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Search - "interesting times"
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So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!
It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"
Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.
My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.
I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.
Then I started to experiment more and more.
After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!
From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.
Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!
I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.
Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?
First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.
Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.
Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!
I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.
Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!
Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.
Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.
Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!
It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).20 -
"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"
"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"
"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"
"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".
"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"
"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"9 -
I love coding
But I hate coding
But I love coding
But I hate my buggy IDE
But I love coding
But my back hurts from all that sitting
But I want to work on my side project
But at times, it's frustration.MaxValue
But anything remotely related to coding I find interesting
But it's so hard to abide by good practices
But I love coding
But progress is so fizzlingly slow
But I love that elegant solution of the other day
But it took me 57 attempts to arrive at that elegant solution
But the shit I'm building is so cool
But
But
😦1 -
!!politics
My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.
It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!
As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.
To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.
Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.
I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.
Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.
Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.rant root attends a meeeting political circlejerk aka “meeting” politics toxic workplace office politics on steroids office politics66 -
The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD
1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!
2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.
3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?
4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.
What crazy shit have you done at your University?9 -
Root encounters HR at her new job.
So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.
Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)
But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.
The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.
I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.13 -
Last week, my entire team was out including my manager.
I had to define the roadmap for Q4 and present it to everyone along with my skip level manager (Sr Director).
Now with 12 hour time difference, the call was scheduled at 04:30 AM India time.
Now since I am new, this was my first time (an opportunity to build trust), one off event, and some new learning experience, I decided to give it a shot because I am professional enough to fill in during critical times.
Everything went well.
I come back from vaccine break and this happened: https://devrant.com/rants/4595608/...
Now here is the interesting part. I had my 1:1 with my manager yesterday and she asked me the details of how things went the previous week yada yada..
Then she proceeds to tell me that Sr Director and herself are super impressed with me and by my work.
She was like, "we are thankful that we have you because after the lead left, you managed everything so well"
Then proceeds to asks me, "You had a conversation with lead that you'd be open to relocation. She mentioned me before she quit. Do you think that if you are with the team in US, you'd be able to perform better?"
I agree and tell her that in person socialising is a key tool that helps me a lot in my job.
Manager: "Cool. If you ever want to move to US or anywhere, just let me or Sr Director know and we'd be happy to do so. It's very easy and can be done quickly."
Me: "Do you mean visiting different offices or relocating full time?"
Manager: "Both."
For someone like me, coming from a third world nation who has seen nothing but hardship, this was one of the most rewarding career experience I have had. The decision lies with me. And she asked me that as soon COVID is over, I'll have to frequently visit different offices around the world.
This is my third international offer in 1.5 years that too in times of COVID. All by themselves and I wasn't even looking for them.
Holy fuck! Now I feel more confident and valued for my work.
Hard work is indeed paying off23 -
Why do so many people waste their time and their computers turning coal into heat? It really pisses me off.
Often I meet smart guys who are fairly decent coders and after what starts as an interesting conversation is instantly destroyed by cryptocurrency.
It is *exactly* like enjoying a discussion of the intriguing nuances of quantum chemistry only to have the guy say, "thats all cool, but how do you make meth?"
argh.
You want to use your decked out rig to make money? Fine. But please help us solve important problems instead of literally wasting electricity. Just google search "supercomputer physics" and you will find a thousand current problems requiring extremely fast computers for number crunching. All of them can make you more money than crypto and all of them help society at the same time.
We burn coal to make most of the electricity on this planet. Most coal stations burn around 20,000 tons of coal per day. The world burns about 250 tons of coal every *second*. This is converted into carbon dioxide. (coal = carbon, add two oxygens when you burn it, producing three times as much mass in CO2, which then goes out the smoke stack)
The big picture is this: currently we are forced to burn coal to make the world work. Turning off the boilers would result in an almost instant apocalyptic collapse of society. BUT, we don't need to burn it merely to produce waste heat in your video card array.
Please use your superpowers for good.
<end rant>16 -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.
First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.
Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)
Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.
Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.
If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.
I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.
Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.
Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.
So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?
At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over
So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.
There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.
Be nice to those that desserve it.6 -
Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.
Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.
I ask everyone else on the call to leave.
I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.
My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".
His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.
We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.
I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.
I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.
He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.
He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.
I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.
Point made I think.
So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.
Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.
So, maybe not getting fired today?
Blood pressure still very high.10 -
Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.
First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.
I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.
Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.
Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.
What a fucking nightmare.3 -
a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.
i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.
it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.
it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.
at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.
it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.
it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.
also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...
it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"
back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D1 -
Today was a day at work that I felt like I made a significant contribution. It was not a lot of code. Actually it was a difference of 3 characters.
I am developing an industrial server so that my employer can provide access to their machines to enterprise industrial systems. You know, the big boys toys. Probably in fucking java...
Anyway, I am putting this server on an embedded system. So naturally you want to see how much serving a server can serve. In this case the device in more processor starved than memory starved. So I bumped up the speed of the serving from 1000mS to 100mS per sample. This caused the processor to jump from 8% of one core (as read from top) to 70%. Okay, 10x more sampling then 10x approx cpu usage. That is good. I know some basic metrics for a certain amount of data for a couple of different sampling rates.
Now, I realized this really was not that much activity for this processor. I mean, it didn't seem to me that it "took much" to see a large increase of processor usage. So I started wondering about another process on the system that was eating 60 to 70 % all the time. I know it updated a screen that showed some not often needed data from its display among controlling things. Most of the time it will be in a cabinet hidden from the world. I started looking at this code and figured out where the display code was being called.
This is where it gets interesting. I didn't write this code. Another really good programmer I work with wrote this. It also seemed to be pretty standard approach. It had a timer that fired an event every 50mS. This is 20 times per second. So 20 fps if you will. I thought, What would happen if I changed this to 250mS? So I did. It dropped the processor usage to 15%! WTF?! I showed another programmer: WTF?! I showed the guy who wrote it: WTF?! I asked what does it do? He said all it does it update the display. He said: Lets take to 1000mS! I was hesitant, but okay. It dropped to 5%!
What is funny is several people all said: This is running kinda hot. It really shouldn't be this hot.
Don't assume, if you have a hunch, play with it if its safe to do so. You might just shave off 55 to 60 % cpu usage on your system.
So the code I ended up changing: "50" to "1000".16 -
Clients keep asking if our software will support XYZ format.
XYZ format is a proprietary format that we are not the proprietors of. Unfortunately, it has become something of a de-facto standard in our industry.
It is not practical to support the format because being able to figure it out is difficult, time consuming and not even a certainty. In fact while we have historically done so for previous versions, it has been upgraded several times so this becomes something of an arms race for us (whether intentional or not).
Responses from clients when we try to explain this vary, but a not insignificant number of them intimate that this is a failing or fault on our part.
It is pretty annoying, and considering the damage in perception it can do, is a pretty interesting and subtle form of economic moat I had not previously considered.9 -
!dev
I'm doing some solo karaoking again but with some oldies that I haven't sung in probably 10-15 years. Not my usual song track.
And since I'm deaf, I can't hear the tune, just see the timed words. And just found it interesting the general tune can be recalled at first at all.
Then after a few times, I started remembering how some of the actual singers sound like. But still stumble a bit on some parts.
And then a few weeks. And I have another session and somehow I can pretty much lip sync it with all the emotions and almost perfectly I think.
I just found it strange and wanted to write this down somewhere while I still remember it. And I guess that's sorta the point. Feels like the mind/subconscious to remember things really well but recalling them at either the right moment or randomly....
Anyone else have similar experiences? Wanna share?3 -
I always found this video a must-watch for game-developers.
It's a long video, and he kinda sounds like a fanboy at times (especially in the beginning).
But he makes some great points about the modern gaming industry.
So if you're a game developer, or someone interested in games, and you have 30 minutes of spare time; here's an interesting video:
https://youtube.com/watch/...1 -
Going through a WordPress site that hasn't been updated in over a year. It's so severely infected that even the Wordfence and Security plugins say it's fine. So I'm going through the file structure manually.
File by file, folder by folder manually searching for infected files. This is the most tedious thing I've had to do. But I'm learning some really interesting tips. One file looked empty and I almost missed it because the code had been tabbed over a few hundred times clearing it way off the the right of the screen.10 -
When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.
It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.
The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.
I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.
Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.
I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.2 -
I found this on a wiki with Haskell Humor... it's interesting...
How to Shoot Your Self in the Foot With Haskell: Putting the unsafe in unsafePerformIO!
You shoot the gun, but the bullet gets trapped in the IO monad.
Couldn't match expected type 'Deer' against inferred type 'Foot'.
While compiling your program the compiler produces a type error long enough to overflow a kernel buffer, overwrite the trigger control register and shoot you in the foot.
After trying to decipher the type errors from the compiler, your head explodes.
After you've finally found a way to circumvent the type system and shoot yourself in the foot, Oleg appears out of nothing and shoots you in the foot for coming up with it before him.
You shoot the gun but nothing happens (Haskell is pure, after all).
Your foot is fine, until you try to walk on it, at which point it becomes mangled.
You have a shootFoot function which you've proven correct. QuickCheck validates it for arbitrary you-like values. It will be evaluated only when you end up at the hospital. You hope this doesn't come to pass, as it actually returns a bullet-ridden copy of yourself and you don't want to be garbage-collected.
foreign import ccall "shootparts.h shootfoot" shoot_foot :: Gun -> Programmer -> IO ()
shootSelfInFoot = unsafePerformIO . shoot . foot $ self -- Shoot self in foot 0 or more times depending on evaluation order
No instance for (Target Foot)
arising from use of `shoot' at SelfInflictedInjury.hs:1:0
Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Target Foot)
In the expression: shoot foot
You go to shoot yourself in the foot but the bullet is in the ST monad and the gun is in the IO monad, so you can't.
You ask Haskell to shoot you in the foot but by the rules of lazy evaluation you don't need the result yet so it doesn't happen.
You decide to shoot yourself in the foot but get distracted devising a ballistics algebra and wondering if you can do the calculations in the type system.
You want to shoot yourself in the foot but realize there is no Gun datatype so use Arrows instead.
You shoot in the direction of your foot, but since you are inside the STM monad you can just retry until you figure out what to do.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but you are perfectly fine as long you just don't evaluate the foot.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but nothing happens unless you start walking.
Don't forget about memory consumption! If you don't look, the bullet causes heap overflow. If you look, the bullet causes stack overflow.
You *appear* to have deliberately shot yourself in the foot, and yet your program actually runs perfectly OK due to lazy evaluation. (So long as you remember to not look at your foot...)
You aim the gun at your foot, pull the trigger and remove the clip. When you look at your undamaged foot, the hammer clicks on an empty barrel.1 -
Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.9 -
8 years ago,
I studied in a small school and every year we had computer classes, but most of the times, it gets cancelled or we just sit and browse and sometimes few of us don't even get a computer.
In that time, the only reason I was attached with the computer was due to games.
Our curriculum mentioned HTML, CSS, Access and Excel, which none of the teachers taught us for past 2 years. I wanted to learn all does, but gave up since no one cared about it.(please note that time, I didn't know even to use YouTube or W3schools to learn stuffs)
Then, a new student joined in our class and also a new computer ma'am joined our school. Both of them turned out to be really fun when it comes to learning computers.
She was active during last sessions and teach us HTML, CSS. I even started writing blogs which she taught. The most surprising part was she was super frank. She went beyond her duty, and taught me what Facebook is, how to use it, and opened an account for me which I am still using it, and she sent a friend request to herself. (In lab, past teachers would shout to students trying to open fb. All of them were super strict.)
She was kind and friendly, and during theory classes, the new student in our class would answer every single question. Then, somehow we both started sharing sits in computer class, and he will tell me answers and we both raise hands to answer the question. My teacher will also keep asking interesting questions which made me more inclined to computer science.
My story isn't related to learning a programming language or an algorithm, but it was the wave that brought me closer towards CS and after 2 years, I joined CS in University and till now, haven't look back and always thanked both of them, my respected ma'am and my dear friend, who inspired me and brought out my curiosity towards computers.
Note: My friend is doing Medical currently and when I teased him that I did CS and now, I know more than you and this time, I am gonna whisper in your ears if someone asks any question, to which he replied, I accept I am doing Medical, but I still love computers and know a hell lot about it.
My teacher got married and she also got a cute baby. We talk occasionally in fb and she is going great too.
I hope to meet both of them someday soon. -
I don't know what to chose.
The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;
The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;
The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;
The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;
The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;
The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);
The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;
The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.
I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.6 -
Was fixing a bug and suddenly got an error that the lodash library could not be loaded. Funny, didn't even know the project used that lib. Looked for the reference and the previous dev used _.times instead of a for loop. Ha okay, interesting. Wonder where else this library is used.
Searched the whole project for references, dependencies, whatever, any sign of it. Fucking. Nothing.
Rewrote the _.times part as a simple for loop, then removed the library. The rest of the project still worked perfectly. Took me about a minute and a half.
Who the fuck uses an entire damn library to... Not write a for loop I guess?!7 -
How to waste money as a dev company, 101:
Give people ton of budget for their education to do whatever they want with it with no oversight at all:
1) Devs go to some shitty confs in places across the world that teaches them nothing (new) so they can visit interesting places on company's money
2) Go to a conf where you learn ton of stuff that can be implemented right away
...Then you come back, no time to do stuff properly, just "make it work" (or make it seem like it works), because of deadlines, poor prioritization, new features, bad planning, vague roadmap and poor client management. And the worst of them all, LGTM code reviews.
Few months later, who the fuck wrote this shit? Oh, dude that left? What about this mess? Oh, he's a goner too. What the fuck should this random undocumented chunk of code do?!
Do that a few times and you've got bunch of pissed off clients with a ton of bug reports nobody can solve without wasting 20x the amount of time it would originally take.. LGTM
RIP project.6 -
So recently I had an argument with gamers on memory required in a graphics card. The guy suggested 8GB model of.. idk I forgot the model of GPU already, some Nvidia crap.
I argued on that, well why does memory size matter so much? I know that it takes bandwidth to generate and store a frame, and I know how much size and bandwidth that is. It's a fairly simple calculation - you take your horizontal and vertical resolution (e.g. 2560x1080 which I'll go with for the rest of the rant) times the amount of subpixels (so red, green and blue) times the amount of bit depth (i.e. the amount of values you can set the subpixel/color brightness to, usually 8 bits i.e. 0-255).
The calculation would thus look like this.
2560*1080*3*8 = the resulting size in bits. You can omit the last 8 to get the size in bytes, but only for an 8-bit display.
The resulting number you get is exactly 8100 KiB or roughly 8MB to store a frame. There is no more to storing a frame than that. Your GPU renders the frame (might need some memory for that but not 1000x the amount of the frame itself, that's ridiculous), stores it into a memory area known as a framebuffer, for the display to eventually actually take it to put it on the screen.
Assuming that the refresh rate for the display is 60Hz, and that you didn't overbuild your graphics card to display a bazillion lost frames for that, you need to display 60 frames a second at 8MB each. Now that is significant. You need 8x60MB/s for that, which is 480MB/s. For higher framerate (that's hopefully coupled with a display capable of driving that) you need higher bandwidth, and for higher resolution and/or higher bit depth, you'd need more memory to fit your frame. But it's not a lot, certainly not 8GB of video memory.
Question time for gamers: suppose you run your fancy game from an iGPU in a laptop or whatever, with 8GB of memory in that system you're resorting to running off the filthy iGPU from. Are you actually using all that shared general-purpose RAM for frames and "there's more to it" juicy game data? Where does the rest of the operating system's memory fit in such a case? Ahhh.. yeah it doesn't. The iGPU magically doesn't use all that 8GB memory you've just told me that the dGPU totally needs.
I compared it to displaying regular frames, yes. After all that's what a game mostly is, a lot of potentially rapidly changing frames. I took the entire bandwidth and size of any unique frame into account, whereas the display of regular system tasks *could* potentially get away with less, since most of the frame is unchanging most of the time. I did not make that assumption. And rapidly changing frames is also why the bitrate on e.g. screen recordings matters so much. Lower bitrate means that you will be compromising quality in rapidly changing scenes. I've been bit by that before. For those cases it's better to have a huge source file recorded at a bitrate that allows for all these rapidly changing frames, then reduce the final size in post-processing.
I've even proven that driving a 2560x1080 display doesn't take oodles of memory because I actually set the timings for such a display in order for a Raspberry Pi to be able to drive it at that resolution. Conveniently the memory split for the overall system and the GPU respectively is also tunable, and the total shared memory is a relatively meager 1GB. I used to set it at 256MB because just like the aforementioned gamers, I thought that a display would require that much memory. After running into issues that were driver-related (seems like the VideoCore driver in Raspbian buster is kinda fuckulated atm, while it works fine in stretch) I ended up tweaking that a bit, to see what ended up working. 64MB memory to drive a 2560x1080 display? You got it! Because a single frame is only 8MB in size, and 64MB of video memory can easily fit that and a few spares just in case.
I must've sucked all that data out of my ass though, I've only seen people build GPU's out of discrete components and went down to the realms of manually setting display timings.
Interesting build log / documentary style video on building a GPU on your own: https://youtube.com/watch/...
Have fun!20 -
Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:
I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!
Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....
Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards
Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)
And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....
You get the point.
The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!
Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/2 -
So today was interesting.
I had to extract the domain from an email address and compare the domain to a hard coded whitelist, nothing difficult, fuck takes 2 min really.
Except the project starts throwing 500 errors for no god damn reason, like seriously, I double check syntax, nope looks fine, run pho's syntax checker on the file
# php -l /path/to/file.php
Nope says it's all good.
Checks error log on server -> no log
OoooooooooKay then.
Comments out the few lines, saves, errors gone.
remove comments, error comes back.
Do this a few times, and magically the fucking thing stops throwing errors, now I haven't actually changed anything, and I know this project is so fragile I don't know how it stays running at times but fuck me this is a painful joke.6 -
!dev
I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.
The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.
As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.
This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.
My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.
That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again. -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
!tech
recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.
i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .
I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).
I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.
the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)
I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.
shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.
then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?
i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.
i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.9 -
Are you familiar with chess? What classes/objects and methods/functions would you use to implement the game of chess? Who knows if checkmate is reached? What about timed games?
It always leads to an interesting discussion and you can easily throw out prodding questions if they get stuck. I've never had anybody give me the exact same answer, and it's been complimented post-interview a handful of times.13 -
This is incredibly interesting. How the frikkin-frik did the WiFi and Bluetooth die on my Raspberry Pi 3. Yes, I realize they work in tandem but how does something like this just die after just sitting around and performing light duty tasks for just a few months.
Reinstalled Rasbpain 2 times, nothing. USB WiFi dingle works great.
Not really a rant but I wonder how shit like this happens.
The Pi is in a case away from my cats, in a temperature controlled environment and adorned with the official power adapter.
Things that make you go hmmmmmmm. -
My past 16hours activities
Woke up > destroyed a healthy running environment while trying to setup dual monitor on my manjaro kde > found out the nvidia driver was the culprit the whole the > the whole thing was a PITA > reinstalled the kde with windows dual boot > did the previous task 4/5 times till I felt satisfied ( call be a dumb but it is what it is ) > and now after wasting the whole fucking day I am setting up the environment finally.
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this shit before 4 am in the morning . It's now 1.26 AM .
Life is an interesting loop of hell .4 -
I mentioned in a previous rant that one of my favorite games of all times (CrossCode) was written in HTML5 and Javascript. I have been playing the game again (this time on the ps5) and continue to be surprised at the monumental force of the game. So, I decided to take a look at the "original" game engine in which the game is built. ImpactJS. So, apparently (and I have not looked at the inner workings of the code) the creator had a module system in which files could be imported before module imports was a thing in Javascript, not only that but it had a class system mimic in place to deal with things, with inheritance and everything in between. Fucking fascinating. Now, one can actually see the dev logs of a new project that Radical Fish is working on, their primary target remains, but now they seem to be using TypeScript with a plethora of other things in order to build the game, they essentially took the game engine and re-modified the fuck out of it to come with something different. And it fucking worked, beautifully.
From my other findings, it seems that they had to jump through some hoops to get the games to run on consoles, specially the Nintendo Switch which we all know it is a bitch to port into, but apparently the underlying tech is built on Haxe using something known as Kha, a portable multimedia lib.
This is interesting to me as someone that always admired game development, and I sometimes wonder if they would just be better served using something like C# as a target platform with something that they could mold up from the ground up like MonoGame.
I am probably not going to work tomorrow in order to stay in playing the game all day lmao.
Game devs are amazing really. And this game is a jewel, try out the demo online if you have not yet and see what you think:
http://www.cross-code.com/en/home3 -
Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194
There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?
Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.
The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.2 -
Last December I discovered the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times", and my new year's wish was that there be interesting times. This year I wish there be mundane times.2
-
!dev
Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).
Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.
I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.
But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.
This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.
That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.
And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.
Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.
Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.
Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.
Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.
All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.
Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.
The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.
We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.
Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.
I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.
In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.
Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.
Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!
I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.
it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.
Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.
I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.
But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.
And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.
Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.
When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.
In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.
Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.
Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.
I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.4 -
One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.
Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.
Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.
Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.
Some things he mentioned,
1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.
2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.
3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.
4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.
5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.
6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.
My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.
These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.
Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.
One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.
I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.2 -
Alot of hacks around here!
An extract of some of those:
-Couldn't time the shutter right when photographing lightning. Used my oscilloscope to measure its electrical influence and anytime a peak is detected, it actuates the shutter.
-Using a lock as a heatsink for a overheating display driver ic.
-Hacking two USB ports together to get more power.
-Display module was too tall with header pins. Moved its back components to the main board and soldered the module flat onto it by flowing solder down its connecting holes.
-Not me but still interesting: Back on ye olde times when paid tv contained a disruptive H or VSYNC signal only their paid tv box could filter, my electronics prof. analyzed it and built the required comb filter on his own. Even sold some on the black market. -
Wow I'm first!! Uhm... 8... I forgot to take lunch break cuz I was really busy or the code was really interesting...
If within 24 hrs... Maybe 12... I had to login at night a few times to finish urgent work (bug fixes) -
I'm fed up with my work. I am the only dev so I have to manage everything, from negotiating integration protocols to design and implementation. The field is rather exotic and I don't have much room to grow and develop my skillset. I earn literally 1/4 of what my peers make in other companies doing more interesting things...
But then again my boss (the company is real small) helped me a lot during some difficult times and I don't want to pull the rug from under him. So I'm trying to get things organized and done as much as possible so as to leave everything good for my successor, but that's hard since im the only dev and i have to do everything...
Kinda vicious cycle...4 -
Today I'll visit a university and get a little taste of what they're teaching. The sad part is that the interesting courses are all at the same time.
What on earth is "Computerlinguistik" (computational linguistics)?
And I'm not sure where to go other times as well because literally NONE of these 7 parallel courses are of any interest for me. I'll probably go in Germanistik and Linguistik (german and english) since the IT stuff and financial explanations when studying are all at the same time. Who organized that shit...
Other than that, I hope I'll not get lost on the campus and have enough energy on my phone to distracted me of boring co- I mean taking notes, obviously
Also 3h on the bus. Yay.7 -
You know how wonderful it is to hear a child talk for the first few times? Then, once they get the gist of it, how they endlessly rattle on with worthless stuff - eventually saying something interesting, but really don't have a single idea what the fuck they're talking about?
That's Disney.2 -
almost end of working day... jobless...
me : *running `uptime` on a server*
*for no reason* : runs `uptime --pretty`
interesting output... ( that I have seen so many times on my personal machine because I have `uptime` aliased to `uptime --pretty` )
*thinks to self* : didn't we create that program that computed a similar output? Wonder if the code is similar...
*brain gets excited about the source code of `uptime`*
goes hunting for the source code of `uptime`... finds it... ( wasn't too hard anyway )
now here I am comparing my code with the source code of `uptime`
what a way to end the day... 🤦 FML!1 -
personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.
which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).
first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.
right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.
that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.
i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.
i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.
three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).
put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...
... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.
awesome experience, though. worth every second.
to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...
dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD
those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D
as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting. -
Been consulting a friendly acquaintance on technical issues for some time now. An interesting side project in a field that I am not familiar. Well after some time you begin to be well versed and understand what it's all about.
Wrote some code. Made a website. Did some soldering and prototyping. Now I find myself in a position where most of the IP is a) written by me b) designed by me.
An official agreement has been a topic couple of times. The owner wants to hire me, but I don't see myself working there. He offered shares. I said yes. But nothing has been formalized.
Now the the CEO sends me an NDA that practically tries to make me sign over all the IP to the company. First correspondence I get from him since the beginning. Legislation is quite clear. Without written agreement IP is owned by the creator.
I lolled. They must think I am dumb because I try to help. I feel a hefty invoice for services provided generating in my accounting.. -
First time I have heard of codementor.io
Sounds interesting kinda like desperate times needs desperate measures. Just gotta need to pay some $ for it. What do you think? -
Oxygen Not Included
Another game worth mentioning.
Already spent half the week on it, the learning curve is interesting, you will eventually fail many times but with every fail the next colony is going to achieve more and more.
It's kind of missing some nuclear reactor. (Hello Factorio :)3 -
This is why we can never have enough software developers
It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.
Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.
Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.
Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.
Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.
Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.
Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.
A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.
If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.
With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work. -
!tech
i was feeling very disturbed thinking about this thing, so just wanna share here. trigger warning : this is about 2 recent news (1 national and1 international) about crimes against women and its affect on me, a male , somewhat privileged guy with rarely any women in life.
news 1 : some lady in iran getting killed by police due to religious laws . news 2 : a receptionist girl in india getting killed for not providing sexual services to hotel people .
i will come back to first news in a bit, but second news has shaken me to the very core. i saw a post where her dead corpse was being taken up by her acquitances and she is just ... lifeless, hands going sideways, face hung at one side, mouth open... damn :'(
read more here : https://indiatoday.in/india/story/...
i am not at all related to this news, but somehow, i as a guy feel disgusted and being responsible for this sad event. this is not an act of power or lust , this is an act of a horrible mentality.
i come from the city where the world's most number of hate crime and crime against women take place. and pathetic politicians and people of power blame it on women's dressing and mens "naive nature" and , "boys being boys, accidentally making mistakes" . little did anyone know that this mentality has been cooking in the streets for last so many years.
i am a single child with no siblings or grandparents, my relatives rarely visit me and my last 24 years on earth rarely involved any female companionship apart from my mom.
i like girls, i find them cute. i really want to be with someone, to have a consensus relationship. but the talks among my homie groups and other male friends have gone toxic to the level that a national issue syarted feeling relatable.
the feeling of getting affection from someone has somehow turned into a lust, a "game", a "service". one guy( who recently shifted to other state) would use to tell us how he would visit " red light areas" , another one(also left) once tried to ask for that "service" in a camp where we were staying during a trip, and used to tell how he would hook up with girls on Instagram.
we used to laugh at those things, find them interesting and enjoyable. i would think about them in deep, thinking that this is something possible, a transactional access to sex, with me now earning enough to afford it.
now, seeing this news i feel so shitty and being a horrible human. those thoughts were not originally mine, but i didn't opposed them. rather i laughed on it , and thought that once am even more powerful financially and politically, could even entertain that approach.
As a guy, i want to say i am deeply, terribly sorry.
This mentality needs to be changed. my homie group is not just the only group of males that has such vile thoughts having openly propagated. every park, every company meeting , every library, every gym, anywhere i go, i can just show up a coffee cup and shout "women,huh" and can get a laughter followed by several low voices whospers on which girl is a "s***" there .
there are multiple points of failure in our society that are causing these. the news 1 from the start of this rant is the very first : role of government and religion on controlling "dresses and behaviour" of women
another comes the role of sex, culture and gender education in institution. institutions in my areas are so fucked up: they teach how plants fuck and bees suck honey to a puberty hit student, but doesn't teach consent, relations and personal behavior at any age. my school would even try to sometimes make all girls sit in a seperate row and other times would force guys to sit with girls. don't know what they got for this authoritative behaviour, but that sure didn't impacted our brains very rightly.
lastly this needs to be made clear in evevry guy's mind that paid prostitution, forced prostitution and consensus relationship are 3 different things, and only a respectable , consensus relationship is something you should think about and prepare for.7 -
As there was a lot of talk on the last times about JDK / Java and the release of JDK 17… found this gem via Planet KDE.
JDK 8 - JDK 17 Summary with Examples
https://advancedweb.hu/a-categorize...
Thanks to the author!
Thanks to Kevin Ottens for having weekly something interesting to read, too:
https://ervin.ipsquad.net/blog/...4 -
Since i needed higher quality data for retoor9b I invested some time in the statistics project. It became quite decent. It's not a silly script anymore.
I also had rank per user regarding popularity (upvotes / post avg). It got lost somehow. I only know that IHateForALiving has second place. Root 10th. Netikras 14th, Lensflare 15th). First place was by not regular user who made one post with six upvotes. That's all. Hihi.
Repository: https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...
Dataset for LLM: embeddings:https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...
Graph compilation with ALL users active last few weeks:
https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...
All generated data by this project: https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...
Build / latest export status: https://retoor.molodetz.nl/retoor/...
In the LLM dataset you'll see more interesting data for every user like:
Statistics: User(ranter) retoor made 505 contributions to devRant(developer community) what means retoor owns 1.0 percent of contributions on devRant(developer community). The avarage post length of retoor is 219 and total post length is 111037. retoor owns 0.0 percent of content on devRant(developer community).
retoor is 315 times mentioned on devRant(developer comminity).2 -
I have an interest in methods to make myself smarter. At times some ideas seem to be just out of my reach. I don't always know the reason why. Eventually with persistence I am able to figure things out. However, I always wonder if there are techniques to learn things faster, better, more completely, with less struggle, etc. Would being smarter help with this. I wondered, "Can I create a program/method to increase IQ through training?"
So I found an interesting book called "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard J. Haier.
Very quickly I was engrossed in this book. It is written in a very accessible way and slowly trickles in the jargon. The book is basically the culmination of 40 years of studying the subject. The main point of the book is: you cannot increase your IQ through techniques and tricks. The only realistic avenue for increasing IQ is through genetics. Your IQ is based upon nature, not nurture. This is a result of the data, not opinion. The writer of this book follows what the science is telling him. This was not what I wanted to hear. He also went on to explain that the statement "You can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough." He said this is false. Some people, no matter how hard they try, will not be able to get past certain limitations in aptitude. This statement will probably make a lot of people mad, but the data led this researcher to this conclusion. Though I sense he found this disheartening (my opinion). I know I did.
So after reading this book over the weekend I am a bit perturbed that there are not recognizable techniques to increase IQ through mental exercises. Websites all over will say otherwise, but it isn't a thing.
What to do? I decided I am going to find ways to maximize my potential. I will create a set of mental exercises that help me use what I got to the full potential. I know when I see different ways to think about things I get a bit better at solving problems. So learning and experience is still a way to improve your intellect, if not IQ. If I feel like I have made progress in this endeavor I will definitely share.
If you have any interest in neuroscience then I recommend the book I read this weekend. It is very accessible for the reader not versed in the subject. I knew virtually nothing about the topic and now I feel I have a good grounding in the state of the art. It has some neat info on some potentially better approaches to AI as well.7 -
AHHHHHHHHHHGGGH
I HATE VPN SETUP
- Trying OpenSwan
Installing open swan on a Debian machine.. setting up the config.
Restarting openswan. Syntax error. No syntax error to be found.
Different tutorial.. it starts! Try to connect.. I can’t connect. Look at the logs. No errors.
Tcpdump. My traffic is coming through.. all fine.. try to connect again.. it works! (Nothing changed!)
Try to ping somewhere else.. no connectivity.
Try to ping an IP in the same network.. works fine. So I have connectivity, just no internet.
Spend an hour finding out about traffic directions of which no one seems to know what they really mean.
Boss tells me to stop using openswan because it’s deprecated and replaced by strong swan..
- Strongswan
Reinstall Debian machine, install strongswan. Copy openswan config. Oh, they’re incompatible? Look up strong swan config, and the service starts.
Connect to the VPN.. it works! Again, no internet, just connectivity in the same network. Spend 2h debugging the config, disable firewalls everywhere, find an ancient bug in the Debian package related to my issues.. ok, let’s try compiling from source.. you know what, let’s not. I’ll throw this Debian machine away and try something completely different.
- pfSense
Ok, this looks easy enough! Let’s just click through the initial setup, change some firewall rules, create an L2TP VPN with a simple wizard.
Try to connect to VPN. First, it times out. Maybe a firewall issue? Turn off firewall.. ah, something happens now. I get an error message right after trying to connect to the VPN. Hmm, the port doesn’t even get opened when I enable the firewall.. this implementation seems a bit buggy.. let’s try their OpenVPN module.
Configure OpenVPN. Documentation isn’t that clear.. apparently a client isn’t actually a client but a user is a client.. ok, there’s a hidden checkbox somewhere.
Now where do I download my certificate? Oh, I need a plug-in for that.. ok, interesting. Able to download the certificate, import it, connect and.. YES!!! I can ping! But, I have no DNS..
Apparently, ICMP isn’t getting filtered but all outbound ports are.. yet the firewall is completely disabled. Maybe I need outbound NAT? Oh. There’s no clear documentation on where to configure it. Find some ancient doc, set it up, still no outbound connectivity.
AHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHG
Then I tried VyOS. I had a great L2TP VPN working in less than 15 mins. Thank you VyOS for actually providing proper docs and proper software.3 -
Biggest regret: Staying at my current dev job through the bad times (which started a week into the job). I've been here 2 years now, the first was a complete waste of my time, I was rudely managed and dumped on the projects nobody wanted. They were a complete miss-match for my skill set and not what I was told the job was about. In my first annual review I said I was applying for other jobs, I got moved to R&D within a couple of weeks, it's been better work and management wise but there's a perpetual threat of being moved back. I have my second annual review tomorrow. The money isn't great. The experience has been a mixed bag. After the first year it was quite interesting. But I probably won't be staying long.2
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commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:
Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)
some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.
the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.
some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.
some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.
how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...
ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...2 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD. -
Really interesting video by FunFunFunction https://youtu.be/J9OpTNk0hYc.
"Does a developer need to be nice". How many times have you guys been made to feel stupid for asking a question or for getting something wrong?2 -
I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.
3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note -
Hey guys, who has experience with JPA/hibernate RESTful performance numbers.
Interesting would be:
* persistence operations per second, and the response times
* proportion between read/write for a typical rest service
Rightnow i get ~300ms read, 900ms write at 350 concurrent requests. 75% write operations
I more or less ruled out my custom code, problem seems to be hibernate (of course ...😋)
Stack: jetty, jackson, hibernate, mysql9 -
During these interesting times it has certainly been a productive one for me. But after this fuckup i need to take a break. Also came to the reallisation i rely too much on Ctrl-r in terminal. I just needed to find that one long weird rsync thingy that i use once a quarter year...
:~$ history -c | grep rsync | grep...
I need a break. I royally fucked up now and i cannot be bothered right now to type that 25 lines of escaped backslashed one-liner rsync thing...3 -
I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.
I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.
Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...2 -
I have a teaching side gig and got a course assigned on "designing and implementing cloud solutions". So I started with teaching Go, which some IT professionals consider a fairly good pick for cloud applications.
Now I get complaints from people that think I'm not allowed to teach programming in general and Go in particular in this course, which is about "designing and implementing cloud solutions".
We live in interesting times.7 -
Interesting NY Times article today Saturday March 26 2016 by Markoff and Lohr, "A Race to Take Control of Artificial Intelligence And the Future of Tech". Lots of C levels will read this article and ask CIO if AI on radar. Will fan the fire. Also a lot of VC action. Google TensorFlow open source. Microsoft also all in and of course IBM Watson. Google beat Go grandmaster 4-1, which is tougher than chess program. Something to keep on your radar. Have fun!
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I have decided that massive natural selection events are a thing with humans. When resources appear to be getting low a group of people will prepare and wipe out a large portion of consumers. The most straight forward way is to create a crisis and then offer the "only" solution. Make that solution a weapon and you are done. The masses gladly accept the solution. At all times appear benevolent. Silence dissenting voices swiftly. Make the dissenters look like nutters and publicly humiliate them and apply labels to them. Labels are effective because it creates pariahs. People like to not be singled out and called names.
What do you end up with? People who distrust government and the institutions. I don't know how this benefits the orchestrators (how to spell) of the genocide. Perhaps if the numbers are small enough they can just be rounded up and killed by force rather than coercion.
I get the feeling this approach has been used in the past. Like it has been at least tested on smaller scales. Maybe even on past civilizations. Did we learn to do this from space visitors? I wonder.
2021 has certainly been an interesting year. I used to think people were just stupid. This year has confirmed that for me. But I am not sure stupid is the right word. They are certainly book smart. Maybe naive is a better word. I pray and hope 2022 turns out better for people. Maybe they start seeing signs they have been lied to by people they trust. Maybe not. When you are in the matrix it is hard to see through the facade. The matrix feels very real, until it doesn't.
Dev Goal?: To not be murdered by the matrix.6 -
Is HackerRank a good site to prepare for technical interviews? And I guess the general question is how to best prepare?
The problems are interesting but it seems most of the Medium+ ones require knowledge of a specific approach or the large test cases will terminate with timeouts or out of memory.
Been sitting on this for a week. Just implemented the recursive versionwhich is better but now times out.
https://hackerrank.com/challenges/...6 -
So what are everyone's predictions for Bitcoin on the 31st. Rise or fall? Maybe a bit of both? Recovery times? Impact on other cryptocurrencies?
I'm expecting to see some short lived, possibly huge drops, across the board, followed by it shooting back up within a week. Interesting time though.
Hope you're all are able to cash in, if there's anything to cash in on.
Good luck!2 -
I'm kind of lost guys 🤔(from the point of view of the career path).
Currently I'm unemployed and looking around for a new job inside and outside Italy, but most of them are quiet mediocre, from the point of view of salary(is hard to reach 40K pre-tax in Italy) or actual interesting work to do.
Leaving that aside, up to now I was always able to deal with any job that I had at hand, despite the industry, and this leaves me with an empty goal in the software development career because I feel capable to adapt to any technical environment.
The business side was always a second thought because it's quite boring most of the times(but I might change mind I think, given the chance).
And if you ask me what I like, I would say anything technically interesting/challenging, so no real preference here 😕
Have you ever had such period in your career?
Did you get the chance to find a way to move on?1 -
Well at times, almost anything. Sometimes the wall becomes so interesting to look at that you actually waste 10 good minutes.