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Product Owner: "Our definition of done is putting it on production. So you are only done if it's on production. Otherwise our sprint goal is failed."
So we put it on production.
After deploy, some content manager appears: "Why is the system doing things? I was told this should not happen today."
"Erm, we have put the feature on production as we are only done if it's on production."
"Well, yes. But it should not be live yet!"
Oh well. Communication, or the lack thereof, does never fail to amaze me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯5 -
Intel: our new 12th gen CPU beats Ryzen in gaming!
Also Intel: benchmarks on a buggy version of Windows 11 that takes a big performance hit on Ryzen.
Yeah, Intel... you and your benchmarks. It's just so ridiculous.10 -
!rant && rant
I've been doing random HTML/CSS/JS crap since I was 11 (I'm 20 now). And worked with NodeJS/Swift/Java/Typescript for the past 4 years. For some reason, I've always been interested in public transit and the combination between public transit and Development seemed magical to me. I've tried making Departure time apps and trip planners for a few years now. And for that you need open data, for which we have a national data source and a Google Group for support with that.
I quit my study two years ago after a year doing nothing and I was on the edge of getting into depression because I didn't do anything useful for two years. Didn't see myself do anything useful in the next few years apart from some random dev crap (still public transit related).
About half a year ago I ranted on that Google Group about shit being not efficient (weird standards, weird documentation but mostly lack thereof).
For some reason a business saw that rant and sent me an email about two months ago and told me they 'potentially' had 'some' work for me. So I had some really informal conversations with that business but I still was very insecure about myself (had some shitty experience with tons of unfinished projects) and I was worried that they had higher expectations for me than what I could give them.
A week later I received an e-mail with a proposal for an actual, full-time job as a back-end developer and obviously took the opportunity.
I started a month ago with a month-long probation period and after three weeks told me I had passed the probation period.
I'm a super happy boy right now. I got a job, being super insecure, without any certifications, without finishing school (Everyone in the Netherlands tells you you NEED a diploma to get a job), more than double minimum wage (minimum wage is quite high in the Netherlands), and most important, at a business that does a lot of public transit stuff.
Apparently ranting about stuff, not finishing your school and being depressed gives you a well-paid job. :)5 -
The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.
The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.
It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.
The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.
It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.
This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.
It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.
Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.
It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.
And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.
I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.31 -
Right.. I spent the hours leading up to the year change by adding a YouTube to MP3 downloader into my Telegram bot. After a bit of fiddling it turned out okay, and the commit for it was mentioned to the last for the year 2020.
I mentioned this in one of my chats, and users came in with more issues. Told them it's the last commit for the year and I'll keep myself to it. I did adjust the code a bit though to fix those issues, awaiting a commit after midnight.
Midnight passes and 2020 turns into 2021.
I commit the new features, and quickly implemented another one I already thought of as well, but needed its own commit.
Quickly afterwards it turns out that the /mp3 feature actually breaks the bot somewhat, especially on long tracks. Users add a slew of 10h songs into what essentially became a long queue of single-threaded bot action (or rather lack thereof).
I made the /mp3 command accessible to myself only like I did with some other administrative commands already. Still no dice, the bot rejected the commands but executed part of the /mp3 command anyway.
I look a bit further into the code and it turns out that while I was restructuring some functions, I forgot to make the admin() function exit the script after it sends the rejection onwards. This was a serious security issue and meant that all authentication was void. Fortunately the chat did not realize this - one of the commands that became available as a result was literally a terminal on the bot's system.
I fix the issue in 7 commits after midnight total, 3 of which were related to /mp3 and admin(). We're now 1 hour after midnight.
Happy New Year everyone... :')6 -
Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)
Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.
Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.
DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”
It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting 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 -
SHOCK CONTENT PROCEED WITH CAUTION
Star tattoos on knees means "I'll never be on my knees for cops", "I'll never do what cops say" in russian criminal culture. However, these tattoos are dangerous. Russian cops don't like them. If you're just arrived to a russian prison and they see the tattoos (and they see it), they tie your legs the way that makes you knees face the ground, then two cops hold you and drag you around the huge asphalt prison yard until there is no stars on your knees, only the naked kneecap bones or lack thereof.
I have to leave but it's psychologically hard because russia is the country that gaslighted and threatened me into becoming a slave. It's a stockholm syndrome and I want to break it.
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Ah, so the great war I my head has begun. When you're a CS major in college, you can't help but realize that knowing everything about computers and how to develop everything on thrm is next to impossible. So you start to question "what will be my specialty?". "Web dev or Low-level? "swirl through my head. I work on projects when I should be writing that 5-page essay for that College Composition course I care nothing about. Then on my own time I need to openly practice and refine my craft, and studying. Sheesh, I hate time (or the lack thereof). How do you do anything major on your own these days?3
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A good way to avoid working for a bad company is that you can spot major problems in the interview and pre-employment phase. There are a number of things that indicate a bad culture that you can ask about right off the bat. Dress code, blocked websites, and work from home policy(or a lack thereof) can all indicate what kind of work environment to expect.
But the biggest one of all is a request for your salary history. If a recruiter or hiring manager wants to know how much you are or were making at a previous job, and will not allow the process to continue without the information, run.
Every job opening has a budget associated with it. The employer already knows what they want to spend on the position. They want to know what your current or previous compensation is or was, so they can perhaps save some money of that budget by offering you a very small amount more than the amount you tell them.
If they ask the question, I get suspicious, but then say, "I'd prefer not to disclose that. What is the budget for the requirement?"
If the person who asks you relents and tells you the budget, then all is well, in my opinion. But if they stick to the subject and insist on getting your salary history, then it indicates a culture of arbitrary subordination, which is not a healthy work environment. If it ever goes this way, I politely tell them that I'm not comfortable disclosing that information, and that I would like to withdraw my interest in the position. -
I can't believe how simple SwiftUI is compared to UIKit.
Unbelievable how Apple screwed up with the simplicity (or lack thereof) with UIKit.1 -
Into a bunch of open source hogging meat heads because no one likes paying for things their own peers toil days and nights creating and creating more under documented over expensive licensed stuff (because agile) while throwing buzzwords to clients just make business while simultaneously choking the life out of underpaid overworked devs and engineers with the skill of running away from responsibility trying to save their own skin with the inept ability to look like a hero/King at the end of the day with a single mail sent with psychic communication or the lack thereof with people who are slogging their asses off to fix a problem created to the vulnerabilities and bugs introduced due to the impatience of the same moron who couldn't afford to give his employees/subordinates more time to figure out an elegant solution to a non existent problem created in the confusion of improperly documenting unnecessary requirements of an ignorant or unknowing client who is way too eager to process way too much load with way too less resources all the while whining about lack of features theyre not gonna use.3
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Have a wonderful weekend now, fellow devs!! Enjoy the sun, enjoy your company or maybe lack thereof. Is there something you have been thinking of trying but put it off as just a dream? Try it! Take the first step! Enjoy your life!1
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Long time nothing from Mr. Gitmaster, somehow made my peace with him as the project moved out of my focus and he actually seemed to be contributing.
But now some pull request exchanges burst into flames as if they were on LKLM before Linus got castrated. Actually it's with the guy who is jamming out most of the front end code trying to make a really shiny UI with lots of animations that turn our macs into heaters.
Well, debate was over JS code styles or lack thereof and how commented out code should be removed (would actually support Mr gitmaster here). They have me a bit lost there, as I expect the freestyle JS code we produce without any agreed Coding Style Guideline to be an even greater clusterfuck than our C++ code base.
Anyway, hope they come to terms again, like at the start of the project when they jokingly attributed one another as assholes. Their opposing characters could actually benefit from each other. -
Docuware, oh Docuware.
Meant to be an archiving system, but the moment work flows were seen by our director the ball just went out of the court in terms of implementation.
We've gotten to a point where we don't want to use Asana for ticket tracking and task assignment, we don't want to use a tool that acts as a man in the middle to push information to dbs, we want to use workflows with set conditions to automate every single process in the company. Why? It's cheaper.
The syntax is alrightish for arithmetic expressions, but there are so many limitations that we've gotten to the point where we're absolutely circumventing the entire point of the software.
Initialise variables, Condition, condition, condition, draw data from external sheet, process based thereof.
"oh, why doesn't it display images on the populated forms? I don't want it just as an attachment I need to click next to see".
Frustration is paramount, but the light is at the end of the tunnel.
"Oh, did I mention that we need digital signitures?" you need an additional module Mr boss. "no, I bought the cloud bundle. Make it work".
Powerful tool, I'll give it that, but it's downfall is its lack of being comprehensive.
Month 3, here we go.
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Hey all! My first post isn't quite a rant, but rather a question.
I see a few posts that are about project managers. Now, I'm still doing IT at uni, but I was quite intrigued by PM when I found out one of my family friends is an engineering PM. The idea of PM appealed to me as I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do mostly after uni (not ruling out development, ofc!).
My question is whether or not it would be beneficial to have a PM with an IT background, and if so, to what extent do the benefits outweigh the lack thereof?
Sorry for the wordy post.2 -
What's up with the scrolling on Devrant? Or rather, the lack thereof. I keep being sent back to the top of the page.
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