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Holy fuck, muscle memory just saved my ass.
At a train station wanting to do some work on my mini laptop which has disk encryption (LUKS I think). Realised that I forgot the password partly 😬
Few tries.... incorrect. FUCK.
*hey, let's try to let my hands do the work based on muscle memory!*
*starts typing the password (its insanely long) and presses enter*
*succesfully unlocked, booting...*
😅25 -
Never trust a developer who’s muscle memory isn’t set up to automatically run `ls` *immediately* after `cd`ing into a directory.12
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Apple has a real problem.
Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.
I know, I used to be one of them.
Past tense.
They have jumped the shark.
They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.
I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?
They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.
And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.
By which time it is too late to do anything.
But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!19 -
My git password is only muscle memory at this point.
If I accidentally try to think about what I'm typing I end locking myself out for the rest of the day.5 -
1) Open devRant app
2) Enjoy so many great rants
3) Thinks is enough
4) Quit devRant app
5) Immediately open devRant again without thinking
6) ....
(damn my muscle memory)5 -
That moment that you start typing on your new ergonomic keyboard and suddenly notice that your muscle memory has nearly entirely adjusted to this new keyboard without you even noticing it because you're suddenly typing at full speed while you hardly could type any sentence an hour ago without looking at your keyboard.
This kinda stuff never ceases to amaze me!9 -
I'm a die hard ViM user and throughout the years I managed to put ViM key bindings in everything, from browser to even my cell phone for some reason (back in the day if I had the opportunity to put them in the fridge, I would have put them - people would have a hard time closing the door, though)
The thing is that it had become a liability because I see that, even though I "work really fast and efficiently" using this tool, when I have to use other things, like a different shell (I use zsh with some ViM sauce) or type in another editor, it sucks so hard.
Everything is wrong, nothing works, the typing is a mess.
Now I'm trying to force myself to use Vscode and I removed all those extensions from my browser and shell. It is uncomfortable, but the idea is to "rewire my muscle memory", if there is such thing.
Yeah.
8 -
*Keyboard breaks*
*Calls Desktop Support*
Me: Hey, my keyboard is broken. I want to replace it.
*Support guy sends new keyboard*
*Calls support again*
Me: Hey, the shift key on the left side of the new keyboard is broken.
I don't know who came up with this keyboard design, but that person really wanted to see developers who write in camel case suffer while their muscle memory adapts.
16 -
I'm convinced that playing the piano has allowed me to type faster and commit keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory faster too. While coding isn't about typing quickly, there's a whole bunch of times when I've had an idea, and had to get that down into code as quickly as possible before I forget it - and that's when I really find fast keyboard work comes into its own.5
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Q: What's a "muscle memory"?
A: It's when you open up devRant, skim through several posts, get bored, decide to visit some other website for more stimulation, close the tab with devRant, open a new tab and your hands type in devrant.com [ENTER] before you know it4 -
Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)
- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.
- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.
- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".
- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.
- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.
- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....
- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.
- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.
- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.
- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.
- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).
- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.
- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)
I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!4 -
Wrote some documentation in a text-editor. Pressed cmd+option+l and wondered for a moment why it didn't properly formatted my document.3
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I just had a boys-out night with my son. Went to some restaurant, found a parking spot in a confusing parking lot (half is more expensive than the other half of the lot, not sure which fee applies to the middle row... confusing), started paying for parking with the app (pays every 15 minutes until stopped).
Went inside, ordered a pizza, some ice cream. Chatting, playing, eating, having fun,... An SMS comes: "You have outstanding fines" and a link to the gov taxes' website.
wtf.. I must have parked in the wrong spot. FUCK! Oh well, it should not be a large fine anyways, it's just for parking....
Click on the link, login with my bank/SmartID creds. Another SmartID dialog pops up asking for a PIN2.
What? PIN1 is for authentication, PIN2 is for Authorization. What am I authorizing...?
Reading through the Auth message: "Paying 2473€ for Boris SomeLastname".
what.....?
Thank God my muscle memory did not kick in and I did not enter that PIN2.
And thank God I know what PIN1 and PIN2 are for.
It would've been one expensive boys-out evening... Even a strip club would've been cheaper.
Stay sharp, guys!
P.S. Later I checked the URL. It used all the right keywords, and it was registered as an .info domain. It was somewhat off, but gov websites trying to be lean do sometimes use some weird ass domains.15 -
I was cleaning up my hard drive and deleted some old directories.
I was notified that my backup just started and wanted to look how far along it was.
However, instead of 'ls -l /mnt/DATA/Backup' my shitpile of muscle memory typed 'rm -rf /mnt/DATA/Backup'... That's when my harddrive suddenly had 750GB of free space and I decided that I probably need some sleep.
Before any of y'all wanna lecture me on off-site backups, funny thing: Today I implemented a new daily backup routine (praised be borg) and therefore deleted my somewhat chaotic Backups on my NAS "Because if shit hits the fan, I still have my local Backup"2 -
"Manager,, can we change the names of our master branch to main"
"It might upset the muscle memory of others"
👍 Our entirely white team.👍5 -
Funny thing the brain is.
TL;DR; being in the zone is nice. But there is another level of it and, fuck it, I'm loving it!!!
level 0: phased-out, relaxed state. Not focused on anything in particular. Just going with the flow
level 1: aware of the situation and of what's going on, not engaging too much
level 2: alert, ready to react. Constant concentration
level 3: THE ZONE. Time continuum is broken by concentration on the task in front of you - while working on it, time passes faster by magnitudes than when you're in any lower level. Surroundings and periphery do not exist. On;y the task currently in hand exists. Restroom breaks can wait.
level 4: body works on the task by itself. Any cognitive engagement with any of it will only make matters worse. The body knows it better, just let it do the work - let your consciousness sit back and relax, think about something nice. It's a sort of biological version of DMA (direct memory access), bypassing the CPU.
I've only reached level 4 several times, briefly and only while playing BeatSaber. The boxes are flying at me and hands just hit 'em the right way by themselves. Only after the hit, do I realise what my hands did and how cool it actually is. If I try to intentionally look at the boxed and aim for them, I mess it all up. And it's not like muscle memory - level 4 copes with any non-Camellia Expert level, regardless of whether have I played it in the past many times or just a few, several months ago.
I love that feeling!6 -
When you have been heavily using 1 language for 6 months, then start a project in another - where da fuq did all my memory muscle go!4
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I'm notoriously bad at Git. By that I mean I REALLY REALLY SUCK AT IT. And I have the curse of short memory and an even shorter ability to retain the how-to, muscle memory knowledge of things if too much time passes.
So, I was staring down the gullet of merging two separate repositories onto my local machine and then pushing the result to a remote server. Not having the benefit of someone else to bounce this off of, and always finding the usual Git docs too dense and obtuse, I turned to ChatGPT to help me sort it out.
Guys, where has this been all of my life? I know it's not perfect and it can make mistakes. I knew that going into it, so I made preparations in case this failed. BUT. IT. WORKED! I feel like it has put me into the Star Trek:TNG universe where I can say "Computer, do the thing." and it does that thing. Here's the prompt I used and which it answered perfectly.
"Play the role of a git coach. I have two git repositories. One is on Bitbucket. The other is on GitHub. The branch named "master" on Bitbucket has the latest code. The branch named "master" on GitHub needs to be updated to what's on the Bitbucket "master" branch. Please write the series of git commands that I will need to accomplish this."9 -
Mozilla really knows how to nudge one to not use email encryption by default.
Since Thunderbird has native support for OpenPGP encryption, i can only chose to encrypt all or no messages by default. There is no opportunistic mode and there are no per-reciepient encryption preferences. The Enigmail addon had both.
So i obviously have gone for encrypt-by-default.
But since then, whenever i want to send a message to the majority of my contacts, i have to manually disable the encryption or get annoyed by the no-key-found dialog.
I thought, i would get the muscle memory to just disable encryption for recipients for wich i don't expect to have a key.
But they also made the GUI so i have to open a dropdown and then click on the right item to do that. All the items basically look the same, as there is no color coding or specific icon for them. The item labels are also too long for unconscious pattern recognition.
So i didn't got that muscle memory.
I now have turned off encryption by default and will probably forget to enable it for some emails wich i actually could send encrypted...4 -
!rant, story
Wonder if I’m alone on this:
I have habits.
Always use the same cup, with very same amount of coffee grounds. Same four presses with the same fingers on the coffee machine.
Same way I place the cups in my desk. Same way I carry my notebook, same way I dry my hands. Same exact spot I place my card on the rfid reader. Use same elevator, same locker. God.
You name it, I do it on my own particular way.
Thing is, that I think about it. I do it consciously. I am just happier if things stay the way they are. It not just muscle memory thing.
Not judging here, just wonder if there’s people who can relate as much 🧐7 -
Java rant...
If public field declaration is so so bad, why can't all class fields in java just be private by default? And make it a pain in the ass to expose it as public?
I can't actually remember a time declared a class field as public, it is muscle memory now... Private bla Bla Bla, return, private bla Bla, return...4 -
9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:
I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS
What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!
Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:
password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6
Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?
$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3
$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6
$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported
$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]
$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported
In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!4 -
The struggle when you have to work on your muscle memory every time you get a new laptop/keyboard. For extremists - using someone else's keyboard/setup to do a code fix.7
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Am I the only one who seems to have trust issues when saving code in my text editor? Whenever I want to save I press Ctrl+X+S like 5 times just to be sure.
NB: Ctrl+X+S is equivalent to Ctrl+S in Emacs/Spacemacs1 -
Finished work early, shutting down the PC, Clicked Ctrl+S instead. Fucking Muscle Memory still want me to work?
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That feeling when typing "dev" in your browser address bar and hitting enter takes you to devRant instead of your usual developer website.1
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Pressing Ctrl+C shouldn't overwrite an existing clipboard entry that has just been created by pressing Ctrl+C immediately before.
Who thought it was a good idea to use copy + paste shortcut keys exactly next to each other? Some people's muscle memory does not work with such a fine subtlety.
How much working hours, days or even years must have been wasted by people using productivity software accidentally losing what they were about to paste from their clipboards?
Anticipating the first comments, yes, that's another kind of first-world problems affecting people that spend too much life time doing stupid office work on a (German) (PC) keyboard, but here we are, procrastinating on devRant ant wasting even more time.
Antipating even more comments: why am I using a keyboard to work in a German train on a sunny Sunday instead of relaxing at a lake or a swimming pool instead? Well, at least this train doesn't seem to have a pool. More luxury problems for me.3 -
Ok so I just changed my keyboard layout to neo2 because qwertz can suck my balls. Looking quite good so far. I've been writing some smaller texts and it looks like you can get used to it quite fast (i also changed because I wanted to learn writing with 10 fingers anyways. Not that I've been writing slowly before, but why not).
The bad thing: all shortcuts (vim etc) feel strange because I have to betray my muscle memory now. So I thought I might also just switch to emacs now. Have to learn it from the beginning but it might be worth it.
Did anyone of you have any experience with neo (german) and what editors did you use?6 -
Ok ok.. I used a German keyboard so Y and Z are switched. Ive never seen a picture of Jason Mraz but I really like his music so I wanted to YouTube him.. and my muscle memory did this.
2 -
Fellow social skeptics, I need to vent. Flew back into RI for the family, not the various holidays. Fuck christmas. Fuck the societal norm that's been programmed into me and all of us. "Merry Christmas", "Happy holidays".
Yeah that doesn't play so well for my family after your brother dies the night of the 24th.
Even my best friends slip up with it, and even I'm regurgitating the phrases when I'm in public and need to be socially fucking acceptable. It's fascinating to me just how muscle-memory it is. Does that make it hollow in the first place? Is the well wishing the point and the sounds and message secondary?
Whatever it is, I've never felt comfortable in these social situations anyway. If I didn't have to travel to see my family, this would just be another day. So here's a big fuck-that to social obligations and gatherings. I just need a good intellectual conversation or a project to dive into. -
MOTHERFUCKING Stripe !!!
Changed their dashboard layout !! Yes, let's move the top navbar to the left and change the whole layout. Oh yeah, and let's make the page less responsive than before.
I seriously don't understand why Stripe had to do this. Their dashboard layout was completely fine and useful but noooo lets change the navbar from the top to the left.
Because of these fucks, I now have to train my muscle memory to get used to this SHITTY ASS layout.
Fuck this. FUCK ALL OF THIS.2 -
fucking muscle memory added a '^' to "git reset --hard head".
at least it gets faster when you have to write it a second time, but I lost about 20 files -
`const someNumber: int = 1337;`
Why doesn't it work?
Gnarf!
`const someNumber: number = 1337;`
I stopped counting how often I made that typo /o\ My phpdoc is still in my muscle memory.
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