Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

TL;DR: Got a really horrible supervisor temporarily fired, maybe permanently fired, got a laptop, and realized that senior devs are amazing when they stand up for the little guys

Omg... I love my coworkers!!! So like, I'm an incredibly shy dev, like, I only managed to get my internship purely because of my familiarity with c#, Android/UWP app development (although never apple, which you can read about in my last rant lol), and the API Management framework that they were using, so, long stories short, I'm insanely shy and I get anxious quite quickly in social situations, that'll be important in a bit. Anyways​, so, in my previous rant (my first one actually, it was "that" bad...) I had a run-in with a rather unfair supervisor situation where he expected me to work on an iOS app without a Mac machine.
Yup.
So, this is currently a little bit before my shift end, where I'm anxiously trying to get a MacOS VM up and running to be able to copy paste some psudo-code so as not to get in trouble, which is when the senior dev of the team walks by and sees me tearing hair out of my head and being really sad. So what does this god amongst men do?
He comes over and asks me what I'm doing.

Now, I didn't actually notice him, so when he asked me, I was insanely jumpy and scared that my supervisor would appear and be mad at me for not having things done, so I kind of half scream half yelp when he says something, so now he knows somethings up and he acts kind of like I'm an injured deer and slowly asks what's going on.
So, of course I tell him everything that had happened and how the supervisor got really mad about me not being able to develop iOS apps due to not having a Mac, and his expectation of me to get it magically working and getting to work on my module, and the selenium portal automatization, and after a couple seconds of me rapid fire nervous squirrel-like explanation, he holds up a hand and says "He what?!!!!? God dammit, how the hell are you supposed to do that? Jesus, you were supposed to get a company laptop when you got here, where's that??? And if you don't have that then how the hell were you working on the cross platform portion? You need a Mac machine for that, so let me get this straight... You've been frantically trying to find a workaround so that AS (let's call him AS for asshat supervisor (missing an s)) doesn't get mad at you... Who the hell... And this fuckers in charge of the interns??"

He was incredibly pissed off at this point, like, REALLY pissed off... But-

This man had just spoken miracles to me.

Mother...

Fuckin...

Miracles...

So I do what any self respecting intern would do, I start cry laughing and hug said BSD for a quick second (badass senior developer), and I say yep, pretty much ;-;.

And queue AS walking into my workspace and saying
AS- "are you done with the iOS a..."

BSD- "You've got to be kidding me, shut up for a second and sit down"

AS- "?" *Sits*

Me- *hides in corner and cinches up hoodie*

BSD- "Excuse me, but what did you ask benlion to do?"

AS- "Um, I simply told him to start working on the Xamarin app"

BSD- "Yes, but according to benlion, you angrily told him to start working on the Mac portion... Let me ask you something first, why would you do that? It's rude and inappropriate to be hostile to anyone at the workplace, in fact, if he wants to pursue to matter, you can get demoted, actually, if he wants to pursue it, you're fired, and there's no way I'm letting you get a management job again"

AS -"Wow, did benlion really say that? He's obviously lying due to his dislike for me, BSD, it's rather unfair to take his word over his superv..."

BSD-"Oh you did NOT just go there. That's it, stay here. And benlion, come with me." *Points at me*

Me- *Terrified out of my mind, almost to the point of a nervous breakdown because of the argument that I had started* "O-okay o_O"

Long stories short, we come back with his supervisor and he is now relieved of his duties temporarily while this whole thing gets settled...

Oh, and I get my Apple Laptop tomorrow ^-^ so I'm really happy, albeit kind of sad that its my fault that AS doesn't have a job right now ;-;, but he did yell at me and expect incredibly impossible things of me, so, not as bad as I might feel.

Social let's-help-female-programmers warriors piss me off.

The other day a massive email thread at work on how women are misrepresented in tech and how we need to help them and how using words such as "guys" is intimidating and generally patronising shit like "let's advertise jobs on websites like femaleprogrammers.com instead stackoverflow because there's too many white males on stackoverflow."

99% participants in this topic were guys.
One girl sent a message saying she doesn't want to be helped and she wants to know she has been picked for her skill and not filling in diversity numbers.

...would you believe she has been schooled on problems women in tech face by those lads too.

Like "woman, please... we speak diversity here"

So annoying....!!

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

Me: let's try to be a little social and make some friends and talk to people nicely

After 5 very hard minutes of trying
Me: fuck them!! where's my laptop

A quick non-dev rant..

So. A few of you may have noticed this in my devrant "about" section.

But for those who don't know, I have this disorder called "CAPD" or Central Auditory Processing Disorder. Well actually, I have something called "SPD" or Sensory Processing Disorder but the capd is the worst part.

Basically what it does is, I have a very hard time properly reacting and comprehending various sensory inputs including hearing.

Anyways.. enough about what it is. Let's get to the ranting!

I am so fucking done with capd! It is so annoying. I will be working on a project by myself or something and someone will start talking to me. But I can't fucking understand them!

My right ear has the most problems so if my left ear happens to be blocked, like wearing headphones, it's like everyone is speaking a different language. I can't figure out anything that people say.

This gets really fucking frustrating because I don't usually tell people about this. (Because going up to someone and saying "hi my name is ____ and I have this Disorder" is really weird). So since I at a new school where only like two people know this, I get yelled at for not paying attention and other random reasons. Nobody actually wants to hear my explanation. Also I usually resort to texting people (even when they are sitting beside me) because then I can actually understand the conversation on the first try.

Yes.. this makes my social life very awkward.

Anyways.. I am mostly annoyed right now because it has been getting really bad recently.

Help me plz..

Seriously.. any suggestions on ways to make my life easier?

If you are wondering what having capd is like, I'm going to put a link to a great YouTube video about it in the comments.

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

I usually open this account when my brain is full of shit. So brace yourself if you wanna read next. you won't get any more happier. i definitely am not.

I AM A SHIT RIGHT NOW. So fucking done with everything. a month from now and i turn 21, and look what i have achieved: shitty brain, shitty personality, ugly looks nd no income. But well, most of the people i know are more or less similar.
But what the fuck i am. so less of confidence. can't even write here without a fake account. Coz my original account has details of a cheerful, joke posting swaggy mobile dev guy with good social skills. But am I? where is the proof? I am about to go to 4th year this august, my college (of the "great" indian edu system) wants the students to do internships and fucks. But i don't wanna do that. I had done that twice already when other students were playing and roaming and enjoying their life
So here i am , a so called "dev" not doing any shit in summer.
So what i am doing? wait we wil come to that.
So how's college going? shit. Maybe i am not fooling myself and the other people around me that i am a "so good" dev that i keep my fat ass home during summer and do poorly at college with average attendance & marks. But currently everyone is forgetting me and giving me shit for being a shitty student.

Oh. So how'z family doing? Oh its Bad(even writing that word hurts) to be honest my daddy( i love him so much) was not a good businessman. We changed business from being a small grocery shop owner to water supplier to now a restaurant. mum and dad, they are now in debts that hey can pay but they are trying their best to get a settled life and safe source of income.We are at the verge of closing. fuck. Our food is liked by everyone, but here we need a staff of 7 .Those fucking cheap village labor runs off to their homes in summer. And my dad who should be manager ,has to do tasks like cleaning utensils. Yet he does, that lovely old man.
And what does their "only 21 yr old son" does? fucking sit in their home, doing no shit but sleep during the day and watching a fucking laptop screen during the night.
Its been 2 years of mobile dev. i think i know a lot of things, But i don't feel confident about it. I thought about giving a certification paper that would give me a little boost but i don't feel confident about that too. its syllabus had a lot of things that i didn't know when i saw it first, last year. There are a lesser things now that i don't know. and maybe if i give it a week or two, i would be fully equipped to take that shit.
That's what my plan of action was, this summer. That , along with many other things: To give that paper. To learn 10-12 more frameworks/technology/languages, build 2-3 production level apps ,have a solid resume and then try for companies(but clg wants to force us in getting internships and shit).Also in terms of personal goals: get in shape wake up early, sleep early , exercise,go for runs, eat right. get and learn a fucking 2 wheeler (Yup. that's right. 21 yaer old ,who doesn't have/know how to drive a scooty. family couldn't have bought it then and now i don't want it. another pin of shame on my chest). help my small 3 ppl family in its business.

But all went to this shit that i have made.
>>"Hey X, its vacations now! let's learn this new language/framework/gaming engine that we so much dreamed during our papers" "Meh. fuck it, first let me get give that paper i have been postponing" .
>>"oh yeah you can prepare for that in a week ,let's do this" *15 days passes. no shit is done*
>>"Oh X, you gotta stop wasting time" *downloads another season of oitnb*
>>"Common man. okay stop, let's leave screen, wake up early , focus on body goals" *Wakes up tomorrow, goes to park, does running,exercise, comes home. Ow body hurting. sleeps full day. wakes in evening*
>>"Oh man, you missed the whole day's study" " yeah mann. fuck the morning routine. that makes body full of pain. Let's leave body goals, we can't focus on study coz of that. and what good would a less obese sagging guy be anyway, when you are already 5'4 . fuck exercise"
>>" hmm. okay. but no more web series or sleepless nights" *Goes on watching full series in night and sleeping full day without moving his ass by an inch, while poor family goes onto their routines*
>> "ahh this is getting insane. go meet your friends, you are too lonely. How are they anyway?" Fucking great friends they are. I used to think that i overthink about friendships & othr ppl's actions and should take things lightly. So when a small prank happened and i got out of the 'whatsapp' group, i was never invited in again and am now totally cut off! in real life we are all chill, even when we DM its all gud, but mann , did we all actually chatted in that shitty group only? coz i don't see any msgs in my DM. what the fuck is everyone upto ? I keep feeling those lazy asses are talking w/o me but keep trying to tell myself to not give a fuck coz they don't.
Great going.

I know there's no solution to this that wouldn't cause more problems because all humans seem to do is exploit whatever they can get their hands on but I hate how through technology, anyone can create entirely new identities to stalk and harass others. From the shit maggots and incels who vomit dumb shit or act aggressive online to the disturbing, obssessive, should-have-been-removed-from-the-gene-pool cowards who stalk you for years, you can't seem to do anything to defend yourself other than to block whatever new accounts they create and carry the paranoia of someone other than Sunblock Mark watching you either through your own portfolio or even GitHub profile.

What life can you still have when you've avoided most types of social media and you get followed around in other sites that are supposed to help your career? There's nothing left for peace aside from being a true hermit. It's just the fact of the internet and the dark side of the lowlives. What can you do about these things? The police wouldn't care if an ex and family members have been stalking you for five years until something physical actually happens. Nevermind the fact that just getting a "hi" from these people is enough to drag you into a trail of nightmares every time you close your eyes on the next few weeks until you hear from them again. Oh, look how harmless, he's just saying "hi". Let's check the spam folder. Oh there it is, the email he sent at 3AM in the morning that he probably figured out you blocked so he created a new email that will go through with the same damn message at 9AM. I've been ignoring him for half a decade and I blocked him? Surely that is not enough to make him stop, he's such a normal person.

No, telling him to stop is not an option. I already told him that several times back in 2015 and he went on and attempted to hack every social media I had. He then went on to "visit" me in my condo and wait by the door. I slept with a knife under my pillow and got the fuck out of that city forever. Stayed the fuck away from Facebook too and still get stalked on LinkedIn and even GitHub for fuck's sake. What can I do? Report him? For what? For saying "hi" too many times? Then you get crap about others having worse problems than you as if this kind of shit isn't killing you on the inside. Let's just overwhelm the people who work on themselves and try to succeed until they remove themselves from the Earth and we're left with the disgusting fuckers who have nothing to do and nothing to contribute.

I know this sounds like a non-problem problem but it really messes with my head and every day, it pisses me off that people like this can't be stopped until they do physical harm. No one cares about the mental damage they cause. No one cares about how disturbing their behaviors are. Now the past haunts me and I keep dreaming I was still in the same shithole I used to live in, dating the same Flowcode abusive engineer, getting even my tomatoes stolen, my family fucking up every tiny glimmer of hope and happiness in me. It's so ridiculous that it's kinda funny.

A few weeks ago, I was watching "Perfect Blue" with my partner. He said I've always been calm in most situations but he's never seen me get so worked up over a movie. This is despite watching morbid true crime, war, paranormal shit, and others. This movie along with the Jessica Jones series, trigger the fucking hell out of me and I'm glad they exist as another genre of horror because they truly are terrifying.

I just hate this. I fucking hate the fact that I have to be the one to do all the work and get therapy when the ones who truly need them are freely doing pathetic shit and possibly harassing others too. Fuck you all, I hope your ding dongs dry up and no child would ever have to bear the nightmare of being around parasites like you.

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Storytime. Go watch social dilemma on netflix NOW. You might realize how much of hacked are you in terms of generating revenue for tech companies.

Ads have been the primary source of business for every web player. those weird sayings "ïf you are not paying the product, you are the product" are true but vague. Its all simple maths. if you are scrolling on your feed, and an add pops up, and you have ANY sort of interaction with it, like slowing your scroll, swiping across its items, clicking it, viewing its comments etc, then at least one of the parties involved achieved success and generated revenue. And that party would be the one responsible for making this behavior true for millions of users and billions of ads.

social media in a gist: "We are going to give a customized version of our product to every úser, so as to change the mindset of this person towards some stuff because we are getting paid for that"

What we are losing is tremendous when studied in terms of behaviors and psychology. we are becoming addicts. addicts to those continuous scrolls, those new posts when we make a swipe up gesture, those notification pings, these nonsense recommendations that are remotely connected to our interests . No matter how much tired you are and want a sweet death like sleep, a simple "PINGG" and you wanna go back to see what is it about.

Those bell icons. Those are the fucking worst. a collection of all the notifications that will catch the center of user's attention. User hates the red number on its bar , so let's fill it with more and more notifs than required. I bet the upcoming decade will see ads in the notification bar too. those big fanged Faang giants are just waiting on one another to see who tries it out first.

Social media has shown to make young gens much more depressed fragile , nd less comfortable in taking risks fearing the backlash. the rates of getting a driver's license are decreasing while the rates of suicides and self harm among teens is increasing.Real dates are now decreasing while the viewership of porn industry is staggering. even the parents or old gens which are not much into social media are getting effected by this, because the children are transferring their fears of social media interaction to the whole family environment.

And you know who is going to be the next big player in terms of using a mass manipulating tool for commercial benefits? News and Journalism industry. And THAT WOULD BE HORRIBLE! Imagine someone paying news channels to target people with certain beliefs and presenting news in a biased manner as opposed to rational manners

social media is one of the best tools of persuasion. and in the hands of a dictator or a cult, it is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. We think that recommendation Algorithms are designed to help us gain more knowledge as they are gonna recommend us similar content. but what these algorithms are doing is to move our attentions pan from something that we are interested in to something which is commercially profitable, in the common interest of a large group and which we might be interested in too. i can think of a million times when i went from watching college subject lectures to cat videos

We have now 4 types of political deviations : the people who are absolute supporters of the ruling party, the people who are absolute supporters of the opposition party, the critics and propaganda community which throws dirt at both and the people who are neutral and not inclined to anywhere. the propaganda community consists of social media, tools and content maker which could easily flood the streams of everyone else with the beliefs they want / are paid to and their major target is to move the natural bias of un-inclined people in a particular direction. and this is wrong, it is a wrong thing to disrupt a natural balance for personal benefits, being treated like zombies

A network provider has tons of data about us... its transferring the freaking packets of our voices and images. but it is governed by the national laws to not use them in wrongful ways. but the software industry have no laws for any kind of regulation. they can hoard as much data as they want, use it in whatever ways they want and yet call themselves as "self regulated" by paying shit tonnes of bribes.
The need to be controlled, come under government jurisdiction. taxes should be enforced on how much data they can collect as they have the power to undermine the whole democratic systems using their tools and data.

The only question that is left asking is : how to not get affected with this continuous hacking while being in this industry itself? How do i make money off this 2 edged sword that is technology without getting cut myself? How to not being a mindless zombie for these giants trying to make everyone a small node of their massive eco system?

Hey just brainstorming a business/ startup idea I may try out sometime down the line. I wanted to put it in writing available to my peers for review. If that sounds boring, sorry.

So I've had an idea and I know it's a million dollar idea because it's absolutely boring as fuck.

Recently I have been learning about NoSQL and it has gotten me pretty excited about unstructured data.

Now the first thing you should know about me is I like to make business software. I don't like games or social networks or blah blah blah, I like business stuff. One dream I have always had is to make THE business solution. I've noticed so many specific business solutions for very specific areas of work. Specific software for car washes, which is separate from the software for car maintenance, which is separate from the point-of-sales software, which is separate from the [...]

One of the problems with this is the inconsistency. Modular is good, but only if the modules are compatible. They aren't. Training needs to be provided for each individual system since they are all vastly different. And worst of all, since all of these different applications reach their own niche market, they charge out the butt for things that are usually very simple "POST a form over http(s)" machines.

I mean let's not get too dreamy here. My solution is an over-complicated form-builder. But it would be a game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses. Allowing users to build their own front-end and back-end disguised as a drag-and-drop form builder would be THE alternative, because they could bring all of their solutions into a single solution (one bill!) and since THEY are the ones that build what they need, they can have custom business software for the price of a spreadsheet program.

The price difference we could offer would be IMMENSE. Not only would we be able to offer "cookie-cutter" pricing as opposed to "custom" pricing, but since this generic solution could be used for essentially all of their systems, we aren't just decreasing one bill. We're decreasing one bill, and eliminating the rest entirely. We could devastate competition.

"BUT ALGO", you scream in despair, "USERS AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO DRAG AND DROP FORM PARTS TO MAKE A FORM"

I mean ya true. But you say that like it's a bad thing. For one, we can just offer a huge library of templates. And for another, which is part of the business plan, we can charge people support dollars to help them drag and drop their stupid fucking forms!! Think of the MONEEYYYY YOU COULD MAKEE BY EXPLAINING HOW TO COLLECT FIRST AND LAST NAMEEE. Fuck.

The controls library would be extensible of course. You would be able to download different, more specialized controls if you need them. But the goal would be to satsify those needs with the standard collection of controls (Including interesting ones line barcode scanner and signature input and all that). But if all else fails, maybe someone made an open source control for you to implement and ignore that stupid donation button. We all do.

This could PURGE the world of overpriced and junky specialized business software, and best of all, it's aimed at smaller businesses. With smaller businesses making more profit, they will stay afloat better and may start to compete with their larger foes. Greater for the entire economy.

Anyways, I'm sure it's full of holes. Everything always is. But I still think it's something I'll try before I die.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Sorta rant.

Now that this drama shite is calming down, here's my tuppence on how connections management should be implemented.

We really need something that is in between blocking and doing nothing. This, in my opinion, is temporary silencing. Having the ability to mute a person or rant, or notifications altogether, for a set period of time would be very useful when a situation needs de-escalating. As this social network (let's not beat around the bush, this is a social network) grows in size, this will be a handy tool for calming storms without burning bridges permanently.

To sum up, I think it would be a good idea to have three available options for notification muting:

- mute notifications/this person/rant for 24 hours
- mute notifications/this person/rant for 7 days
- mute this person/rant forever

As for implementation, I'd wrap up the call to the user's notification assembly like so:

If(!notifBlocked(<typeofnotif>)
{
notif.push()
}

And use a date field in the DB to handle timescales.

Also, I suggest the addition of this tag specifically for suggestions, just so we're not all using different tags

@dfox

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

Co-Worker (mechanical engineer): I have an amazing idea that I want to pitch to you!!
Me: Whats the idea?
Co-Worker: Let's make a social media app where you send a drawing to other people and possibly doodle on pics. The drawing or picture can't be saved and it's directly sent to people or a group.
Me: That's SnapChat.
Co-Worker: Oh...well my idea is cooler.
Me: *Rolls eyes* go back to work.

Let's hope the government starts an initiative to get rid of fake editors. All the mainstream alternative editors will be banned from discussion in social media. People have to think critical and realize that there is only one editor: vi.