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Search - "invisible work"
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Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.
So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.
They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.
After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.
I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.
Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.
The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?12 -
Alright, so you are a dishwasher and you do your job just fine.
And great news, the restaurant you work in is becoming THE restaurant in town.
To handle the volume you need to clean each dish within 30 seconds.
The pressure causes you to clean only the dishes that are easy to clean. Soup bowls come before ramekins with half-eaten Crème brûlée. This works for a while but it's self-defeating because not everyone is going to order soup and there is a growing shortage of clean "hard" dishes because you can only scrub so many of them to keep the chefs supplied. Eventually you are moving about 70% of the dishes in inventory at any given time and rarely used dishes have to sit filthy with their contents caking on until they are needed.
But Good news! Meet Jeb. He's the new dishwasher here to help. Efficiency! Except you have to stop and explain which dishes are easy and why they should come first. You have to share the sink, so you get a good helping of Jeb's rants about how things should have never gotten to this state and how nice the faucet was at the sink at the other restaurant.
In the interests of not making a scene in the kitchen and in front of any customers looking in, you smile and feed him a line of bullshit about how you understand and appreciate his thoughtful feedback. You'd rather just walk away and let him learn why being right doesn't buy him anything, but then you'd just be reprimanded. You and Jeb clean more and more until your moods match at a dead zone of benign acceptance thinly disguising your cynicism.
Still, part of you DOES understand Jeb. This SHOULD be simple. You pick a dish up, you scrub it until it's clean, and then you dry it. If only you could do that. If only the boss knew how hard you have to fight to do your job.
You privately go back and think about how much better things would be with some adjustments. Like, another sink. A dedicated dryer, be it person or a machine. Things that require investment, sure, but would more than make up for the value lost. You then remember that doing your job more efficiently would only bring more volume to perpetuate the cycle, assuming that you can even justify interruptions or reduced dish output to your boss.
You know that the root cause of your rush is really the customer's impatience and the business' fear of losing customers to a more convenient competitor, but that's not your job to fix. You are a dishwasher. You aren't here for the politics, you are here to wash dishes. But still you stew in a dance of wanting the power to fix what is broken while knowing you have no power to fix the most stubborn force on Earth: people.
You here a chef yell out that he needs 4 plates NOW (and not with spots on them this time, dammit), and you briefly fantasize about staring blankly into space, walking stiffly into a corner, dropping your pants, bending over, rumbling your butt cheeks, and blasting a thundershit like a 6-gauge all over the sink, the chefs, the food, fucking Jeb, and the customer body at large.
It didn't matter if you acted like a four-year old on amphetamines. The news would repeat your name for years as the dishwasher that wouldn't stand for the human condition as it stood, because the world needs to know that EVERY dishwasher's, no, EVERY WORKER's job would be simpler if it weren't for impatient consumers. And then things would change.
Pffffft lol. You laugh off your fantasy as the naive and selfish daydream that it is, then pick up the next soup bowl.
Now imagine everyone thinking this way, the dishes are invisible, the sink bowls are made of cracked cement, and the big customers will panic and attempt to raid the kitchen if they stop seeing food come out of the kitchen the instant they ask for it. And the boss asks you about your status every day while promising that you'll have time to clean the hard dishes one day.
This is Enterprise-level Software Engineering.3 -
Don't you just wish you can delete things from the internet forever?
I used to be a host on this show, not telling the name tho. It aired every Thursdays at 10 pm. And in case anyone missed it, the television station would post it on their youtube channel.
I was so desperate to remove it that I flagged it a bunch of times, but I knew it wouldn't work.
I'm dying of embarassment because everyone is finding it. It doesn't air on TV anymore, so that youtube channel is the bane of my existance.
I even got the idea to search myself up and delete any social media accounts, because I want to be nearly invisible on the internet.
That worked out. Except for that damn youtube channel.
I was a fucking 14 year old. I looked weird, acted weird, my mom made me dress weirdly. I was so nervous, I licked my freaking lips ON CAMERA. Not to mention, I had acne, and my skin was dark at the time because I was fresh out of middle school, and I did cross country in middle school.
Now I'm curious. Does anyone else have something embarassing on the internet that they can't get rid of?26 -
"Ad targeters are pulling data from your browser’s password manager"
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Well, fuck.
"It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth doing"
Just check for visibility or like other password managers handle it iirc: assign a unique identifier based on form content and fill that identifier only.
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"Nearly every web browser now comes with a password manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.
The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising."
Source: https://theverge.com/2017/12/...14 -
If you want to talk about politics or religion at work, then you can expect a lot of disinterested nods and “sure”s from me before I leave the room.
I don’t care about your invisible man in the sky, I am here to do work. In fact, your invisible man in the sky can choke on my dick for all I care.
I don’t want to talk about to political cult. I’m here to work. Keep your sheep mentality to yourself.
I’m here to build fucking software, not to take on your insecurities and character flaws.4 -
Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.6 -
Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.
For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.
Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.
Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.
Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.
What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?1 -
Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??
It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.
Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.
All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.
Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.
Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.
If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.
Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.
Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!22 -
That's it, where do I send the bill, to Microsoft? Orange highlight in image is my own. As in ownly way to see that something wasn't right. Oh but - Wait, I am on Linux, so I guess I will assume that I need to be on internet explorer to use anything on microsoft.com - is that on the site somewhere maybe? Cause it looks like hell when rendered from Chrome on Ubuntu. Yes I use Ubuntu while developing, eat it haters. FUCK.
This is ridiculous - I actually WANT to use Bing Web Search API. I actually TRIED giving up my email address and phone number to MS. If you fail the I'm not a robot, or if you pass it, who knows, it disappears and says something about being human. I'm human. Give me free API Key. Or shit, I'll pay. Client wants to use Bing so I am using BING GODDAMN YOU.
Why am I so mad? BECAUSE THIS. Oauth through github, great alternative since apparently I am not human according to microsoft. Common theme w them, amiright?
So yeah. Let them see all my githubs. Whatever. Just GO so I can RELAX. Rate limit fuck shit workaround dumb client requirements google can eat me. Whats this, I need to show my email publicly? Verification? Sure just go. But really MS, this looks terrible. If I boot up IE will it look any better? I doubt it but who knows I am not looking at MS CSS. I am going into my github, making it public. Then trying again. Then waiting. Then verifying my email is shown. Great it is hello everyone. COME ON MS. Send me an email. Do something.
I am trying to be patient, but after a few minutes, I revoke access. Must have been a glitch. Go through it again, with public email. Same ugly almost invisible message. Approaching a billable hour in which I made 0 progress. So, lets just see, NO EMAIL from MS, Yes it appears in my GitHub, but I have no way to log into MS. Email doesnt work. OAuth isn't picking it up I guess, I don't even care to think this through.
The whole point is, the error message was hard to discover, seems to be inaccurate, and I can't believe the IRONY or the STUPIDITY (me, me stupid. Me stupid thinking I could get working doing same dumb thing over and over like caveman and rock).
Longer rant made shorter, I cant come up with a single fucking way to get a free BING API Key. So forget it MS. Maybe you'll email me tomorrow. Maybe Github was pretending to be Gitlab for a few minutes.
Maybe I will send this image to my client and tell him "If we use Bing, get used to seeing hard to read error messages like this one". I mean that's why this is so frustrating anyhow - I thought the Google CSE worked FINE for us :/ -
My mom is a basic user that needs to use only basic apps to chat and speak with family, post photos and play one or two games.
She is always ranting about how difficult is to do simple things. And she is mostly right.
Like, where are my fucking photos gone?
Why is facebook/whasapp/whatever different today, where are the fucking buttons gone?
what the fuck happened (when while clicking something a update windows popup and you click something else). Why the buttons are so small (when you want to close a fucking ad windows with a little invisible fucking "x" somewhere and you click the ad instead)?
I don't want no fucking cookies.
Why after windows update my fucking game doesn't work anymore. Why I can't hear anything through the fucking skype?
The fact that she knows I'm one of the moron who builds kind of not-usable and buggy fucking things, doesn't help.2 -
//First rant
So I've been working trying to get a file exporter for a binary file format mostly reverse engineered - 2001 Super Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube) if anyone's interested.
Everything works fine, goals show up in the right places, wormholes work as intended, etc. That is everything, except every single level you create will be invisible, or crash (Depending on which version of Dolphin emu you use).
This happens whenever trying to specify object names for 3D objects. I checked, all the many offsets seem correct, Object names are correct. Tried both null terminated strings and fixed 80 character strings - nothing.
Some other guy also made an exporter that works, however the code is an absolute mess - basically unreadable. It also lacks some newer parts of the file spec, which is the main reason as to why I'm rewriting it.
And as I'm working with an almost entirely unheard of file format, there are few people to go to for help. The 2 I know who are also familiar with the LZ file format have no idea either...
Sigh.1 -
The longer I live, the longer I am unsure what the meaning of my life is.
TLDR; 42
Yes I am a creative person in a way that I can create something out of nothing, but unfortunately all my work is almost invisible. Is the meaning of a developer guy to be a magician? He does something and *wooosh*
//magic happens here
there is a thing which he forgot how it works within a month. Why can't I just talk about my work with other people than those from the IT business? I don't think to be that important, but sometimes it appears that without you and me nothing will really work nowadays.
And to be honest with you guys, I am too slow. I can adapt new concepts and new programming languages, but I feel like getting overruned by all that new stuff appearing each day. Am I supposed to be that super hero named"superbrain"? Is that still healthy?
wtf, my life is a miracle, an oracle and a hurricane (and some times it is even great)!
I am confused!1 -
Anyone recalls my raspberry's hotfix for overheating problem?
Frankly I am considering it as a long-term solution. I currently have a proper rpi fan applied but it's just too freaking noisy! I thought my work lappy is noisy when at 90C. But this tiny rpi fan is just.. Painfully loud! Especially when rpi is suppised to be tiny and invisible.
Soo.. Yeah.. 3"" fan for an rpi it is!9 -
Every time when I spend hours of thinking, investigations and experiments to find a solution to a problem...
And it ends up with a one line change in the git commit.
Always a strange feeling.3 -
Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.
Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.
So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.
Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.
Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.
I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.
Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.
Get a load of this bs.
In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.
Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.
Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.
Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.
Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠
I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.1 -
Went to a hackathon and tried to use ARCore. Most painful experience of my life. There are so many issues and critical bugs that I can't even fit them all into a 5000 character rant, Google has shittier code than a highschool startup.
So instead of typing 5000 characters I'll just save you all some time. If you're forced to use ARCore, don't even try to use the AcquireCameraImageBytes or related apis for actually accessing the camera feed. Just use unity's screen capture API (draw an invisible rectangle on the whole screen, make a texture, readPixel entire rectangle). Turning off all models for 1 frame and taking a screen capture is easier, faster, and somehow more optimal than using Google's code.
Also, they released Augmented Faces on Friday. Their demo plainly doesn't work the way they intended on many devices because the list never gets populated since their engineers are dumb fucks. Just force the face mesh to always remain active and you'll instantly support all devices! You can deactivate it using your own methods but Google's doesn't work on many devices. There's an issue in their repo about this that they are plainly ignoring.
Also if you're interested I have a (working?) engine to use Object Detection for interactions within AR + a create your own adventure game demo made w/ object detection + ar on my git:
https://github.com/pshah123/...
My code is 100% crap so definitely don't use it in production but I was able to get the individual pieces working so hopefully this helps someone! Unless you're from Google, then fuck you please uninstallrant please uninstall google fuck google mv google /dev/null sudo rm google sudo kill -9 google git rm google16 -
As part of mentoring folks was having a round table. All wanted tech help. lists of things to do, learning syllabus, techs to bet on, projects, promotion mantras etc etc.
I asked them how's the work. All started rating about overload and overworked. How difficult it is to find time to do anything else. It became noisy.
So asked how they will find time to do all the above without time. Do they really need mentoring on time management and prioritisation ?
Felt like my invisible tws anc headset turned ON at that moment3