My dad found a phone a few weeks ago and asked me what he should do with it. Knowing how much it hurts to lose personal data, I said I could try to find the owner and send it back.

My first attempt was to search through the files on the SD card in order to find an identifying document (CV, bill, address...) but there were only family pictures.

My second attempt was to unlock the phone and check the information about the owner and the accounts linked to it. But for this to be possible adb has to be enabled. Good thing is that that particular brand shows an option for activating adb on the recovery menu.

But then, it's Android Oreo and I haven't found a way to lift the lock pattern. I thought I could bruteforce it over the shell (as I found there could be about 1300 possibilities for 2 to 5 point patterns), but there is the same attempt throttling as on the screen so that would take ages.

Finally, I found the owner in the most "social" way : The phone was displaying the weather for a particular place. It turns out that there are only 3K inhabitants in that city, si I thought that a big enough Facebook group might help me find the owner. So I posted a message on a 500 people FB group dedicated to this city with a selfie of the owner : someone identified her within 20 minutes.

Mission accomplished 😎

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

I love coding

But I hate coding

But I love coding

But I hate my buggy IDE

But I love coding

But my back hurts from all that sitting

But I want to work on my side project

But at times, it's frustration.MaxValue

But anything remotely related to coding I find interesting

But it's so hard to abide by good practices

But I love coding

But progress is so fizzlingly slow

But I love that elegant solution of the other day

But it took me 57 attempts to arrive at that elegant solution

But the shit I'm building is so cool

But

But
😦

I just quit my job!
The company I worked for is a small company founded in Jan of this year and I was there since the early days but wasn't a founder nor a partner.
It was me who decided on which tech stack we should use, which languages, what servers to use, best practices and almost anything related to development. I was the lead developer and project manager for the biggest project they had.
But they decided that I don't deserve to be a partner. I was making more than 50,000 SDG per month for the company but only paid 6,000. The worst thing is that the partners don't know shit about software development. They have no vision for where should the company be in the future.
I just had enough. I already had my own software dev business before joining them, and it was successful.
I am going back to building my own company with my own vision.
I know I made the right decision, but it still hurts leaving a company after u made it what it is today. It is like your own baby and you are abandoning it.
Hopefully, it is for the best.

I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.

I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.

I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.

The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.

An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.

What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.

That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?

You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.

And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.

I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?

Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Back when I was in school, there was me, these 2-3 other guys, we maintained the school's sites + graphics and what not. If there was a problem, we could solve it. The school hosted big events and the site had over 50k hits in 2 days.
We used PHP then (was a new thing then for us)
Was looking at the schools site now out of nostalgia,
THE SHIT DOESNT EVEN SCALE WELL.
Graphics look like they were made using MS Paint.
Has a prominent 'designed by so n so' who is a student there.
Was checking the source code,
has
<meta name="generator" content="Zyro - Website Builder" />

FUCKER DIDNT EVEN CODE IT HIMSELF.
I wanna go back to my school and spank those bastards there.
This LITERALLY hurts.

A new guy was brought on to help with a particular part of my program.

He worked on it for a little while and got something working. But honestly the code hurts me. And not because I'm some arrogant prick, but because there's something about the way it's written that's really bothering me.

I was saying to my girlfriend that I don't mind people helping me out and adding new features. Usually they bring something to my attention that I otherwise would have never thought of.

However, in this case I was told to back off completely. This of course, makes sense, we don't want to be stepping on each other's toes. But now that he's sort of done, I've taken a look around at it is really getting to me.

They've placed redundant pieces of code in places that I would have never done. And objects have been made that seem to only match precisely one particular use case.

I had overhauled this program with flexibility in mind a while back, and now I feel like it's doing a 180 again simply because the client is getting impatient.

It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.

I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.

They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.

The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.

So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.

And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.

That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

This is gonna be depressing. You have been warned.

I am getting sick of people, moreso than I usually would. It's getting to the point where I'm feeling like I want complete isolation from people. Why do people get pissed at me then not tell me what I did wrong? How the fuck am I supposed to fix it?

One of my friends, S, has a lot of issues, and I've been friends with her for many years. I try to help her as much as I can because I actually care, but she rarely responds to any texts and disappears for days at a time. Then she comes back and says I worry too much and plays it off like it was nothing. Wtf?!

I give everyone hugs. If you want a hug, you'll get one from me no questions asked. I do this because I'm actually incredibly depressed and the hugs help me feel less lonely. I'm getting tired of caring so much for everyone else and having nobody actually care about me. S says that I care so much BECAUSE I don't want anyone else to feel that way, but it hurts like hell when I'm the only one who cares.

I don't care what people think about me in a sense that if they have a problem, fuck off. I do, however care that nobody seems to actually CARE. I HATE THIS SHIT. I'm getting to that point where I don't want to die, I just don't want to exist like this. Fuck everything at this point. Nobody ever responds to texts, they get pissed for no reason, just fuck it.

Are we all victims of self-inflicted poor posture? Or are there gods among us?

I was at the doctor today for a bad back.
Nurse: how much weight can you lift before your back hurts?
Me: the heaviest thing I have lifted in the past year is my keyboard
Nurse: uhh, what?
Me: I mean 60-70 lbs.

Fuck. I'm fucking alive. The past month or so has been hectic. I've mainly been working, sleeping, or at school (not like I've showed up much lately anyways, maybe 12 days or so since the middle of February).

!dev

I'm fucking tired.

Bought an FX 8350 with the Wraith cooler for my desktop, got it for $70 when normally it's about $140 or so. Gonna replace the PSU and case when I get paid on Saturday, cause I don't have to pay anything with this check, so it's all to myself. Cut myself putting a heatsink back on my motherboard, still hurts 3 days later.

My "best friend" is still not talking to me. But she's been talking ABOUT me. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm done with the whole situation with her. It's just her crying over every little thing.

My rants tend to be about my personal life, and this one is no exception. I just have a lot of shit going on and I need to get it out sometimes.

My back hurts! I need suggestions for a new chair.

age++

My back hurts

So it's been a while since I've posted as my first few months at the new job have been amazing. But now I'm running into issues with a team member that I need to get off my chest.

So my new job is front end development in React. I'm brand new to it but I was promised time to learn on the job. On my first day the team member I'm now having a conflict with offered me help. He's the most experienced so I gladly took it.

But now several months in I've noticed his teaching style doesn't work for me. He'll go into long theoretical explanations whenever I ask a question and I get overwhelmed with info. And he gets frustrated with my inability to process all that, because he feels I waste his time. So frustrated that at one time he just walked out of work and drove home, which was really upsetting to everyone.

My direct manager and my mentor in the company (our software architect), as well as our scrum master (a consultant) are all aware of the conflict. I've been assigned another colleague to help me out. Things were going ok but he got sick so I had to turn back to the team member with the conflict for assistance. Of course frustrations arose again.

Now yesterday during our sprint planning meeting we had to say what we liked and didn't like about the past sprint. And I brought up I feel I need time for learning and that I don't know where to put that, since we don't have a task for it. I said I also felt past approaches weren't working out and that I'd like to take up the offer to go on training. I was trying to word it very neutral to not upset my colleagues, as they tried their best. But the colleague who I had previous conflicts with took it personal and accused me of not listening and that is why my code is awful. While all I've been doing is rely on his code to learn. Long story short it got very heated and direct manager and scrum master who were present had to shut it down.

I'm thinking of talking to my manager and mentor today. It really hurts when you're accused of maliciousness when all you did was try. I know my code isn't perfect. But I get no help in improving it beyond long winded explanations about theory. If I ask for practical help he says he won't write my code for me. Which isn't what I expect. When I say I followed his example he says I shouldn't copy. But two sentences later he says if I don't know what I am doing I should listen to him. It's really very confused and demotivating as a beginner, but he makes it about how I waste his time and ruin his job for him. I understand he tries his best and that it has to be hard when someone seemingly is as dumb as a bag of bricks. But my manager and mentor told me they support me as long as I continue to show improvement. So I asked for alternatives (training, time to study, or whatever I haven't thought of) and now I feel like the bad person. I'm already someone with crippling low self esteem, and I'm thrown into the deep end. It kinda sucks when someone then tells you from the sideline you can't swim and how swimming works. How about tossing me one of those floaty things and then maybe accept I need to hold on to that for a bit and my technique will need work until I can make it on my own? :(

If you are more interested in “being right” (aka winning an argument) than learning from experiences (both your own and others), then I will not waste my time on you.

Story time:

As a member of a startup accelerator I had the privilege to run into many types of people.

There were 2 entrepreneurs who liked to argue a lot. They would argue not just with other members but with advisors, investors, EIRs, everyone. They were much more interested in “being right” than learning from the experiences of those around them.

They flustered many people, but sometime we would have REALLY seasoned investors or entrepreneurs speak to us. Those folks never got flustered.

I needed to know why...

So I pulled aside one of the bigger investors and asked him why. This was his response.

“I’ve invested and advised on every type of company you can imaging, with every type of entrepreneur. There is a lot to be learned from that experience. But if you are more interested in winning and argument than learning from experiences and creating a good business then you are not worth my time.”

He would give his advice and then go right back to his email for those folks.

Smart

1 of the 2 entrepreneur I mentioned actually turned it around. Once he found out that the investor had invested in and almost identical company in the same space and that they had sold for 100M+ he finally started to listen. You could see him really fighting the urge to argue, but he did it. That guy ended up being successful and is on track growing a company today.

The other guy had no success and is still on the Slack group of the co-working space arguing with anyone who will engage him.

I know which one of those I would want to be.

PS. If this hurts your feeling and you feel like commenting. Feel free. You’ll look very cute.

How to NOT handle dates!

Do not put the date to "mdy" format, today would be 050217.
Working on an intranet for some multi-billion corporation, and was wondering why events from last year were showing.

Last year's events were 28th of October, 2016, and was showing as upcoming events :)

Checked the code, and saw this. Quick fix, turned dates to UNIX timestamp, and it worked.

Ugh, I know I sound like an u grateful little brat, but summer holidays just aren't for me.
I hate wasting my time on the beach.
I hate the feeling of skin burn.
I fucking despise people that don't give a flying fuck about other's comfort and blast Disco Polo on their own JBL speakers. Even though there's music provided by the hotel.
Also babies, babies everywhere, crying and dashing around. My head hurts when I think about flying back. And I LIKE airplanes. But not when every baby and their mothers are crying on the top of their lungs.
Winter is so much better. Skiing is great and I don't have to worry all the time about getting skin cancer.

There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.

Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.

The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"

Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"

Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.

Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.

Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.

The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.

You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

Wordpress.....

God, why..

Okay, so my company has deep roots with wordpress websites, which is, well fine, and at some point they needed portal that would do something but I was bussy doing other project for our child company, so our frontend slapped together "portal" in wordpress. So I dont even know if I understand that properly whats going on, but today buddy came with help request to wordpress.

I had to look through wordpress database and was like.... FML hard.

Okay, fuck it, let's try to make it work. So, I needed to get random category (using get_terms), check it's ->count and if its greater than X show it on page. I came to done halfway, the random part wasn't working.

Okay, made it work after initial struggle with "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! AND THAT?? AND THAT?!?!??! ;-;" and now comes the kicker. It has ACF installed and it has additional category in ACF. And it should check count of posts within the category that have certain ACF value.

After awhile I just said "this shouldn't be done on wordpress, no idea how to make it work".

What I seen is like... it hurts me on so many levels... My head wants to explode...

Can I get back to writing normal code now? ;-; Im fed up patching logic in frontend (I dont even know if that's `the wordpress way` but that's what they did)

Cons of SW development: even when I do get up regularly, walk around and stretch, at the end of a whole day my back hurts really mean.
If someone could get me a heat cushion right now, that'd be great.

A petty rant but I'm going for it anyway.

I don't like how Trongate is bashing Laravel, claiming that it is a "better" framework and "Pure PHP is back".

It's fine if you built a framework that is better than Laravel, good for you. But don't go around bashing Taylor Otwell's work. As someone, who has spent a major portion of my career in IT as a Laravel dev, that hurts to see.

IMO I think they never understood why Laravel became popular in the first place. It wasn't because it's the fastest, but because how beginner-friendly it is and how easy it is to maintain and many other perks it has.

My last post was a year ago. What brought me back here is the ability of AI to agree and apologize to anything and everything, while producing the worst hopeful code.

4 days I wasted, trying to make an android audio visualizer, but AI... sigh.
It gave me the wrong structure of FFT bytes emitted. I corrected it
It gave me the wrong logarithm calc, I corrected it
It gave me the wrong sampling rate, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong texture order, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong glsl sample2d, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong textureID generation, I corrected it.
It gave me a render which was about 10 fps, I found out that instead of using native onDraw, I had a fcking delta time in my shader. I almost corrected it, I gave up

Lets go to code generators with Annotations.
Like always, starts very positive, until I start to correct it.
It gave me the wrong file locations, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong order of find copy modify and write to .build, I didnt correct it.
It gave me regexes to find annotations. Im like So whats the use of an "ANNOTATION PROCESSOR"
It apologizes and used a fucking regex in the processor,..... I didnt correct it, in the end, I was left with a separate module, targetting iOS Android and JVM, with an annotation processor implemented in jvmMain, which tries to modify commonMain src by finding annotations with regexes, which wont run on app build or app sync project, but only on java -jre command pointing to that fucking .java class in that module, which takes at least 2 mins to run, and Finally generate 0 files.

I needed to rant, I understand LLMs are just models of words built and stolen from the most intelligent and dumbest people out there. But Im an idiot for getting my hopes high. I cant build anything new and unheard of. I used to do that. I once made a textView + image print util for a bluetooth printer just to say FU to libraries and heavy sdks. like literally rasterizing shit to bluetooth packets. I needed to let off some steam. I havent been here in a year so I dont know what reactions I can get from this rant. I bet someone will just say yeah we tired of 'Fuck AI' rants. but shit, it hurts. When I gave up on that visualizer, I downloaded an app, I think its called project M, like in reference to MilkDrop.. like the Winamp Milkdrop. I opened it, played something on spotify, and let my eyes go blind

Maybe we should have some kind of DX racer chairs for our avatar. I'm getting one soon (my current one hurts my back).

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

-------------------------------

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Started a side project.
Learnt flutter and firebase.
Started coding app.
Four months pass by.
App is mostly ready.
Wakes up on Saturday morning.
Updates Android Studio and SDK because, why not?

Build failed!
Dependency depreciation warnings!
Java errors!
Firebase errors!
Emulator stopped running!

Wify is angry with me as we planned shopping but now this. Fortunately, she's also in IT, so she understands..

FML! Spent the entire day stackoverflowing and fixing errors!

8PM evening, I am back to Friday's status. My shoulder and neck hurts but my mind is chilled.

TL;DR: I should just stick to Python. I'm not touching front-end stuffs.

I got promoted to moderator of the subreddit of the game I play. Got greeted by a list of task involving tweaking the stylesheet (CSS). I said fine, I screwed around with CSS before I can screw with this again. So now I'm in charge of the whole op. Alone. Yay /s.

The objective is just dark-theme-ing the thing because white hurts (we all know that). So I fired up Firefox, made a test subreddit, cloned the whole stylesheet and sprites and started screwing around with my editor and Inspector Tool. And it hit me: One element refused to render (I don't if that's the correct technical term), and I don't even know why the fuck it didn't render. 15 minutes fuzzing through and it still gave a middle finger. Fine. Fuck you. Full revert, back to original. Then I changed the original sheet one change at a time, reloading after every changes. After changing everything, it suddenly work. What the fuck. Why the fuck. How the fuck. How the bloody fuck. How in the bloody fuck.

(""Fucks" per minute" sure is an effective measure of code quality)

Had virus cause growth thing on my uvula. Dentist saw it got bigger. So we got another doctor to remove it. He suggested we just take the whole uvula out. He said, "You won't miss it." He had it done as well. They want to biopsy to make sure I don't have "the cancer". Not too worried. Been taking things to prevent that. Mostly good general health foods. Good vitamins and anti-oxidants.

So it took like a month to actually line up the time to do it. I was thinking this would take a while. It took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to burn it off. They used a cauterizer thing to cut it off. The whole time I couldn't breath out my nose because my mouth was wide open. I was breathing out seared flesh smoke during this time out of my mouth. Burnt me doesn't taste all that good.

I didn't gag nor puke. The doctor said he was good at dodging just in case. I have a feeling he would be fun to have drinks with.

So he said my uvula was large at the base. So it would take more than a week to heal. He gave me script for meds. I appreciate that because it kinda hurts. It feels like there is that large burn at the back of my throat. Because, there is a large burn at the back of my throat. I told them I came to the doctors office and lost weight. Got the nurse to snort.

I hope this turns out like getting my teeth pulled. Needed meds for right after and not again later. We shall see. It feels like a really bad sore throat. It kinda IS a really bad sore throat. Go figure.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

3 days ago i started home workouts after 3 long years of not doing it. By following THENX on youtube. It was a 20 minute ab workout. I fucked myself over. I am in SO MUCH PAIN for several days now. Every day I'm in more pain. I cant stand straight because of how much it fucking hurts. My stomach muscles are FUCKED. It feels like i got punched and beaten in the hips and stomach. But those are muscles strained from not working out for years. This first workout was way too extreme and I fucked up. I look like that old grandma that bends her back like a cockroach while walking. This is ridiculous for a mid 20s guy. How do i recover from this shit

I got plenty of stories of yelling at co-workers before for assortment of reasons. But let me tell you a story of a time I almost yelled.

Think of Adam Sandler when he's a bit ticked. He says something nice with nice words but he delivers it in an upset and load tone but not actually screaming/yelling. That's me trying to hold back but it reveals how upset I am. I do try to stay courteous and gentlemanly (I'm really trying to manage my anger after so much BS I've been getting after a decade of working). But there are times where my patience is testing its limits and well, I implode.

And when that happens, I regret doing that to my co-workers as we are all trying to get things done and still get paid by the end of day. But they stoopid! UGH!

Co-workers, I can tolerate a little more. But clients are a completely different story. Ever tried fake smiling for over 3 hour meeting of ridiculous change requests and has the balls to make them free? It fcking HURTS!

New college is big enough to let my legs hurt in pain while small enough to have carts for transport

It hurts!!!!

Besides I'm slowly going to depression whereas I already left coffee (as in not to take anymore)

So there is no coming back

hello everyone, my back hurts! Any advice for this humble web developer?