any idea of what to do.

Here's the twist: the OSE's analysis (and my assumptions) of the problem was off, so we were basically running around in circles.

Today, he and I had a good one on one as the only priority to put this mother fucker to rest. Turns out he assumed a lot of things in his hurry to give his analysis to his boss.

Confirmed a few things, lo and behold, it's a non issue. That's how the legacy, 13 year old system (that no one in the entirety of the company knows end to end anymore) works.

Fucking eureka.

Just observed a robot lawnmower driving in circles on a small hill on someone’s lawn.

Teslas are supposed to be able to drive autonomously in city traffic...

Anyone who knows a light and simple way to plot circles in C?

We were learning how to code circles to light up in sequence. As it's similar to how code works for Arduino. Cool. Go back to c# in Unity and teach what the code does not just copy.

So he has wel all have gone in circles and circles and all of you created a lot of unified moronic half logic and sophisms and now we all seem trapped and I’m looking around and seeing people who have aged 20 years doing the same things I have to ask

Was making the world a more insanely moronic place worthwhile ?

We could all be comfy sipping tea and tipping strippers for extras and getting a drink on Tuesday watching actual new movies etc instead of all the crap repeats from 2021

Instead everywhere I wander lately since around that time period I’m surrounded by weird fucks pretending to be 20 at age 40

Would like to see what justified being run around in circles forever
Starting to get a bit pissed

The Turing Test, a concept introduced by Alan Turing in 1950, has been a foundation concept for evaluating a machine's ability to exhibit human-like intelligence. But as we edge closer to the singularity—the point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence—a new, perhaps unsettling question comes to the fore: Are we humans ready for the Turing Test's inverse? Unlike Turing's original proposition where machines strive to become indistinguishable from humans, the Inverse Turing Test ponders whether the complex, multi-dimensional realities generated by AI can be rendered palatable or even comprehensible to human cognition. This discourse goes beyond mere philosophical debate; it directly impacts the future trajectory of human-machine symbiosis.

Artificial intelligence has been advancing at an exponential pace, far outstripping Moore's Law. From Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that create life-like images to quantum computing that solve problems unfathomable to classical computers, the AI universe is a sprawling expanse of complexity. What's more compelling is that these machine-constructed worlds aren't confined to academic circles. They permeate every facet of our lives—be it medicine, finance, or even social dynamics. And so, an existential conundrum arises: Will there come a point where these AI-created outputs become so labyrinthine that they are beyond the cognitive reach of the average human?

The Human-AI Cognitive Disconnection

As we look closer into the interplay between humans and AI-created realities, the phenomenon of cognitive disconnection becomes increasingly salient, perhaps even a bit uncomfortable. This disconnection is not confined to esoteric, high-level computational processes; it's pervasive in our everyday life. Take, for instance, the experience of driving a car. Most people can operate a vehicle without understanding the intricacies of its internal combustion engine, transmission mechanics, or even its embedded software. Similarly, when boarding an airplane, passengers trust that they'll arrive at their destination safely, yet most have little to no understanding of aerodynamics, jet propulsion, or air traffic control systems. In both scenarios, individuals navigate a reality facilitated by complex systems they don't fully understand. Simply put, we just enjoy the ride.

However, this is emblematic of a larger issue—the uncritical trust we place in machines and algorithms, often without understanding the implications or mechanics. Imagine if, in the future, these systems become exponentially more complex, driven by AI algorithms that even experts struggle to comprehend. Where does that leave the average individual? In such a future, not only are we passengers in cars or planes, but we also become passengers in a reality steered by artificial intelligence—a reality we may neither fully grasp nor control. This raises serious questions about agency, autonomy, and oversight, especially as AI technologies continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our existence.

The Illusion of Reality

To adequately explore the intricate issue of human-AI cognitive disconnection, let's journey through the corridors of metaphysics and epistemology, where the concept of reality itself is under scrutiny. Humans have always been limited by their biological faculties—our senses can only perceive a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears can hear only a fraction of the vibrations in the air, and our cognitive powers are constrained by the limitations of our neural architecture. In this context, what we term "reality" is in essence a constructed narrative, meticulously assembled by our senses and brain as a way to make sense of the world around us. Philosophers have argued that our perception of reality is akin to a "user interface," evolved to guide us through the complexities of the world, rather than to reveal its ultimate nature. But now, we find ourselves in a new (contrived) techno-reality.

Artificial intelligence brings forth the potential for a new layer of reality, one that is stitched together not by biological neurons but by algorithms and silicon chips. As AI starts to create complex simulations, predictive models, or even whole virtual worlds, one has to ask: Are these AI-constructed realities an extension of the "grand illusion" that we're already living in? Or do they represent a departure, an entirely new plane of existence that demands its own set of sensory and cognitive tools for comprehension? The metaphorical veil between humans and the universe has historically been made of biological fabric, so to speak.