As a developer in Germany, I don't understand why anything related to development like IDEs, git clients and source code documentation should be localized/translated.
Code is written in english, configuration files too. Any technology, any command name in a terminal, every name of a tool or code library, every keyword in a programming language is written in english. English is the language of every developer. And English is simply a required skill for a developer.
Yet almost everything nowadays is translated to many other languages, espacially MS products. That makes development harder for me.

My visual studio menus are a mess of random german/english entries due to 3rd party extensions.

My git client, "source tree" uses wierd translations of the words "push" and "commit". These commands are git features! They should not be translated!

Buttons and text labels in dev tools often cut the text off because they were designed for english and the translated text is bigger and does not fit anymore. Apparently no one is testing their software in translated mode.

And the worst of all: translated fucking exception and error massages! Good luck searching for them online.

Apple does one thing damn right. They are keeping all development related stuff english (IDE, documentation). Not wasting money on translations which no developer needs.

Every commercial lib:

"Download free trial"

*click*

Register with your email, full name, phone, company name, etc.

😒

Yeah, fuck you, too.

Non selectable, non clickable links in error messages. *sigh*

People giving Xcode bad reviews for being english only.

Stay the fuck away from development if english is a problem for you! 🤬

I'm already annoyed by the translation craze everywhere in development.

At least Apple remains sane in that regard.

I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

That moment when you get an image from a designer and it is ok to use in the app first try. 🧐

Correct size, format, transparency, spacing, colors and everything.

I thought that day would never come.

Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.

Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.

Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.

Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.

Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.

Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.

Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.

Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.

Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.

Designer: Unlikely

Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.

Designer: … Ok then.

-

It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.

Merge conflict

Today I have opend a foreign project and noticed a weird bracket ending style.
All closing curly brackets are indented one level further to the right.
I've never seen that style before. Normally I am really agnostic about bracket styles.
I don't care. But this one is so strange and confusing that I wanted to know what you other devs think about it.

Support forums with no possibility to edit your posting. 🤬
You'd like to correct your typos?
Oh too bad...

Windows: I have updates, please pick an option:
* Update and shut down
* Update and reboot

Me: Ok, update and shut down

Windows: Updates and reboots

Three weeks of vacation. Finally I‘ll have time to delay my side projects every day until the end of vacation.

Me, talking to a colleague:
"No, thats impossible. The problem can not be in my code. Let me show you why. You see, the code does this, and than it goes here, and then… oohhhh…. I’ve found the bug."

Today I have encountered some interesting piece of code:
In order to make a button disabled, the text of that button is assigned a grey color.
And in the click handler, there is a check if the color of the text of that button is grey, then return from it and do nothing.

That might be the ugliest hack that I had ever encountered 😆

"I might steal that idea"

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

Tester commenting in a Jira ticket:
"Not testable"

Me thinking:
"Why? 🤨 Has he been attacked by a tiger or something?"

Yes! Give me hell! 😈
(it‘s German)

Roses are red,
Bluescreens are blue,
Windows enrages me,
I‘m telling you.

MS Teams sending an email to inform me about people which "are trying to reach me", one hour after I already talked with those people via Teams chat.
🤦‍♂️

Currently working on a game for developers.
Two players compete on a randomly generated arena by sending instructions via a REST API such as "unit x move in the up direction and shoot to the right". So units can be controlled by manual user interaction but the idea is that the players create a smart program that controls the units automatically. So it’s about who can implement the best "bot".

The game is turn based and the units can move one grid cell per turn and shoot in one of the four directions. Shots require energy which regenerates a certain amount per turn.
Units can also look in a direction to spot enemy units which are not visible by default.
The winner is who manages to destroy all enemy units or the main stationary enemy unit "the gem" (diamond shape in the screenshot).
There are walls which block the movement, the line of sight and the shots (green cells).

Everything is randomized. The size of the arena, the number of units, max hp, max energy, etc. But it can be replayed by providing a seed.

There will be a website which lists all games, so that players can watch them.
Alternatively a player can also implement an own viewer. Everything necessary is provided by the REST API.

I’m curious about what you think 😄

English is weird.
Take the double oo for example.
There are so many different pronunciations for it and there seems to be no rules whatsoever.

mood
wood
blood
door

All different

Found the secret Bethesda HQ. It’s located in Germany and is disguised as an old people’s home.

Those faceless devs are a little bit creepy 😮

I am using this SDK and I came across a property "Orientation" of type int.

Why int? Is it an enum or something? Let's have a look into the online documentation...

"Gets or sets the orientation."
😣

Yeah, thanks. Very useful.
It's again that kind of documentation which simply restates the property name or method name. Who needs this?

So I tried to set the Orientation property to 1 to see what happens.

A runtime exception then told me that the only valid values are 0, 90, 180 and 270.

Well, this is kind of stupid but ok, I can live with that.
But ffs, put that info into the documentation, where it belongs!

Me as a mobile app developer trying to add a button to a page of a .Net website:
So, what do i need to do?

Web developer:
Oh that's easy. You need to edit that template which produces html, add an event in there that will call a javascript function, which is in a .js file, which is generated from a typescript file. Than you should give that button a style. Simply by opening up that .less file here and adding a class which will be translated to css later. In that c# file over there you add a bundle reference which contains the css and js files, but before that, they must be minified. In that other c# file, you add a controller that handles your button.
Aaand... take care of new js features and css features. Most browsers don't support them. Those cool C#7 features you love so much... not in this project. Our build servers don't support C#7. Those new features are evil anyway.

😭

"Let‘s make a service where the users can enter all of their secrets and sensitive data so that we can warn them if that data has been leaked elsewhere"

What could possibly go wrong?

End of the year. Management announced that the project that our team has been working in for more than 4 years, will be killed.
Shit.

Every time when I double click a .cs file and Visual Studio begins to load.... Noooo! Stop. I just want to look at the code for 5 seconds. I don‘t need VS for that! Damn!

Popularity is orthogonal to quality.

Dear Microsoft, stop pushing me to update to Windows 11.
I still haven’t changed my mind and I won’t change it even if you ask me for the 6th time.
Just stop being an annoying bitch, please!

Also, one button is completely enough. You don’t need to make me click 3 or more buttons in different places just to remove your Win 11 messages which you keep slamming into my face.

Dude... have you ever heard about... enums? They were invented so that you don’t have to explain magic numbers.

Websites which tell you to use Ctrl + F in a mobile browser...

Why does MS need to be such a scumbag with Windows updates?
Every now and then, this unskipable blue setup screen appears and forces the user to make some decisions.

"Do you want to set Edge as the default browser?"

"Do you want a 360 subscription?"

The usual crap.

But it‘s not skippable!

You have to make a decision and the UI for "fuck off" is different for every decision.

You can‘t just press the Nope button every time.
It‘s fucking deliberate. They want you to spend time on reading their shit and force it down your throat.

And let‘s not forget about people who don‘t know computer stuff very well and are confused by this. Then call us because "the computer isn‘t working again."
And you can‘t tell them to skip this slimy rotten vomit of a marketing weasel because you need them to tell you what the options are for each fucking decision screen.

😫

Seems like the ad spammers are quite active recently. I‘m worried.

Also: fuck every single one of them human scum.

Sounds weird without context:

Ask yourself a couple of simple questions:
Do you like to code?
Do you like to learn new things and improve?
Do you like to solve problems and spend hours on a single detail until it finally works?

If your answers contain a "no", then development is probably not for you. You will hate it and you will suck at it. And you will make lifes of devs who actually love it miserable. So do something else.

Microsoft after changing the toolbar buttons layout in Outlook from horizontally aligned on the bottom to vertically aligned on the left edge:

"Yeah there is absolutely no way to fit the To Do and the Notes buttons together with the other three on the left edge. We need a popup menu there!"

Dev: What is higher priority, ticket A or ticket B?
PO: No.

Installed SonarQube and Snyk on the CI/CD of a 2.5 year old project that only had a linter enabled previously.

Practically zero problems found. One minor problem (same code in different branches), a few false positives, and a few possible problems in dependencies that I have no control over.

Now wondering:
Am I really that good or are those tools just shit?

"with that said" is the most overused phrase in meetings.
Not sure if it‘s a just a German thing when we speak English.

Binary searching my way through the git history to find the commit that broke something. 😄

!rant
It‘s just amazing how much a proper type system and a modern language makes refactoring a good dev experience.

Valid from, valid until.

Who else has this irrational feeling that in some edge case, it might be not long enough?

I’m half developer and half dogshit corrector.

Dogshit specifically being the output of people who fail to properly do the one thing that they are paid for.

Because if I don’t do it, nobody does.

Dear providers of SDKs, when you claim to have a full documentation for your SDK, please at least provide the info about what unit (radians or degrees) the Angle properties are. Especially important when the iOS SDK is taking radians and the Android SDK is taking degrees, as I found out by experimenting. I don't even care so much about float on Android and double on iOS. Just make use of the fucking documentation and provide some actually useful info there. "Sets or gets the angle" is fucking NOT useful.

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

devRant

"BUSCAR TODO"

This Spanish translation for "SEARCH ALL" just tricked me into thinking that a translation is missing 😅

Space Age, the expansion for THE game for programmers, Factorio, will be out tomorrow.

Who else will be playing the shit out of it?

God damnit Quora!

I stumbled upon some article or post or whatever they are called on quora.
And I really wanted to read the comments on it. It wouldn’t let me unless I log in.

I normally don’t do that but I thought I’ll make an exception because I really wanted to read the comments.

So I clicked on that comments button and logged in (via google). First it presented me some modal dialog to pick 5 things that interest me. And it was mandatory. Fine… I picked those 5 things.

Finally it presents me the list of articles or whatever. But not the same list that I have seen before I was logged in. Scrolling, the article of my interest is not there. God damnit! Just show me my comments for fucks sake.

I go back to that tab where I was not logged in to somehow copy the link of that article or the link to the comments section. But it doesn’t let me. Some bullshit pseudo smart layer of crap is preventing me from doing anything.

Then I abuse the fucking share link to visit it in my logged in tab to finally see the comments that I came for.

And the comments weren’t even worth it. God! What a waste of time! And how can one fuck up a fucking forum so much?

It will be a lesson for me not to visit Quora ever again.

Switch your tech stack or programming language or development framework to something that you enjoy more.
If it requires to switch the company, do it!
If it requires to learn something new and you think that you don‘t want to, then it‘s probably the wrong goal.

It looks like "Fifty Shades of Gray" is a popular color palette among frontend designers.

I heard good things about Edge recently and thought that I should give it a try for a few days.

I’ve opened the same pdf file in multiple Edge windows and and tabs, each scrolled to a different page.

#1
The middle-mouse button scrolling is broken on half of the windows and tabs. You press the button, you see the scroll mouse curser. But it doesn’t scroll.

#2
Scrolling horizontally to an area which wasn’t visible before, the content there is extremely blurry. Scrolling vertically to different pages doesn’t fix it. Is it the pdf? No. It’s just Edge. Zoom in and out again and the blurriness is fixed for now. Until it comes back later on a random page.

#3
Duplicate another tab and suddenly it crashes all of the tabs and windows of Edge. Now I need to open them all again and scroll to the positions that they were before…

If you think that it was just a one time issue, you are wrong. All of them happened multiple times and after Windows reboots.

I’m back to Firefox again.

In our company, all devs are using windows notebooks with the brand Schenker.
And they get bluescreens regularly. The bluescreens are currupting git repos and other data. Seems to be caused by some driver issues with trackpad but no fix for that yet. Happening for years now...
If someone hits the table and gets angry, he probably got a bluescreen again...

Idiotism and cluelessness is a plague among dev world.

Do you know that feeling when you ask for help in a chat or board and some guy posts a link to the first google result by just googling what you asked?

I mean does that guy think that I can’t use google?

I wouldn’t ask for help if the answer could be found in google in a few seconds.

On the other hand you can’t be mad because he only wanted to help you.

Congrats to johnmelodyme :)

Idea for a next gen image compression method:

* Put your image into a reverse AI image generator to get the prompt for that image.
* store the text string as the compressed image
* Put the text string into to AI image generator to get back your compressed image.

There is a fine line between a fine line and a progress bar.

What the fuck is wrong with Windows?
I put it into sleep. After a while, it just wakes up again.
I put it into hibernation. It boots up again.

I closed anything that could potentially wake it up like instant messengers etc.
Still it wakes up after a random amount of time.

I opened a pdf in macOS today.
It was opened in the default pdf viewer and I could scroll through the pages. Then I accidentally dragged one of the pages in the left area where all of the pages are shown as thumbnails. I was surprised that I can do that, because surely I was just viewing the pdf. Like in a pdf viewer. Like read only.

Imagine my surprise when I closed the pdf, opened it again and found the pages in the wrong order!

It freaking autosaved my accidental drag and drop in the standard app that opens pdfs!
Who the hell thought it was a good idea to do that? That’s insane!

I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).

First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.

So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?

No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.

"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.

The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.

Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.

No enums. Do I need to say more?

No generics (of course, lol).

Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).

No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.

No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.

No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.

The need for null AND undefined.

No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).

JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.

Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.

That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.

It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)

Marry Christmas!

MS has added copilot to Outlook and placed the button in that left side bar where the other buttons are.

Thing is, that‘s the only colorful icon there.

Now every time I look at this bar, this icon always stands out. It looks like this is the selected icon, even if something else is selected.

For me this is a great example of shit UX.

They probably made it on purpose so that people are constantly reminded that COPILOT IS INTEGRATED IN OUTLOOK NOW.
They don’t care about good UX, they just want to smash it into your face.

The disabled option cannot be disabled if the UI element is disabled. 🩼

Each of the 3 words "disabled" has a different meaning.

So I’ve requested images for the dark mode because the existing images are very bright and look bad when dark mode is enabled.

After a few days the designer says that it’s done and sends me the figma link.

And what do I see there? He added the screens but in dark mode with the same bright images! 😂

I mean… even if he misunderstood me… doesn’t it look odd to him?

Hey, been gone a hot minute from devrant, so I thought I'd say hi to Demolishun, atheist, Lensflare, Root, kobenz, score, jestdotty, figoore, cafecortado, typosaurus, and the raft of other people I've met along the way and got to know somewhat.

All of you have been really good.

And while I'm here its time for maaaaaaaaath.

So I decided to horribly mutilate the concept of bloom filters.

If you don't know what that is, you take two random numbers, m, and p, both prime, where m < p, and it generate two numbers a and b, that output a function. That function is a hash.

Normally you'd have say five to ten different hashes.

A bloom filter lets you probabilistic-ally say whether you've seen something before, with no false negatives.
It lets you do this very space efficiently, with some caveats.

Each hash function should be uniformly distributed (any value input to it is likely to be mapped to any other value).

Then you interpret these output values as bit indexes.

So Hi might output [0, 1, 0, 0, 0]
while Hj outputs [0, 0, 0, 1, 0]
and Hk outputs [1, 0, 0, 0, 0]
producing [1, 1, 0, 1, 0]

And if your bloom filter has bits set in all those places, congratulations, you've seen that number before.

It's used by big companies like google to prevent re-indexing pages they've already seen, among other things.

Well I thought, what if instead of using it as a has-been-seen-before filter, we mangled its purpose until a square peg fit in a round hole?

Not long after I went and wrote a script that 1. generates data, 2. generates a hash function to encode it. 3. finds a hash function that reverses the encoding.

And it just works. Reversible hashes.

Of course you can't use it for compression strictly, not under normal circumstances, but these aren't normal circumstances.

The first thing I tried was finding a hash function h0, that predicts each subsequent value in a list given the previous value. This doesn't work because of hash collisions by default. A value like 731 might map to 64 in one place, and a later value might map to 453, so trying to invert the output to get the original sequence out would lead to branching. It occurs to me just now we might use a checkpointing system, with lookahead to see if a branch is the correct one, but I digress, I tried some other things first.

The next problem was 1. long sequences are slow to generate. I solved this by tuning the amount of iterations of the outer and inner loop. We find h0 first, and then h1 and put all the inputs through h0 to generate an intermediate list, and then put them through h1, and see if the output of h1 matches the original input. If it does, we return h0, and h1. It turns out it can take inordinate amounts of time if h0 lands on a hash function that doesn't play well with h1, so the next step was 2. adding an error margin. It turns out something fun happens, where if you allow a sequence generated by h1 (the decoder) to match *within* an error margin, under a certain error value, it'll find potential hash functions hn such that the outputs of h1 are *always* the same distance from their parent values in the original input to h0. This becomes our salt value k.
So our hash-function generate called encoder_decoder() or 'ed' (lol two letter functions), also calculates the k value and outputs that along with the hash functions for our data.

This is all well and good but what if we want to go further? With a few tweaks, along with taking output values, converting to binary, and left-padding each value with 0s, we can then calculate shannon entropy in its most essential form.

Turns out with tens of thousands of values (and tens of thousands of bits), the output of h1 with the salt, has a higher entropy than the original input. Meaning finding an h1 and h0 hash function for your data is equivalent to compression below the known shannon limit.
By how much?

Approximately 0.15%
Of course this doesn't factor in the five numbers you need, a0, and b0 to define h0, a1, and b1 to define h1, and the salt value, so it probably works out to the same. I'd like to see what the savings are with even larger sets though.

Next I said, well what if we COULD compress our data further?

What if all we needed were the numbers to define our hash functions, a starting value, a salt, and a number to represent 'depth'?

What if we could rearrange this system so we *could* use the starting value to represent n subsequent elements of our input x?

And thats what I did.

We break the input into blocks of 15-25 items, b/c thats the fastest to work with and find hashes for.

We then follow the math, to get a block which is
H0, H1, H2, H3, depth (how many items our 1st item will reproduce), & a starting value or 1stitem in this slice of our input.

x goes into h0, giving us y. y goes into h1 -> z, z into h2 -> y, y into h3, giving us back x.

The rest is in the image.
Anyway good to see you all again.

I got @-red bombed 😂
Thanks, pal!

I‘ve not seen a single ad spam post today, so far.
Thank you @retoor!

SDK’s API’s TODO’s ...

Is anyone else allergic to the wrong use of apostrophes instead of the plural form? I see this everywhere.

Not a kiki post 🙂

Pelmeni, the Russian dumplings cuisine, sold in Germany, have a big label on the packaging saying "Made in Latvia" since the war with Ukraine has begun.

Elon Musk

_ducks and runs for cover_ 🤣

One of our customers wants our mobile app to log out the user after 15 minutes of inactivity because of SeCuRiTy…

Why? The phones protect the apps with their hardware encryption from any malicious access.
And we are not dealing with super sensitive data here like some banking app or so.

Why do some people want to have bad UX for no reason?

In a universe where JavaScript was never invented, the world of programming might look vastly different. Perhaps another programming language would have taken its place, or multiple languages would have coexisted in a more harmonious ecosystem.

Without the challenges posed by JavaScript, web development may have been smoother and more streamlined. Websites could have been faster and more responsive, without the need for complex optimization techniques. There might have been fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, and the web could have been a safer place for users.

In this utopian world, developers would have had more time to focus on building great user experiences and innovative features, rather than battling with cross-browser compatibility issues and JavaScript quirks. The internet would have been a more accessible and inclusive place, with fewer barriers to entry for those who want to build and create.

Overall, a world without the horrors of JavaScript would have been a world with less frustration and more possibilities.

(Fooling around with ChatGPT)

As if it‘s not shit enough that I have internet with the speed 1.2 Mbits, now something broke with the connection and the internet disconnects like 5 times per minute the whole day.
And now I need to wait for some technician to come and check (and hopefully fix) what‘s wrong. And I hope it won‘t take him days to do that. I need the internet now! 😣

I think the jobs of people who say that they will be replaced by AI must be so mundane that they probably will and should be replaced by AI.

PO1: Hey, PO2 just told me that he experiences a lot of crashes in our iOS app!

Me: Whoa! The app hasn’t had any crashes since ages. The testers haven’t reported crashes either. (Me in panic mode). I will ask PO2 about some details about the crashes.

Me to PO2: So, can you please describe me when the crash happens?

PO2: (long story about error messages and UI quirks and how he force quits the app to make them disappear)

Me: OK thanks for that info. Those are definitely valid problems that we have not encountered yet. But none of them are crashes. So are there any other problems that cause crashes?

PO2: Yes and no. (Long story and more problems)

Me: ok we need to investigate that. But are there crashes?

PO2: (Something that doesn’t answer the question)

Me: I need to ask explicitly again: Are there actual crashes where the app closes itself automatically?

PO2: No, that has never happened.

@Lensflare how's your game doing? I want to kick some ass

After mass downvoting a serial ad spammer, apparently I've lost my downvote privileges and all of my downvotes are removed. Fucking great.

Meanwhile devrant is flooded with 99% spam, nazi trolling, pseudo intellectual conspiracy nonsense and politics.

I‘m tired of this shit.

Dear fellow devranters

ostream has created his 3rd generation accounts, @godiebitch and @gofuckyourself

Can we please downvote him this time?
He will delete his accounts anyway in a few months but maybe we can reduce the spam that way.

And also try to convince him to get some help.

A mandatory update (for security) for MS Outlook has just broken the badge indicator for new emails 🤡

In the macOS app "Keychain", if you search for something ("fork" in this case), you can’t delete it from the results directly. To delete it, you need to select it in the list without searching, which of course defeats the purpose.
WTF is this? This can’t be on purpose right?

(Sorry for the bad photo instead of a screenshot)

I’m currently working on the profile view in JoyRant, which turns out to be much more work than I thought.

Anyway, after many iterations on the appearance, I’m now finally satisfied about how it looks and works. Especially the category picker (Rants, ++’s, Comments, Favorites).

What do you think? Do you like it?

Dear great ux lords at ms azure devops, could you make the whole freaking button clickable instead of just the text inside of the button?

I want to replace Windows with Linux on a very old Notebook. It‘s for my father who uses it only for web browsing and Skype.
Can you recommend me a distro?
I think Ubuntu should be fine but I don‘t know.

It’s truly amazing how almost all SDKs that cost a ton of licensing fees are technical garbage. The one that I am dealing right now doesn‘t even build without manual tweaks.
Free SDKs are much better quality than that.

Inspired by jestdotty's comment:

> *makes spooky JavaScript noises*

What would be a noise or sound that most accurately represents JS?

I‘ll start with two suggestions and we can vote for the most fitting one.

At this point I think we can reject the theory that image upload somehow fixes itself.

So, when hovering on that element in the bottom task bar in Windows 11, it shows those two icons (wifi and sound) grouped together.

Left click anywhere on that button and it opens the same menu.

But if you right click, now it suddenly depends if your cursor was on the one or on the other icon. It opens different menus!

Great UX! Good job, MS!

Do you think it’s appropriate to use the phrase "dried" in commit messages to refer to removing duplicate code? (DRY = don’t repeat yourself)

I just used it and I’m not sure if it’s ok because some devs might not understand it and the the original letters from DRY went away and became "dried" so it might be even more cryptic.

On the other hand it’s so much more concise having "dried type X" compared to "refactored the code so that it doesn’t contain duplicates of type X"

!rant
I’ve just looked into Rust a bit deeper and was absolutely stunned by how many things it has in common with Swift. The Syntax, the features, the concepts, the "philosophy".

Previously I thought that Kotlin is what comes closest to Swift.

Anyway, Rust seems like a beautiful language and it’s no wonder that it is one of the most loved languages out there!

The compile time index out of bounds errors blew my mind!

Has anybody tried to remind dfox about the broken images, yet?

devRant is messed up!
I often open the app (iOS), see a rant that I want to read, tap on it, and the app crashes.
Now I almost got used to that shit but for some reason when I open the app again, that rant that I wanted to read is gone! Never to be found again!
No matter how often I reload, how much I scroll down, it’s simply gone.

This annoys me more than it should maybe. But seriously, wtf is wrong with this platform? I don’t know if it’s only the iOS app but so many other things are broken here, it’s disturbing. And those problems are there for many years, nobody seems to care. 😩

Don’t get me wrong, I like devRant. It’s the only social platform that I use. But… ugh…

Put as many comments into the code as possible.

Will anyone be going to the WeAreDevelopers Congress in Berlin this year?

If so, we could meet and say hello to each other ☺️

Cotton in German is Baumwolle, which is literally "tree wool".

I'm in Germany.

While being the same race, they're obviously from a different world. I wonder if @Lensflare has more style than his fellow citizens.

Most Germans are Dutch without support for CSS. The country of times new Roman I guess.

They buy apple products to compensate for theur own style. That's how much money is needed to make a German hip.

Update on my devRant client SwiftUIRant:

I’m experimenting with some UI changes compared to the official app.

* vote buttons are laid out horizontally and placed above the rant to not waste space on the left side.
* comments count shows 0 comments instead of disappearing.
* rants are not cut off but visible in full length (I plan to add a toggle setting for that)
* creation date/time is present in the feed
* date/time formatter uses the current system region and the language english. So no more awkward American dates for non American users.

What do you think?

Found a review from 1970 for "Command and Conquer 4" on steam 🙃

Congratulations @Lensflare

Fucking Edge forcing itself onto me after Windows update by displaying annoying dark pattern like fullscreen popups and putting itself into the task panel.
FUCKING GO AWAY you piece of shit! Nobody wants you!
Do I have an OS or fucking malware on my pc?

Games which have a save point or checkpoint system: FUCK YOU!

This is a technical limitation that was present in game consoles in the 90s.

There is no fucking need to implement save points in games made today!

It serves no purpose other than to generate frustration for the player and make the player redo the same section of the game again and again when he fails.
Oh how much fun it is to repeat 20 minutes of tedious shit as a punishment because I fell into your cheap trap and died!

And even if I don‘t fail, I want to be able to stop the game at any time and continue later where I left off. Is that too much to ask?

I don‘t want to be forced to progress in the game until you decide that NOW, after 20 minutes is the time that I am allowed to quit playing.

This is a fucking design decision. Don’t make your design suck to imitate the games from the past that did it for technical reasons!

Imagine seeing words like developer:ess, member:esses or user:ess in artices on the web becoming more and more popular.

Pretty dumb, yes?

That’s what happening right now with the German language with something called gender-language.
It hurts my eyes reading Entwickler:innen, Mitglieder:innen and Benutzer:innen.

People argue that words like Entwickler are excluding woman by using the male form by default. But it’s just a matter of perspective. Why not just define this as the neutral form just like in english? Developer is neither male nor female. Everybody is fine with that.
Yet the Germans are messing around with this gender shit and making text unreadable for no reason at all.
It’s just bullshit!

Some people have a very confusing way of communicating things…
And you need to painfully pull out of them every bit of information.

Colleague:

```
ITEM_ID <- only this will work
1200
1201
1300
1301
1400
1401
```

Me:

What does this list mean?
(I want to know if this is supposed to be a white list, but that doesn‘t make sense business wise)

Colleague:

*explains what the ITEM_ID means*

Me:

(Yeah I know what it means)
Are those ids in the list examples or the only possible values?

Colleague:

Yes, examples. But there are restrictions. Not all will work.

Me:

(Ok this is confusing again)
What are the restrictions?

Colleague:

*Explains the restrictions.*
(Those have nothing to do with the list)

Finally added UI to pick a reason for downvoting in JoyRant :)

What I absolutely love to do is refactoring. With strongly typed languages, I often just remove or change something and then follow the compiler errors to finish the refactoring by fixing them.
It‘s not just a matter of renaming something. I will reliably get all the places in code which are affected by the change.

How do you handle that with weakly typed languages like JS? I can only imagine how horrible of an experience refactoring would be.

"I like being right so much that, when I’m proven wrong, I change my mind."

Such a great quote! Found it in the comment section of a youtube short :)

Judging by the amount of bitcoin recovery ad spam here on devrant, there must be a huge amount of people somehow losing their bitcoins on a daily basis.
Thank god those altruistic scammers… *ahem* I mean hackers of course… are there to help.

Have you tried chatgpt's text-to-speech feature?
It’s so much better than anything that I tried before. You can even choose different "personalities" or tones or whatever.

I‘d even say that it‘s perfect. I can’t think of anything that could be improved in terms of how well it pronounces words and puts emphasis on specific words. It’s 100% natural sounding.

I‘m curious what you guys think about puzzle games with timers.

I personally hate it to be pressured by the timer. And I hate it when the puzzle resets and I need to start from scratch because I ran out of time.
I prefer to take my time and think about the next move rather than rapid fire my moves by intuition and hoping to get lucky.

Yet so many puzzle games have timers. Is this just lazy design? Do you like timers? What do you think about this?

Swift 5.9 will get huge additions to the language, compared to the current version 5.8, including type safe and checked macros much like in Rust.
And it’s still not going to be a major version bump to 6.0!
I’m thrilled to see what kind of stuff will be in 6.0 then! 😄

Got this design for a button.
Now I'm writing an essay in the ticket about how this is problematic for localization and accessibility.

What do AI and CSS have in common?

It‘s easy to get alignment problems which are hard to fix.

Fuck you Jira, for your shitty implementation of the board, which causes written comments in tickets to simply disappear.
You clicked on another comment during edit? Say goodbye to what you have just written!
You clicked on the send button to send your comment? Well, many things can happen with our overcomplicated pile of shit that we call Jira. So, your comment might get lost. Fuck you. We are complicated. This shit can happen. Deal with it.

I‘d like to work more on my 2D game.
The idea is to make a mix of "Factorio" and "Knights and Merchants".
I’ve already got a decent basis with infinite terrain generation and units that collect resources and store them in containers as items.

Notifications UI in SwiftUIRant.

I don’t want to just copy the UI of the official app.
So I’ve made a few changes:
Always displaying the name of the user and other stuff that makes it easier to scan visually, I hope.

Feedback is welcome.

Concerning your recent posts of jubilees,
Here, have yours dear fellow.

Cheers @Lensflare

With unlimited time, I'd put resources into the invention/improvement of a container which can be fed photons and is able to bounce them between mirrors for a long time, like days, and can be released at any time.

With that tech, I would build a delayed choice quantum eraser and set it up so that it produces with many photons an interference pattern or strips pattern by choice, representing a bit of information.

Then i would set up many of those devices in a row so that the results are representing bit strings for arbitrary information.

And I will use this time machine, which can send back information, to win the lottery and other stuff.

Not going insane due to slow, unstable and restricting VPN connection.

Today I‘ve been investigating a freeze in our app. It took me many hours to narrow it down to the textfield validation regex. And it turned out to be a "catastrophic backtracking" issue.
I‘m a regex noob so I don‘t have a clue how it occurs exactly. But I‘m a bit perplexed about what a seemingly innocent regex can cause.

For me it became another argument against regex now.
I‘ve rewritten the regex into readable code and the freeze is gone.

I could try to fix the regex but… nah. The code is better anyway.

Another weird property of the devRant API:

For every POST request the url parameters need to be passed in the http body instead of in the URL, like this:
app=3&user_id=42

Wtf why?

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.

!rant
Just tried Vapor (server side Swift) for a web api project and expected to be troubleshooting a lot but it was super easy and worked out of the box. Even openapi/swagger generation.
Now I‘m exited to build a fullstack project with native and web clients, completely in Swift. 😁

Why the hell do languages like Kotlin (Java) and C# handle dates and datetimes so needlessly complicated?
There are multiple types with different implementations and concepts like local time or time zones represented by those types. Some of them have capabilities like serialization, some of them don’t.
Parsing and encoding is tied to the types.

Why? Take Swift as an example:
It has one single Date type (including time) which represents a point in time independent of any calendar, time zone, encoding or format.
There is a DateFormatter to parse from APIs from iso or timestamps or whatever and to format to UI as a string in any language (localization), for any region, in any format.
If you just want a container for the date time components themselves (which the concept of local date time seems to be in those languages), you can use the DateComponents type. If you are interested in dates from the perspective of a calendar, there is a Calendar type.

Everything makes sense and the different concepts are decoupled from each other as they should be.

Damn! My memory about C# is a bit hazy but Kotlin, I’m disappointed in you! Date handling is a horrible mess!
Ok, I guess I can blame it on Java and JVM.

I have this irrational cringe every time that people say infinite when they actually mean unlimited. I hear and read it everywhere, multiple times per day. In English and in German.

"You can do this infinitely often"

"AI bots have infinite APM"

"The number of items you can store is infinite"

Aaaaargh! Stop it! It hurts! 😫

Weird how words keep changing meaning as you add other words to them:

pass
pass off
pass off as

!rant
Loving the the fact that constructors in Swift (initializers) can fail (returning null/nil) and be async.

In C# there is no other way than using static methods instead.

How do you type with pairs of characters like () [] <> "" etc.?
Do you type them both, then move the cursor back and type the stuff inside or do you type the first of the pair, then type the stuff inside and then close it with the second of the pair?

I just realized I do both techniques, apparently randomly, which weirds me out.
Also my IDE often places the second character of the pair automatically.

I was thinking about what the correct term is for the "." symbol at the end of sentences. Is it dot, point or period?
Turns out it is period, but I also learned that in British English it’s called full stop, which I find very funny 😂. It sounds like something that one would scream in an emergency. FULL STOP!

Anyway, in German there is only one word for dot, point, period and full stop.

Image upload is broken again.

Just a notification for @dfox

@Lensflare I don‘t need to go to whatever websites that you are linking.

You can‘t experience the state of being dead, by definition.
No amount of drugs or spiritual bullshit will give you an actual experience of being dead, because nobody knows how it is to be dead, because it‘s fucking impossible, again, by definition.

Just because your drug trips give you the feeling of "woah bro, it’s totally like I‘m dead, bro" doesn‘t mean it‘s actually like being dead. Fucking imbecile.

Mentions are broken again

Ok so I switched from iPhone SE (1st gen) to iPhone 12 mini.

And no crashes in devRant so far...
With the old phone, it was crashing sporadically when I was opening a rant.

Makes me wonder if that info could help fixing the crashes.

white-trash.png sounds like a fitting name

Based on @Lensflare saying not everyone should start low level.

I don‘t get notifications about @Mentions anymore.

Noticed a few days ago and today in the iOS app.

Currently implementing a Swift devRant SDK and encountered something very stupid:

The json value for attached image is an object (dictionary) when there is an image but it‘s an empty string "" when there is no image.

So two different types for the same property.

I hate this kind of crap.

Why not make it null or omit that property when there is no image?

Now I need to add ugly as fuck custom decoding code for this object.

Playing War Wind and Z (from Bitmap Brothers) on a Win95 computer of my friend. Good old times :)

I can‘t respect religious believe from an intellectual point of view and I believe that religion does more harm than good in general.

But, I do respect the opinion that some atheists have, about religion being good for some people and that it can improve their lives.
I strongly disagree but I respect this opinion.

I have recently realized this after watching some stuff about atheism and theism.

Yesterday‘s Windows 11 update brought back an old bug which I haven’t seen since Windows 8 or so.

The EN keyboard layout is added in the task bar UI but it‘s not actually there when you try to remove it in the settings.

Fucking hell! Why even make new versions of Windows if it‘s all the same pile of shit?

That‘s not the only old bug that persists across multiple major Windows versions!

I just wrote a rant but the iOS app doesn’t upload the image. It shows the loading spinner and then just stops without creating the rant. Is it an iOS app thing again?
Sorry but this is really annoying.

Fucking hell! Why can‘t I block notifications for a specific conversation thread for a limited amount of time in Teams? I get spammed with shit that I don‘t care about but when I block it now, I will forget to unblock it later. 😡

Fuck Xamarin! Fuck Xamarin.Forms!

It's slow, it's full of bugs, it's missing basic functionality, it's rapid new updates breaking older frameworks, it's a shitty unstable IDE on both Mac and Windows, it's the need to frequently reopen files or restart the IDE to fix "intellisense" or the false compile errors, it's non working UI builder and previewer, it's connection issues with simulators, emulators and real devices, ...

Have I forgotten something? Probably yes.

Your dev customer for many years.

I was wondering if there are "employees" in scam call centers, who genuinely don‘t know that they are scamming the people who they call.
Maybe they get minimal information or are lied to and don‘t care enough to question it.

So I‘ve tried to google it. I‘m bad at googling and couldn‘t find anything. All the results were how to avoid or to spot scammers and similar things.
I tried searching in German and in English and I also tried Duckduckgo. No luck.

Then I asked ChatGPT and it basically said that it could be very well true and gave some examples and referenced some articles.
Of course I know that ChatGPT can‘t be trusted because all of it could be hallucinated.
So I asked for references. It gave me just one link, which lead me to a 404.

Maybe you can help me out on this topic?

The reason that I want to know is because I get a lot of those scam calls for years now and I started to mess around with the scammers.
But if they don‘t know, then maybe I should try to convince them that they are working for a scam "company".

What do you think about / would say to a job with a 42 hours week?

Ok, ok, I’ll do it! 😵‍💫

How is platonism still so prevalent among mathematicians?

We know by now that there are different mathematical models depending on different axioms, like the axiom of choice. You can include or omit it from the model and you get consistent and useful but different mathematics in either case.
And there are other examples.

How does this not make it obvious that formalism, rather than platonism, is true?

How to fuck up a simple feature in terms of usability and functionality and take two freaking years (!) for it?
Just use some low code dogshit like the crap that SAP provides.

I have a personal rating system for personalities of people.

On the very bottom of the list, which represents the most disgusting scum, I have those "people":

…
dictators like hitler
politicians
ad spammers
scammers

I never fell for a scam myself but I just can’t comprehend how someone can do it the whole day. You must be a very fucked up piece of shit to do such a thing.

The sad thing is that there are so many of them. This makes me lose hope for humanity.

Just realized that it’s been a long time since I had to deal with collections that contain values of different types and that ugly type checks that come with it when you need to do something with the values.

Sum types are really a blessing.

I do think sometimes, that many of the members here are missing out on millions of dollars and fame, just because they don't choose to be a YouTuber in the dev space.

Given the skill that you guys got, I can say with 100% confidence that y'all will make it. Some of you that I can think of are:

lorentz
Ranchonyx
Lensflare
atheist
kiki

I mean it, y'all are missing out on life-changing money.

On Windows 10, I can have files on the desktop of the secondary monitor.

But for some reason, it’s not possible to pin programs to the task bar of the secondary monitor. 😡 Wtf?

Can somebody tell if it’s possible on Windows 11?

Looking further into Rust, the macros are quite sexy. My first reaction was "omg really"? But then I learned that macros in Rust are nothing like macros in C++.

Again, comparing with my favorite language Swift, it feels like Rust macros are somewhat similar to result builders (formerly named function builders). Or they they have a similar purpose. Both evaluate to some type safe result at compile time and are a perfect tool to make DSLs.

But Rust’s macros can do even more than that. It’s truly amazing.

C# I hate you for that!