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The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.
This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.
Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."
Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.6 -
Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!
The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.
I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.
The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.
When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.
That's when the nerdgasm happened.
The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!
That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.
Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.
Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.11 -
Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding
That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.
I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.
Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.
Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase
but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol
Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.39 -
In the past: "Alright, have the day off, so can do some serious work (work on my game project). Let me just check my mail first... And a cpl of sub-reddits... And see if there are any updates for Unit3D, or any interesting forum posts, or new assets on asset store that look nice... And check some online newspapers just to see if anything is going on... And check if anything new has been posted on slashdot since I last checked 5 minutes ago (nope)... And maybe see if there's any updates to Sublime Text or new useful packages that can help improve workflow... Ooh came across article on how to improve workflow... Hm someone mentioned a new task-management system in comments, gotta check that out... I'll just sign up for a demo-account and... Hm but what if there are any better ones? Better google for comparisons. Wait, isn't there a new episode of Silicon Valley today? Gotta see that first, no time tmr. Hmm also new episode of Archer, and American Gods. Better get watching these out of the way first, or I can't concentrate... Ah, wait, it's dinner time, no point starting anything until after that."
Now: All of the above, plus "I'll just check devRant real quick before I... hmm... interesting rant... *scrolls and reads rants and comments for 3 hours*"
How am I supposed to get any work done? :_(3 -
(mostly !dev) Fuck humans! Really: what a scum bag race. All that shit talk about human dignity, the highest values are just sugar coating the low base motives we mostly live by. Like people have such fine antennas for your income, social status, the power or lack thereof you exert over other. They know it before you open your mouth, that they can pick on you, harass you, because you're the one on the receiving end, the one that bows away. The bullies feel that. On an overcrowded chicken yard you'll find more dignity than in human society.
Everybody drooling over that polished photoshop life on facetubeinsta: materialistic, consumeristic, masturbatic wastage. At least we now say it openly: that if we were the winners, we'd also take it all, live that empty luxury, life of fame. But 99,99% of us, we aren't in that position, just working off our arse to only keep afloat. And for the stars, those fake images, we're just rats to click on ads to better train Google.
No wonder that software, as a picture of human communication is such a shitfest of arbitrary, entropic conventions and endemic epidemic of quirks, bugs and evil trap doors. As a whole: an insults to reason, a challenge to sanity. (...Conway's law)
And I'm still a bit pissed at our profession, that, you know, as engineers, scientists, physicists, we still see us in the lineage of that "great" age of enlightenment and reason,.. while it's all just a cover up. Sure science and their ideas are nice as long as you serve a purpose or make some money. Sure democracy and free speech are great achievements, but in the end some elites and monopolies rule the world at their gusto - and will not stop destroying the world unless we're already one feet in the abyss (like 1962, be we ain't had enough of that shit, hadn't we?)9 -
The hype of Artificial Intelligence and Neutral Net gets me sick by the day.
We all know that the potential power of AI’s give stock prices a bump and bolster investor confidence. But too many companies are reluctant to address its very real limits. It has evidently become a taboo to discuss AI’s shortcomings and the limitations of machine learning, neural nets, and deep learning. However, if we want to strategically deploy these technologies in enterprises, we really need to talk about its weaknesses.
AI lacks common sense. AI may be able to recognize that within a photo, there’s a man on a horse. But it probably won’t appreciate that the figures are actually a bronze sculpture of a man on a horse, not an actual man on an actual horse.
Let's consider the lesson offered by Margaret Mitchell, a research scientist at Google. Mitchell helps develop computers that can communicate about what they see and understand. As she feeds images and data to AIs, she asks them questions about what they “see.” In one case, Mitchell fed an AI lots of input about fun things and activities. When Mitchell showed the AI an image of a koala bear, it said, “Cute creature!” But when she showed the AI a picture of a house violently burning down, the AI exclaimed, “That’s awesome!”
The AI selected this response due to the orange and red colors it scanned in the photo; these fiery tones were frequently associated with positive responses in the AI’s input data set. It’s stories like these that demonstrate AI’s inevitable gaps, blind spots, and complete lack of common sense.
AI is data-hungry and brittle. Neural nets require far too much data to match human intellects. In most cases, they require thousands or millions of examples to learn from. Worse still, each time you need to recognize a new type of item, you have to start from scratch.
Algorithmic problem-solving is also severely hampered by the quality of data it’s fed. If an AI hasn’t been explicitly told how to answer a question, it can’t reason it out. It cannot respond to an unexpected change if it hasn’t been programmed to anticipate it.
Today’s business world is filled with disruptions and events—from physical to economic to political—and these disruptions require interpretation and flexibility. Algorithms alone cannot handle that.
"AI lacks intuition". Humans use intuition to navigate the physical world. When you pivot and swing to hit a tennis ball or step off a sidewalk to cross the street, you do so without a thought—things that would require a robot so much processing power that it’s almost inconceivable that we would engineer them.
Algorithms get trapped in local optima. When assigned a task, a computer program may find solutions that are close by in the search process—known as the local optimum—but fail to find the best of all possible solutions. Finding the best global solution would require understanding context and changing context, or thinking creatively about the problem and potential solutions. Humans can do that. They can connect seemingly disparate concepts and come up with out-of-the-box thinking that solves problems in novel ways. AI cannot.
"AI can’t explain itself". AI may come up with the right answers, but even researchers who train AI systems often do not understand how an algorithm reached a specific conclusion. This is very problematic when AI is used in the context of medical diagnoses, for example, or in any environment where decisions have non-trivial consequences. What the algorithm has “learned” remains a mystery to everyone. Even if the AI is right, people will not trust its analytical output.
Artificial Intelligence offers tremendous opportunities and capabilities but it can’t see the world as we humans do. All we need do is work on its weaknesses and have them sorted out rather than have it overly hyped with make-believes and ignore its limitations in plain sight.
Ref: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/...6 -
I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.
My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.
apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.
- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.
- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.
- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain
- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :
--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)
- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev
- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company
- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.
- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)
- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.
- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.
- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)
- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/13 -
I don't have any experience in teaching, but I'd venture to say that teaching anything is hard. For most subjects, teaching has been refined over thousands of years to be easier and meaningful. Not CS. As has been mentioned by many people CS is a very new subject when compared to the likes of maths, for example, and education systems haven't been able to cope with it adequately (nor should they be expected to).
That the CS industry is rapidly evolving certainly doesn't help matters, but in reality that shouldn't really be that big of a problem (at least in earlier years of education). The basics of computer systems and programming don't really change that much (please correct me if I'm wrong) and logic stays the same. Even if you learn stuff that's a bit out of date it can still be useful and good lessons should be able to be applied to new technologies and ideas.
Broken computers is a big inconvenience, but a lot of very useful things can be done without a computer, and I should think the situation is a lot better than it was 5 years ago. What I think would be good, instead of trying to use broken computers would be to get students to set up and use a raspberry pi each; you learn about something other than windows, learn how to install an OS and you don't need that much computing power for teaching people computer science.
I think the main problem is a lack of inspiring teachers. Only a very few teachers will be unable to get you through the exams if you put in the effort, but quite a lot of the time students don't put in the effort because they can blame it on the teacher.
My solution would be to try and get as many students into computer science as possible and the rest will follow: more people will become teachers, more will be invested in the subject, more attention will be payed to the curriculum.
That's not to say I don't agree that many of the problems that have been mentioned need to be fixed for CS education to work properly, just that there is no way that I can see to fix them currently without either creating more problems or some very rich person giving a load of money.
This has gone on a lot longer than I expected so I'll stop now.14
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