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Search - "no more phone"
-
- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..41 -
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"
Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"
Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"
Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"
Boss: "What?"
Me: "Not the team, the servers..."
Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"
Me: "I get why he left you"
Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."
Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"
Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"
Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."
Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"
Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"
Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"
Me: ...
Me: ...
Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"
Boss: "That's what he said"
Me: "You're using that meme wrong"
Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"
Me: "That would work"
Boss: "Why are you grinning?"
Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"18 -
• Manager : WTF did you push, now it keeps crashing all the servers.
• Me : (silent, I'm trying to speak but nothing is coming out. Felt like someone in coma).
• Someone else shouts at boss : Now we now have 47 major crisis bridges.
[I went running for the door to get away from everything.]
Only to find myself rolling on the floor tangled in my bedsheets after falling from my bed. Realized it was all but a nightmare.
Went to get some water. While taking the first sip...
Me: Shit, I'm late for work AGAIN.
Running for the door again. Then stopped to think if this is all some fuckin premonition. Hurriedly went for my phone to find out it's nothing but Sunday.
I'm thinking about a career switch now. No more devops once this is over.8 -
So... A random morning moment:
(c - Cient, m - me)
C: Help!!! Our users are complaining that our website is not working as intended!!! This is crucial!!!!
M: What's the problem? What is not working?
C: EVERYTHING!!!! FIX IT!!!!
M: Could you be more specific...?
C: Look at the bugsnag - it has all the errrors!!!
M: *looks there - no errors* - But... It has no errors...
C: Okay, so client told me he's using Galaxy SII - does that ring a bell?
M: *thinks that I'm fucked* - Asks, which browser?
C: Why do you need it? It's a browser after all...
M: Yeah but not all browsers are the same and I need type and version to investigate...
C: It's Samsung default browser... Last updated 2012 January.
M: Well, tell that user to update the browser, the site is working fine on newer versions...
C: No, you update it.
M: Browser?!
C: Yes, what else?!
M: Of course, I'll fly 3000 kilometres to press UPDATE button on clients phone...
C: Well, he's not doing it himself - he's afraid!
M: Well, that is his problem. Site is working fine for other users with newer browsers.
C: But... He's a client
M: I get it but he's a client that uses 6 years old browser and tries to visit our website. Don't you remember that we ditched IE support on your behalf for the same reason?!
C: Oh... I see... Can you make something that it works with 2005 browsers?
M: Of course... *evil laugh starts* I'll make the website work on EVERY single device EVER - make it plain text.
C: Are you joking?
M: Are you?
----
And since then, we ditched the actual need for supporting users with old browsers that don't update to modern standards... Feels great!12 -
I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.
HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?
Me: Sure
I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.
HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.
Me: ---- (seriously ?!)
The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.
This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.
A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :
- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.
I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.
Thanks for reading.15 -
The programmer and the interns part 3.
Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.
I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.
Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.
Without further delay,
Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.
Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.
Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.
Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.
Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.
Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.
Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.24 -
I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
My colleague sent me this. Think before you act!
Hi Bob,
This is Alan next door. I’m sorry buddy, but I have a confession to make to you.
I’ve been riddled with guilt these past few months and have been trying to pluck up the courage to tell you to your face but I am at least now telling in text as I can’t live with myself a moment longer without you knowing.
The truth is, I have been sharing your wife, day and night when you're not around.
In fact, probably more than you, particularly in the mornings after you’ve left for work.
I haven’t been getting it at home recently, but that's no excuse I know.
I can no longer live with the guilt and I hope you will accept my sincerest apologies.
My wife has known for some time now and I’ve promised her that it won't happen again.
Regards, Alan.
Bob, feeling anguished and betrayed, immediately went into his bedroom, grabbed his gun, and without a word, shot his wife twice in the head, killing her instantly.
He returned to the lounge where he poured himself a stiff drink and sat down on the sofa.
He took out his phone to respond to the neighbour's text and saw he had another message:-
Hi Bob,
This is Alan next door again.
Sorry about the slight typo on my last text, I expect you worked it out.
Anyway, but as I’m sure you noticed, my predictive text changed ‘WiFi’ To ‘Wife’.
Hope you saw the funny side of that.
Regards, Alan.9 -
TL;DR: Don't ever interrupt me while taking a shit.
>be me taking a shit comfortably in the bathroom, not bothering anyone
>hear my cousin outside calling his gf
>nofsgiven.jpg
>suddenly stuff comes flying through the window and hear her gf laughing in his phone speaker
>stupid asshat was trying to make his gf laugh by bothering me while in the debug room
>scream from the top of my lungs for him to stop interrupting my defecation process
>stuff keeps coming from the window
>my brown creation comes back inside like a scared turtle
>pull up pantaloons
>get out of thinking room
>open up laptop, start ubuntu
>sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng
>enable monitor mode, get phone, ap mac addresses
>vim shittyvengeance.sh
>write small script that deauths his phone and then waits some seconds and then starts over again so he doesn't think it's me
>:wq and make script executable
>sleep 180; cowsay ding dong ur vengeance has arrived; sudo ./shittyvengeance.sh
>tuck into bed and close laptop before sleep time ends
>his call suddenly drops
>"Matt are you messing up with my WiFi again?"
>"Nah man. Not working for me either. Must be localcompany's problem."
>mfw he can't talk with his gf for more than 15 seconds before losing connection
>omgitworks.jpg
>figure that it was the most useful thing I had made in a pc in these two years at uni
>be proud of me for making a stupid script
>think about going back to my pearl white throne
>no longer wanting to drop my supplies
>go to sleep
>mfw forgot to wipe ass
My first story in devRant! Was lurking for quite a while and finally felt like sharing something 🙃24 -
This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.
After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.
The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.
This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.13 -
One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.
I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.
No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.
The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.
The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.
Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.
Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.
Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.
Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.
Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.
Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.
We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.
Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.
The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.
Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.
Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.
I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.
But I worked support after the launch.
And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.
Back to support.
Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).
So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.
And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?7 -
Was over at a friend's place for the first time in months again to just have a few drinks and some good time with two of my best friends when I wanted to show them a website.
Had my own phone turned off (NO phone use while socializing for me!) so asked one of them (the one who's still finding his way around the concept of online privacy) for their phone so I could show it.
He uses loads of Google things so I started to look for the chrome icon. Swiping all ways but couldn't find it... then suddenly:
DuckDuckGo search/browser icon!
😵😯
Me: dude the what?! YOU using a more privacy conscious browser?!?!?!
Friend: well, Google doesn't need to know EVERYTHING I search for online so I looked if ddg had an app and voila!
Me: de damn! And, how do you like it?
Friend: the results are good so nothing to complain about!
I'm proud of you, mate!8 -
Dear websites,
Please stop fucking asking me to install your shitty mobile apps. They do the same thing your site does. I have a browser, and it's a lot better. I don't even visit you every day. But even if I did, and I wanted your crappy app, I'd open the app store and download it by myself. No need to push me.
No need to waste the little screen estate I have with crappy call-to-action sections to download that shit.
Fuck your desire for more information about me. Fuck your narcissistic enjoyment when I have your icon on my fucking home screen.
The truth is, there is a very small number of apps that really need to integrate with a phone to offer better experience.
I feel most of you feel you need to have an app just because everyone else does. And so you could show these little Android and Apple logos on your website or ads. Well, how about you just make sure your site works well on a mobile screen and don't waste your money on a half-baked mobile shit app unless it really offers something worthwhile?
And if you do have a good app and it really does something, ask me just once and fucking respect my choice. Don't just ask me again and again, on every page, with every new session, or I'll just stop visiting.
You're all not that unique, so fuck you!16 -
Person at work, staring at my keyboard: How much was it?
Me: The keyboard? Oh it's a cheap one for around $30.
Person: Huh... I'll never get you rich boys and your fads.
Well, I don't fucking judge you for your $600 phone, or your $80 shoes or shirts, you cuntwaffle. Fuckin' asshole has the face of a horse's left testicle, is always on his phone, which is arguably fine since he's not a dev but still fuck him, and has the gall to call me bringing my mechanical keyboard to work a 'rich fad'. Oh, that's rich coming from you. Ever seen your ugly mug in your undeserved branded clothing, you unloved, shit-gobbling piece of shit?
"You type so loud." And you breathe too loud but I don't tell you to stop but maybe I ought to.
Go suck on your daddy-uncle's chode for a couple more bucks and stop hanging around me, you judgemental cum-snorting piece of shit.
P.s. it's a cheap keyboard with blue switches but the office is normally noisy and busy enough that no one gives a shit about it. Planning on buying an Anne Pro sometime next month.27 -
"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.22 -
Weirdest technical interview:
I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.
The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.
Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.
I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!
It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.1 -
I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.
One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.
Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.
I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.
I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.
He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.
Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.
So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.
He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.10 -
My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.
It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.
like, fucking really?
There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?
What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.
But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)
So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.
"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.
Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.
And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.
Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.
talk about ridiculous.5 -
Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!
Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.
What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.
I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.
To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.
tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.8 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.
So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.
This dude.
It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.
Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.
He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.
Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"
With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.
"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"
That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"
Mofocka plz.
Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.
Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.
He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.
"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"
"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"
Lost it more.
I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.
Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.19 -
I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.
While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.
I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.
So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.
She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"
During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.
It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"
I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.
I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.
Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.
It read something like:
hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?10 -
Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]
It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.
I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.
Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.
It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.
*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"
Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.
I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.
She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.
I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.
Got a call a few weeks later:
"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."
"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."
"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"
"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"
"I understand."
The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.
After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.
"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"
"Hello, yes, speak up?"
"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."
The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.
She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.
My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.13 -
Every second I’m spending on this iPhone is getting me more annoyed.
I’m about to fucking compromise and get a non-lineage phone but At least a rootable one because I want or throw this piece of shit away as soon as possible.
I wouldn’t even pay 1 euro for an iOS device.
I told myself I’d go for an iPhone for a month or so but I’ll be looking for an extremely cheap android phone because I can’t bare working with this thing for much longer.
No offense to anyone and this is a personal opinion.
Fuck.30 -
Interviewer: Hello I’m calling for your phone interview now
Dev: You’re about an hour early calling but I can accommodate
Interviewer: Well it’s more convenient for me to do it now
Dev: …Alrighty then.
Interviewer: So I am from HR 😇*pause for effect*
Dev: …
Interviewer: Um, typically candidates start the interview by thanking me for consideration for this role.
Dev: Your job description was very vague so I don’t really know what I would be thanking you for.
Interviewer: 😡. It’s me that’ll be determining whether or not to pass you on to The Management.
Dev: …The Management?
Interviewer: Yes 🤗.
Dev: I’m no longer interested *click*.13 -
I feel so sorry for all the people in the world who use their phone more than their PC/laptop.
All the pitiful souls who think they're gamers because they installed lootchest simulator on their little digital skinner box. All the sad beings who just view the internet as a collection of ad-infested apps.
Actually, I don't feel sorry, because these people make the world a worse place.
Suddenly we needed websites which could render on tiny screens and need bloated cross-platform app development frameworks. Many game studios became parasites exploiting addictive behavior in humans, instead of creating works of art.
Humans spent 10,000 years to perfect their caves with expensive kitchens, and all people want is for their WiFi to reach the grill at the end of the garden. Humans created central heating, comfortable couches, wall-mounted TVs and luxurious desks -- and all people can think of is whether their phone plan covers holiday roaming at their shitty resorts.
The rare times I do actually go into this apocalyptic wasteland people call "The Outside", all I see is subway cars full of hunched addicted drudges, bus stops with clusters of enslaved automatons.
Fuck all of them.
Fuck all of you imbeciles, who ventured out of the cave and now DARE to call me anti-social, just for preferring the warmth of my comfortable protective den.
It's fucking cozy here, within the walls of my shelter, I got booze and a fridge full of food and a bunch of LSD, I can masturbate under the shower, have sex on the couch, have all kinds of GIANT displays for entertainment, with full-sized qwerty-keyboards, high-DPI mouses, even some console controllers and big TVs if I feel lazy.
You can stick your responsive websites and social-network-integrated Android apps up your rectum, just sit your fucking fat ass down in front of a workstation and desperately refresh the stream of fake attention-seeking messages there, if you absolutely must.
Seriously, why does this guy from our marketing department call me on my private phone number. Why did HR PROVIDE him with my private phone number?
And WHY THE FUCK is he asking me, a DB admin: "Our website doesn't load properly on Safari on my iPhone 7, could you take a look at it"?
No, of course I won't fucking come to the office to take a look at your miserable shitty device with its cracked glass screen.
Fuck you and your outdoorsy habits.
Stay the fuck in your cave, you degenerate attention whore, otherwise please go choke on your airpods.24 -
!(short rant)
Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"
For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.
tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).29 -
So i was working with a small company which were developing software for insurance sector. It was decided then that there should be an app for windows phone community and i was hired to that job.
It took me almost a month to finish the job. Please keep in mind that project was huge and already developed for android counterpart and was a hit in market. This was a chance given to me to prove myself and i proved it.
First month was fantastic for the company as software the company made was not available for windows phone. Price has been set for the software was higher in those time. Almost $15.
Excited by the success i added some more features which were not available on android counter part.
But price was very high. Even i asked management to drop the price because there were less windows phone user but no body listened.
Result : in a year app has made roughly 5000 download in which only 200 paid the actual price. Company asked me to take down the app from store. I was blamed for my over confidence in adding features that this made app less usable. They did not say a word to business managment team. I was fired.
Rough, cruel world.
6 month ago i published my app for same purpose with same feature set and different UI. And made it free. Completely free. Added a link to pay developer $0.5 or Rs 30.
Result: i have now 10 thousands plus download in last 4 month in which almost 3000 users have donated already.
Now i have my resource and my confidence and making an android app for same purpose.
This is my story and is not fake, i am 28 years old. If you think you can, you can.
Amen.4 -
The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD
1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!
2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.
3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?
4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.
What crazy shit have you done at your University?9 -
Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.
Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
See where I'm going here?
Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.
Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?
I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...17 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*65 -
Here's a follow-up to my New Year's resolutions rant six months ago:
( https://devrant.com/rants/1117379/... )
I've completed (or made significant strides in) 5 of my 7 resolutions:
1) Rid and keep my like free of toxic people. This includes parents.
I have had a serious conversation with everyone who made my life worse and whom I wanted to keep around, outlining my issues with them and my expectations should they want to remain in my life. I happily cut out everyone who refused to change their behavior, including my parents. My life is quieter now, and much nicer.
3) Take care of myself for a change!
I've started this, but with work, a monster, etc. it's been almost prohibitively difficult. Minimal lasting progress despite considerable effort. I will make more time for it and make it happen. (I was down 12 pounds at one point! Though this isn't just about weight.)
4) Stop putting up with things I don't have to.
If I don't like something optional, snip snip!
I no longer wait patiently (fuming) for slow-moving people. If something prevents me from being productive or going about my day, I no longer let it. Carpe diem; calcitrare culus! I have been much more productive and energetic because of this.
5) Actually enjoy things I enjoy.
Okay, this one is very difficult. Whenever I'm not working, I feel like I'm wasting my time. However, I have made a conceited effort every day to take time off and do something that sounds fun. Sometimes that's more work, but usually it's music, a game, a book, exercise, or bed. I'm still working on actually enjoying my time away from work, however, but I'm making progress!
7) Finish de-googling my life.
I no longer use a gmail account (except a work-provided account), nor do I use any of their services unless absolutely necessary (and I do so through TOR). My phone still has Google Play Services; however, I'm working on finding a replacement that I can @Root. (Suggestions welcome!)
------
The two resolutions I haven't yet addressed:
2) Find a well-paying job that isn't also toxic.
My job has gotten less toxic of late, with the boss actually listening and everyone writing up feature requests (with co-sponsors) instead of just dumping them in my lap. I perform an effort analysis on them, and everyone discusses them as a team to determine which actually deserve development time. This is tens of times better than before. I also no longer have to be at the office. In fact, I haven't been there in months -- and don't even remember the alarm codes haha. I may also be getting another developer, though I suspect this is actually a lie.
6) Finally buy a harp. I've wanted one since I was 3 ffs.
I haven't done any research yet on which harp(s) I should buy. Also, I have no idea where I would keep it, so I may defer this until we move, or just get a tiny one (lap-sized and cute!) to practice on. Probably both!
------
It's been six moths, and I'm happy with my progress. 😄9 -
So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)
Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.
Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.
Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.
It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.
I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.
So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.
I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.
Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.
An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:
"please reenter card number to validate."
Bupkiss. Dead end.
OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.
One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:
"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"
One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:
With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.
So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.13 -
Woohoo! 32k achieved!!! Finally I can post some new rant without risking some sudden overshoot 😁
So putting celebrations aside for a minute, a while ago I've noticed a tingle when I stroke my finger across metal areas of my tablet, or the sides of my phone (which probably has metal near it too) while it's charging. And it's been bugging me ever since.
Now, some things to note are that it only happens when my feet are touching the ground though slippers, and that the frequency is so low that I can actually feel the tingle when I slide my finger across the material. This to me at least seems like electricity flows through me into ground, and touching the ground directly provides a path so easy for the electrons to run away that I don't feel it at all. But if I lift my feet off the ground entirely, I just get charged up and after that, nothing else happens.
So those are my ideas. The answers on the subject on the other hand.. absolute cancer. Unsurprisingly, most of them came from Apple users. Here's some of them.
https://discussions.apple.com/threa...
- I've not noticed it, but if you're concerned bring the phone to Apple for evaluation.
- Me too facing same problem.. did u visit apple care?
And one good answer at least...
- google emf sensitivity, its real. You are right, there is a small current flowing through your body, try to limit your usage. The problem with this issue is those who aren't affected (lucky ones for now) will tell you these products are 100% safe. To a degree they are, i used my ipod touch for about 2 years straight vwith virtually no symptoms. then the tingling started and it gets worse.You will get more sensitive to progressively less powerful things. I dont want to scare you but just limit your usage like i didnt do 🙂
Overall that discussion was pretty good actually, aside from "bring it to the Genius Bar, they'll know for sure and not just sell you another unit". But then there's Reddit.
https://reddit.com/r/iphone/...
- Ok, real reason is probably that the extension cord and/or outlet is probably not grounded correctly. Either that or you are using a cheap knockoff charger.
Either use a surge protector and/or use the authentic Apple Charger.
- It's not the volts that hurt you, it's the amps
- I think you are in deep love with your phone. That tingling sensation is usually referred to as "love" in human language.
- Do less acid, I would advise.
Okay, so that's the real cancer. Grounding issue sounds reasonable despite it being wrong. Grounding is actually not needed when your charging appliance doesn't have any exposed metal parts. And isolation from high voltage to low voltage side actually happens through things like routering holes into the PCB, creating spark gaps, and using galvanic isolation through things like optocouplers. As for a surge protector? I'm using them to protect my PC and my servers, but the only purpose they serve is to protect from.. you guessed it.. voltage surges, like lightning bolts hitting the grid. They don't do shit for grounding or reducing this tingle! What a fucking tool.
It's not the volts that kill, it's the amps.. yeah I'm sure that the debunking of that is easy to find. Not gonna explain that here. And the rest of it.. yeah it's just fucking cancer.
Now what's the real issue with this tingle? It's actually a Class-Y rated (i.e. kV rated) capacitor that's on the transformer of any switch-mode power supply, including phone chargers. If memory serves me right, it helps with decoupling the switching noise and so on. But as it's connected to the primary side of the transformer, if the cap is sufficiently large and you are sufficiently sensitive, it can actually cause that tingle by passing a fraction of the mains electricity into your body. It's totally safe though, as the power that these caps pass is very small. But to some, it's noticeable.
Hope you found this interesting! And thanks a lot for bringing me to 2^15. I really appreciate it ♥️15 -
3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!
1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!
So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.
- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!
Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.
2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!
Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.
So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.
3. devRant web app!!
As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.
So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?6 -
Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.
Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:
"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>
So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"
Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?
Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"
Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"
Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"
Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?
Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level
ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.
=======
Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web
Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"
Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.
Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.
===
* For another Rails position
Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?
Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.
Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.
Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?
Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.
Me: This is a joke, goodbye.
====
To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.
I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)
I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.3 -
TL;DR: Fuck you Apple.
10:30 PM, parent needs iPhone update to update Messenger. How hard can this be?
Need to update iPhone from 9.x to latest, which is so outdated it still required iTunes. Fk.
Boot iTunes on Windows 10 pc that is at least 10 years old.
Completely unresponsive
Crash in task manager
Launch and is completely unresponsive. (Also starts playing unrequested music.. Oh joy..)
Fuck this, go to apple.com to download iTunes exe
Gives me some Microsoft store link. Fuck that shit, just give me the executable
Google “iTunes download”. click around on shitty Apple website. Success.
Control panel. Uninstall iTunes. (Takes forever, but it works)
Restart required (of fucking course).
2 eternities later. Run iTunes exe. Restart required. Fk.
Only 1 eternity later. Run iTunes, connect iPhone.
Actually detects the device. (holy shit, a miracle)
Starts syncing an empty library to the phone. Ya, fuck that.
Google. Disable option. Connect phone. Find option to update.
Update started. Going nowhere fast. Time for a walk at 1:00 AM punching the air.
Come back. Generic error message: Update failed (-1). Phone is stuck installing update. (O shit)
1x hard reset
2x hard reset
Google. Find Apple forum with exact question. Absolutely useless replies. (I expected no less)
Google recovery mode. Get into recovery mode.
Receive message: “You can update, but if it fails, you will have to reset to factory settings”. Fuck it, here we go.
Update runs (faster this time). Fails again. Same bullshit error message. (Goddammit, fuck. This might actually be bad.)
Disconnect phone.
… It boots latest iOS version. (holy shit, there is a god)
Immediately kill iTunes. Fuck that shit.
Parents share Apple account
Sign in, 2FA required.
Fat finger the code.
Restart “welcome” process.
Will not send code. What. The. Fuck.
Requests access code on other parent’s iPhone.
No code present. What???
Try restarting welcome process again. No dice. (Of course)
Set code on other parent’s iPhone.
Get message “Code is easy to guess”. Ya. IDGAF
Use code on newly updated iPhone. Some success.
Requires reset of password.
Password cannot be the same as old password (Goddammit)
Change password.
Welcome process done.
Sign in again on same phone after welcome process done in settings. (Nice.)
Sign in again on other phone with updated password
Update Messenger.
Update hangs. Needs more space.
Delete shit.
Update frozen in App Store (Really??)
Restart iPhone.
Update Messenger.
Update complete past 2. Well that was easy.
Apple, fuck you.
Some call Android unintuitive, but I look at the settings app on iPhone and realize you aren’t any better.
This company hasn’t been innovative since 2007. Over 1000 USD for a phone? Are you fucking kidding me?
Updating an iPhone from iOS 9.x is probably uncommon anymore. But this is a fucking joke. Fix your shit.
Shit like this is why I’ll never again own an Apple product. I have HAD IT with the joke of a business.
Thanks for reading.18 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
Motherfucking WordPress coupled with motherfucking sales people.
If you promise the client something, please fucking relay it via the correct process (i.e the fucking ticketing system that took me a month to write for the company - it's seriously just a click away on your desktop.). "I told your boss" is not a fucking apt excuse.
My boss forgets, and well, doesn't give a fuck about procedure either.
Now you phone my boss and he phones me, on a fucking Sunday evening, telling me that the client was promised a website by tomorrow morning at 10AM. You tell me this at fucking 9PM.
Why didn't you tell me earlier? How the fuck am I supposed to shit out something I would be proud of in a few hours? Nevermind me fucking up my sleeping routine; how the fuck?
Conversation went like this:
"xyz was promised this site by sales person fuckTwit, I need this live by Monday morning. I have sent you a few images. Make it in WordPress, client says they want a 'tangy looking theme'.
Me: it's a bit unrealistic requesting this, is there no way we can extend the time so I have time to create this?
Also, what do you mean by 'tangy'?
Boss: don't know. Make it happen. No excuses.
What the fuck is a tangy theme? When I become a webDev at the company? More importantly, fucking WordPress?!
Now I'm sitting on this shit, tired as a manatee in mating season, and using goddamn WordPress.
I have to halt my irritation, because I get severely irritated when I'm tired, I have to restrain myself from telling the involved parties tomorrow to install the FuckYourself WordPress plugin, coupled with a resignation letter.
Same sales person got me in shit a while ago, because I refused to give him access to the network to download fucking cartoons. Sales director went and moaned that his bitch (the sales person) needs this for a presentation. Yeah fucking right.
Go Snorkelling in a sewer truck you egotistic, megalomaniacal, indecent, outrageous, horrible motherfucker of a person.
Time to develop a fucking website with, oh, a company profile pamphlet.
Times like this I keep telling myself, "my time will come, my time will come".14 -
You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.
A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.
After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.
I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.
They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.
So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.
From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )
So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )
Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .
Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.
After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.
He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.
They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.
I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.
I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.
They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.
If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.
Have a nice day.5 -
preface: swearing.
because anger.
So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.
It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.
HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.
Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.
What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.
Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.
You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!
oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.
SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.
Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.
The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?
like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.
Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.
then again, fuck this significantly more.
UGH.18 -
I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:
http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y
then:
http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh
Twat Client,
As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.
As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.
After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.
It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.
{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},
I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.
I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.
Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.
As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.
He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.
I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.
Reply from ClientClient:
Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.
Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:
I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.
Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?
Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.
Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?
... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!
My email follow up:
http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV
I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.14 -
My dad had been telling me about his friend's amazing son who was working in the IT dept. of some hospital and was raking in a lot, was super smart and 'worked in a hi-fi environment'. Kept telling me to go meet him to get some work online if possible.
Now, I know my dad is easily influenced and impressed especially because of his non-tech background. And today, after a month of him reprimanding that I'm not listening to him and letting go of a big opportunity, he finally pulled me by my collar and brought me to visit the guy in his office...
And turns out the staff has never even heard the guy's name! And their IT dept. can fit no more than 3 people, is filled with papers, monitors from the 90s and chairs that would cause permanent back aches.
He looks so dejected and the guy isn't picking up his phone either but I had an inkling how this meeting would turn out. :/6 -
I'm stuck in a broken train with no more than 3% on my mobile phone... let this rant be my swan song!11
-
WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.
watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.
Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?
For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?
It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.
And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?
Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.16 -
I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.
They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!
I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.
But! No audio.
Damn.
Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.
Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.
But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤
(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)22 -
Best part of working from home? Oh boy, here I go
1. NO COMMUTE !! Fuck public transport. I can just grab my laptop straight to my bed, get comfortable and work in whatever posture I wish to.
2. Relaxation and peace of mind. The local park, library, football ground. I can go anywhere to get work done. All I need is my phone and laptop.
3. Better food - I can cook my own food. Dieting actually works by eating home-made food and not the fried bullshit we eat outside.
4. No office politics - Remote working means you don't have to think about being a circle and getting liked or not. Get your work done and that's it.
5. No "Extra" Activities - We all know HRs are just bored af people making employees have "fun" activities just to push a "culture" agenda on LinkedIn. Umm no thanks.
6. No toxicity - Well, this one is a doozie, you don't get workplace toxicity but you do get home toxicity. People assuming that you stay in ur room all day and do nothing. I'd still take home toxicity though.
7. If there is no work, I don't have to pretend that I am working and hiding my screen from my boss. I can just play video games in that time.
8. Option to start a side-hustle. You have more chances to retain some energy after your shift to start investing/putting time into something that can make you extra cash.
9. Worldwide opportunities - Because of WFH, I work with clients from Netherlands, Estonia, London and Cayman Islands. It never would have happened if I was in an office job.
10. Only work, no extra bullshit - be it smoke breaks, casual tea, conferences, work summits etc. None of that and I don't want it.
11. Your errands get done - Need to go to the dentist at 10 am? You can do that. Need to pick up your kid at 3 pm? You can do that. You need 5 pm time dedicated to go the gym? You can do that.
In conclusion, I absolutely vouch for WFH and would never take WFO for as long as possible.
WFH FTW !!!9 -
Very long story ahead!
Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.
That's it. Thanks for reading.7 -
I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.
It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.
The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.
My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.
From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.
Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.
I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.
I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.
I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.
I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.
I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.
The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."
The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.
So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.
I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.4 -
- Hello! Gordon's pizza?
- No sir it's Google's pizza.
- So it's a wrong number?
- No sir, Google bought it.
- OK. Take my order please ..
- Well sir, you want the usual?
- The usual? You know me?
- According to our caller ID, in the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust
- OK! This is it
- May I suggest to you this time ricotta, arugula with dry tomato?
- No, I hate vegetables
- But your cholesterol is not good
- How do you know?
- Through the subscribers guide. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years
- Okay, but I do not want this pizza, I already take medicine
- You have not taken the medicine regularly, 4 months ago, you only purchased a box with 30 tablets at Drugsale Network
- I bought more from another drugstore
- It's not showing on your credit card
- I paid in cash
- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement
- I have other source of cash
- This is not showing as per you last Tax form unless you got it from undeclared income source
-WHAT THE HELL? Enough! I'm sick of Google, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp. I'm going to an Island without internet,where there is no cell phone line and no one to spy on me
- I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport as it has expired 5 weeks ago..11 -
So this happened a few days ago. I always want to root my smartphones for that little bit more control.
*Put's new smartphone into fastboot mode*
*Tries to flash root zip onto it*
"You have to OEM unlock the bootloader first"
*OEM unlocks the bootloader*
*Tries to flash but fails*
*Tries to reboot*
Phone: "The bootloader has been tampered with, the device will boot in 5 seconds".
*Screen just hangs there for ages*
FUCK.
*Tries to enter fastboot again to OEM re-lock the bootloader*
*Fastboot appears to startup RIGHT AFTER THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE so can't boot into that anymore*.
FUCKING FUCK.
Hmm... TWRP is still installed...
*Tries to flash some stuff through TWRP*
"The zip file you are trying to flash is corrupt".
FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
*Connects phone to Linux for adb flashing*
*Nothing happens after half an hour of trying*
*Connects phone to ancient windows 7 laptop*
*Laptop doesn't even RECOGNISE the phone although all drivers are installed*.
*Le me about to completely lose my fucking mind*
*Connects phone desperately with Linux again*
*Phone is recognised right away but the SPL flash tool can't detect it*
*Tries to put it into fastboot again*
*Fails for about an hour*
*phone in charging mode again*
*Presses the power button for a last, desperate attempt*
*SPL flash suddenly recognises the phone*
FLASHING
FLASHING
FLASHING
DONE.
*Android boots again like nothing happened*
I can use it again like normal but the No-Root firewall is draining my battery like crazy.
That was one hell of a journey though!10 -
TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!
*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*
But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎
But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?
*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?
*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!
*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*
Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?
*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.
*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<
*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...
Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.
Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!5 -
I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:
"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "
OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:
"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."
PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".
Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet7 -
How it is to be a dev in my country?
At bit of an odd question this week.
For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.
Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.
Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>11 -
The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.
I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.
They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.
Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.
The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:
- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5
A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.
Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.
So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.
While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:
- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database
All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.
According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.
#TheValueOfEngineers2 -
Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!
The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.
I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.
The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.
When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.
That's when the nerdgasm happened.
The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!
That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.
Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.
Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.11 -
Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.
That time when...
He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.
He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.
He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.
He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).
He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).
He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.
He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.
He set up a new email account for each individual online service.
He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).
He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).
He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).
He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.
He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.
He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.
He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.
He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).
He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.
(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).
He ate a sim card.
He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).
He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.
He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).
He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).
He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.
I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.26 -
OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble, money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45. I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?68 -
Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.
Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"
Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."
BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW
Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."
Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"
Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine
Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT
Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.
Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.
Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.
10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.6 -
!dev
GOD FUCKING DAMMIT
My Mother was intelligent enough to get her phone stolen and screams at me over the phone of my brother why I can't do more than telling her the last known location
BECAUSE THEY SHUT IT DOWN
I CAN'T DO SHIT WITHOUT THE PHONE HAVING AN INTERNET CONNECTION
But what if they go through my files go into my bank account
THEY CAN'T BECAUSE YOU HAVE A PASSWORD ON IT
but they could crack it or something
NO THEY CAN'T WITHOUT TRYING FOR MONTHS OR YEARS OF POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS
but
NO BUT JUST FUCKING CALM DOWN IF THEY AREN'T THAT BAD THEN THEY WILL CALL ME IF THEY ARE ASSHOLES THEY NEED AT LEAST MAKE A FACTORY RESET AND DELETE ALL YOUR FILES
I CAN'T DO MORE THAN THIS SO FUCKING SHUT UP AND DON'T LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT A FUCKING WAITING ROOM AND DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING ON THE FUCKING INTERNET ESPECIALLY FACEBOOK
Thanks know I can't concentrate anymore........5 -
Just came back from a new café (to the pedantic among us, yes I know it's a bar.. get over it).
And I met some Apple fanboy 🤭
So the guy kept on bragging about his shiny iPhone 6.. and I figured that I'd chime in. Due to my short-term memory being terrible, I'll be paraphrasing here.
M: me
S: iPhone usar _/\_
M: iPhone 6 ey..? I've heard about some devices in which the old ones are throttled down in a system update "to save the battery".
S: Yes, biweekly updates!! You can even delay them to tune them down to the time during which your device is charging and can commence its system update.
M (thinking): You've clearly missed the point sir.. but on Android, system updates don't need to be willfully delayed even. They (usually) won't commence unless your device is 80% and charging. OnePlus has been an exception to this though, probably under the assumption that their users are mostly power users that know what they're doing.
M: You do realize that given that your iPhone 6 is quite old already, Apple will very likely start throttling your device during a system update in the next few months, right.
S: What the hell dude.. look, look how smoothly it's been going for the last few years!!! Nothing wrong with that.
M: Just wait until your repair bill comes from those Geniuses 🤭
M: Sir, you do realize that Apple quotes €600 for battery repairs nowadays, right.
S: What the hell dude!!! I can buy a whole new phone for that much!!
M: Exactly!! That's exactly Apple's business tactic!!! They design their phones as such that the battery replacement (one of the most common repairs) requires you to replace not only the battery, but the whole chassis!!! And on the XS, the battery replacement is nothing short of atrocious!!!
M: Here, have a look at this: https://youtube.com/watch/...
*shows Louis' newest video about him switching to iPhone XS*
S: Yeah that's just bullshit. I bet you're showing me this on one of those crappy Samsungs.
M: No sir. I'm showing this on my Nexus 6P, that is tethered to my OnePlus 6T. Speaking of which, let me introduce you to the Nexus 6P's (one of the crappiest Android flagships to ever exist) repair, the battery replacement of which I've done myself.
(you can watch the iFixit video about it here: https://youtube.com/watch/...)
*explains heatgun, screwdriver, heatgun battery replacement of Nexus 6P and the time each step takes - more than an hour combined*
S: Yeah that's because it's one of those crappy Androids. That'd never happen to this shiny iPhone, look, I've got a $20 battery right here!!!
*shows battery*
M: Sir... That's a battery for a MacBook. A laptop battery.... 🤨
I love how willfully ignorant these Apple users are. To them, all that exists is Apple and Samsung (both of which I hate because lockdown). And they apparently don't even know what repair they have to look for when they'll need one.. maybe that's why those Genius Bars exist? 🤭
I'd love to see the guy's face when the Geniuses quote him the price for battery replacement when his planned obsolescence time comes 🤭14 -
Screw the German Telekom!
I recently got a new home without internet so naturally, I went to an isp, Telekom. I went there a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised by the personal and the general competence. He told me they would send a technician to check my cable. So I thought great and went home. 1 A week passes, nobody shows up. I then went back to the shop and asked(someone different). He basically told me that such a service must be specifically asked for and a contract has to be signed. I then told
him his colleague told me no such thing, and that the technician should have checked up on my connection last week. He excuses him self and I signed the thingy.
Now you would imagine that this would have worked.
but.
NOOOoooo.
A week came and went and I got pissed. So I went back to the shop the guy from the first try was there. I Asked what happened, he types in his Computer. and. and. and. nothing. Apparently, the previous guy forgot, fucking forgot, to enter my request to their bloody System.
Now I asked if I can Just become a customer.
Guy: Sure, what speed is available in your region?
Me: I don't know...
Guy: Let me check
/Type/ /Type/
Guy: I can't see your speed the technician should have checked.
Me: Um, so, can he check?
Guy: Clearly you don't know what you want
Me:???
Guy:*leaves table*
(shorten but you get the Idea)
At this point, I really wanted to change isp so I went to Vodafone.
Lady comes up to me asks me a bunch of stuff and I explain I would want to change my phone, internet, tv, mobile and my friends mobile(I lost a bet once ^~^) to Vodafone.
What happened next I can't really explain, but she talked to her boss and "cheated" (how she calls it) on Vodafone and got me an AMAZING deal it is cheaper than Telekoms has waay more mobile data, faster Internet and I got a new phone :D.
And guess what she could fucking check, fucking check from here Computer my max internet speed.
I can only hope that the lady got a big fat commission for what she has done.6 -
Client(over the phone):- I want an Android app where there job seekers and recruiters.
Me:- sounds reasonable enough, ok
Client:-i want job seekers to apply for the job and recruiters to post the job.
Me(gets a bad feeling);- doable ok.
Client:- and I want an admin user who can see all the users and do everything.
Me(yup there it is):- what do you mean by everything?
Client :- you know everything, talk to recruiters talk to see everyone using the app, you know everything.
Me :- no I don't know this "everything" that you speak of, tell me more, what screens (activity) should that have and stuff.
Client (getting irritated):- everything the admin user usually does.
Me(yare yare daze):- i will show number of users in a graph.
I have a feeling this is not over yet7 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
!dev at all
Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.
While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.
My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."
I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"
"But i get all anxious and shit"
"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"
Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.
So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.
Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.
"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"
"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"
"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"
DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!
"Ok, but only if its you"
Daaaaaaaaaamn
Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.
Lord knows I had my fun with them.10 -
F*cking Samsung's alarm clock.
I really needed to wake up early today so I added secondary alarm little bit earlier. It was supposed to ring at 5:20 and second one shall ring 5:30. But Samsung said no.
Update came thru night and phone was restarted in process. Why it can't keep memory unlocked I don't understand, but OK. But it effectively means it was not able to trigger alarm clock. So I woke up at 6:35 and came more than hour late.
Why such basic functionality failed? My old Sony Erricsson T290i can ring even when powered down. Same as my Nokia and after that Lumia with Windows Phone 10. Why can't Samsung just be normal.12 -
So following from this rant:
https://devrant.io/rants/618679/...
Warning long rant ahead
I resigned and my last day is tomorrow, I've released the app updates a week ago, patched a couple bugs for iOS.
My boss and the idiot who can't open an email on his phone go off to use the app as part of some training thing for the company.
I got a call yesterday saying the Android app has issues and I proceeded to ask my boss what type of phone they have:
"Samsung and Huawei"
I thought okay I need more info "what type of phone..." He responds with wouldn't have a clue....
I can't see the phone, didn't get a screenshot or anything like that but I'm expected to just know what the phone is.
My boss goes on to say yeah it's the app (he is literally the most computer illiterate person I could think of aside from guy who can't open emails on phone, how the fuck do you know that?)
Me: "From all the testing I've done the app works"
Look if you want a more robust error free update hire more than one developer I can't test every single fucking use case to determine the app is 100% bug free, I've tested on at least 10 phones before releasing the update just to be absolutely sure I got everything done and okay I missed something.
So I proceed to get my boss to tell the guy who has the issue I'll sign him up to the testing app to find out the cause and hopefully fix the issue, I setup crashlytics send the email and get a call from my boss saying the guy didn't get the email.
Well okay is it my problem that we have two emails for the same person where one of them is a typo? No it's the guy who asked and wrote down the email instead of actually forwarding a blank email from him to be absolutely sure, I sent the email to both just to be on the safe side.
I swear if he is another idiot who can't open emails on his phone well I can't help him, app works on my phone and the phones at work.
I need a phone where it doesn't work so I can get a solution I know works but if I have to deal with these idiots that can't even check an email how the fuck do I do that?
Sorry about the formatting just needed to get this off my chest before I start work.
Oh and I get asked "so who'll fix the bugs when you're gone" well I can't (in reality I'm not working for free, I'm not traveling 1 1/2 commute time to fix one bug for free, go hire someone you think will love to work for minimum wage and let's see if this guy can do what I did)8 -
This fucking idiot at work needs to use the pre release version of the iOS app for a training programme, and I swear I have tried my best to best to help him get the app on his phone.
I use Fabric and I chose because of how easy it is to install on a persons phone, but this is the situation so far. Also he lives a couple cities away so I can't do it myself.
I had to waste time waiting for him to call me, beforehand I sent the email, maybe 5 minutes before his call and told him that he needs to find the email, he says oh okay alright well I'll contact you if I have any problems.
I waited a day and sent a follow-up email on what the subject, from email, and even what the email looks like with screenshots.
No response for 3 weeks, and I bring it up in a meeting that I need to help him again.
So it's a literal fucking repeat of the first step, wait for his call, this time close to the end of my work day and he's 30 minutes late for his own fucking schedule, I thought whatever so I say the exact same thing BUT expecting him to get it out of the way while I'm on the phone...
Waited two days and sent him an email today and since I forgot to mention it, I've told him that this is to REGISTER to get the app. Guess what his reply was.
Sorry I can't get it on my phone!
He can't get what a fucking email to open on his phone and follow instructions a small bipedal animal could figure out?
It's literally follow the fucking icon moving they have gifs showing exactly what to click...
So tomorrow I have to somehow not blow up and get this app on his phone, honestly I understand some people can have issues with technical things but I got a guy at work that has trouble with his computer all the time to follow my same instructions without me needing to say more than I'll send an email all you need to do is follow the instructions, he actually enjoyed going through it.
...I swear this guy is just not even bothering, and I made sure I sent it to the right email, also second call he told me he found the email..4 -
!!oracle
I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.
So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.
Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.
On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!
So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.
Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.
Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.
Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.10 -
Several rants ago I promised to drop a bombshell about Android. What took me so long was my research.
I wanted to measure the extent of Google’s background data mining. I put Android at a significant disadvantage — it was Redmi 6, a device with a 5-year-old half-dead battery that was heavily used by my partner. The only change was me installing Lineage OS + microG — a private, degoogled combo that has no quality of life ramifications. Google Play Store opens, apps download. MicroG emulates Google Play Services — maps, banking and other Play Services-dependent apps work flawlessly. This made a huge difference.
Before degoogling, this phone lasted one day tops on standby. Now, with Wi-Fi connection enabled, apps auto-update working (one game I had installed auto-updated during the test), and no battery saver engaged, I was able to pull ELEVEN DAYS on full charge. Battery saver promised even more uptime, but I considered that cheating.
Modern phones have modern screens that drain battery quickly. Yet, they also have 4000+ mAh batteries. If your Android smartphone performs worse than mine in a test like this that doesn't use screen, kiss your privacy goodbye.24 -
* Recruiter says he has a nice proposition
* I say that I'm not comfortable switching jobs yet, but I'd be up for a short phone interview to hear him out, out of pure interest
* Recruiter explains a lot about the company, and then asks if I am up for "a short Teams introduction with the team lead to hear more"
* I say yes, though still stating that I do not intend on switching, but want to know more in case of a future possibility
* Recruiter says I need to send my full CV / Resumé plus grades from every school I ever intended (including the early ones that doesn't even matter)
* I say no since 1) I'd have to dig them out from the basement, 2) I am not looking for a job right now, and 3) This request is absurd to me, and NOT a norm in my part of the world when I am not applying.
* He says I HAVE to, since I could be lying
(I am mostly self-taught and have very little actual education, so this logic made NO sense to me)
* I continue to say no, stating that it's simply not worth the time finding the old grades in the basement for a job I will not be taking, and that I am mostly self-taught so grades wouldn't matter
* He starts getting angry, accusing me of "purposefully wasting his time", and says he'll warn the company about me.
Fair point. I'll warn my contacts about you then. Have a nice day, you f*cking prick :)3 -
Juste before the smartphone explosion (~2008), I was working on a virtual machine for Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android 1.0, and basically every feature-phone of the time.
The VM (coded on good ol' C) would interpret a bunch of HTML, JS, CSS files (more or less like a browser) to run some tiny widgets above the phone's UI, basically allowing us to make multi-platform, custom UIs for low-end phones.
Everything was coded from scratch (except the JS engine which was a fork of SpiderMonkey), the VM could run multiple instances of itself, took around ~2MB of RAM to run (the exe contained everything in 1MB).
Oh, and we were a team of 3 beginner developers.
Fun times, no sleep times ❤️
EDIT: wow, the website is still alive O_o http://viamobility.com/5 -
I hate being a fucking tech support dude. Everyone thinks it is my job to fix their device. Some girl asked me to replace her iPhone 6 plus screen a few days ago. I reluctantly said yes. I bought a screen. And I started the process. I opened the box for the new screen and it was just the screen with no digitizer. That was completely my fault. I was an idiot. I immediately buy the correct one on amazon and tell the girl, I'm sorry you won't have a phone for two days. As soon as the new package comes in, I will do the repair.
3 Days Later: Today.
Her: Has it come in yet?
Me: No, I'm going to call Amazon
Amazon: We're sorry, the thing you asked for was out of stock, you'll have to buy it again.
He was very nice, and he gave me free shipping, but this was not my fault!
Her: I have to wait 2 more days? That's like a whole week without a phone!
I had to do this for free and pay $40 for the new part. I am never telling anyone I am a developer again. I feel so fucking bad, and she's mad. And I can't do anything about it.6 -
So I've been applying to jobs. I, purposely, have been putting down that I am female (since they all harp on diversity, I'd like to see if they even bother reaching out to me. Also anything to get my resume past the bots).
Spoiler alert - getting similar ratios to male counterparts, 100+ applications sent, maybe 4 phone interviews. No offers yet. Still made to do code challenges.
Well, I just found out where all that diversity hiring went to. Buddy of mine who works at a mid tier company said that they have a special program that onboards women into tech.
Specifically, women who have literally zero background in computers.
Teachers, social workers, etc. They get a week or so of some coding bootcamp and then get full time positions over more skilled applicants.
This infuriates me. I literally would be in a better situation to be hired had I not have had any technical background, taken this particular bootcamp and finally net the elusive entry level position I need.
And guess what? That move has antagonized the existing male employees who see that they have zero interest and zero competency instead of having an integrated workplace.
10/10 for incredible bullshit.6 -
I love it when unethical companies' marketing chaps assume that I care about their SMS garbage more than I get pissed off by it. Damart, I didn't even know about your existence or what the hell you do as a business (selling woman clothes apparently.. am I a woman?!) until you shoved your ad crap into my face, and Unigro I really don't have a pending contract with you so kindly fuck off with your reminders (that are in French but am I a Walloon? No!).
Makes me wonder though, with email I usually just give everyone a different email address to deflect spam - since I can reroute email to any particular address straight to /dev/null on the server if so desired. With SMS and SIM cards that isn't really possible.. hence why I'm always so hesitant about sharing my phone number. In email the addresses are scraped off the internet.. but phone numbers? How do such shitcompanies even obtain those?! Their level of pushiness and unethical behavior boggles my mind.8 -
I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?8 -
If nobody hates you, you're doing something wrong ~ House MD
Tl;Dr : I'm pissing the right people off and my God I like it
That's what I've known and have confirmed doing my current side project with my gf, we are working on a ratemyprofessors clone with extra spicy features, one in particular is so spicy some teachers will be put in a position in which they would rather grind hot peppers with their butt cheeks.
Don't get me wrong, there are good teachers (some of which actually showed support) but some are not good teachers and some aren't good people either; I've decided it's time to stop complaining and take action.
We recently released an alpha and I presented it to a teacher I had this semester (one of the "not so great" kind) as a DB proyect cuz fuck it I'm not doing 2 projects.
This teacher is your run of the mill "I'm lazy and I don't care" teacher and she ran the classroom like a shitty kindergarten, so much so, one of the teams was presenting a buggy admin site as their project and she started talking on the phone! Right up on their faces!!
My turn, I go up and handle her a 30 page printed thesis of my project and said that unlike my mates, I was going to start presenting the idea and then the actual software...why is it printed?, She said; Because I won't be projecting the PDF ma'am, I actually made a professional presentation and that way you can read more technical details while I give a broad overview...
I started talking about the huge issues students face and my research about it, undisciplined teachers, no class structure ~ abrupt interruption ~ "yeah I know like, you are giving so much statistics and numbahs but where is the database?"
I got pissed off because the whole purpose of printing and giving her the docs was for her to ask specific questions AT THE END! So I told her I was getting there and to ask questions at the end...I start showing off the system's sweetest features... everyone got quiet...a girl on the front row kept looking at the teacher and then back to the board with her eyes wide open, the teacher was visibly upset.
I asked someone to please help me by using the site being projected for everyone to see, he searched the teacher's name and it obviously popped up cuz I scrapped the whole teacher index site... some people gasp and others start murmuring.
She freaked and started arguing saying that frontend can't be just HTML and CSS, where did you mentioned x and y feature? admit it's just teacher evaluations! where did you get the teacher names? I want the scripts!....it went on even 10 minutes after class and the next class with a police like interrogation.
So yeah, something tells me I'm not getting an A, but I'm happy after all because that's the kind of reaction I want from those types of professors.
Worth it 😎8 -
I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.
A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.
But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.
I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.
I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.
I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.
Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?
I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.
Maybe I should just start my own company.6 -
I was never really fond of 2FA, mostly due to the pain in the ass it creates if you lose or can’t access the 2nd device or jumping between GAuth to access Password Manager to access a password to use a login 😱.
But when your phone prompts up with a “allow some Asian, access to you’re iCloud account” you feel a world of relief that you have:
1) a notification you’re account is no longer secure,
And,
2) an immediate ability to change passwords before any access is granted.
Now it’s 1 more password I no longer know due to it being a scrambled mess of characters.
PS: Fuck you, you low life shithead!9 -
I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.
First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.
So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.
Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.
Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.
So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.
I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.
I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.
Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.
And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.
Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.6 -
When I go to bed, I power off my laptop instead of just closing the lid. I don't bring my phone with me. I don't have a smartwatch. I sleep with no electronic devices with me.
Anyone can solve a lot of their problems by conversing with themselves one on one. Instead, they prefer a feed algorithm taking away their pain. But the nature of pain-relieving addictions is that they always intensify the pain in the long run.
Listen to yourself. Speak to yourself quietly, one on one, without mark zuckerberg in your room listening to your every word. The overwhelming pain will be no more after mere minutes. Only then can you be free.4 -
This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3
Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.
Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.
In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.
Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …
Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!9 -
Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.
Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...
Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.
No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.
I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.
What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.10 -
I have one! Once upon a time (about a year ago) my mom went online shopping on her own. Her husband was out of town and so she had no assistance. At about 10.30 pm she called me, freaking the fuck out that she entered her credit card details on a sketchy site and they charged her for more than she ordered. She was in hysterics, didn't know what to do. Superwoman to the rescue, I tell her to go and deactivate her card and jump on a train back home (she was crying on the phone she was so scared, couldn't just leave it until morning) fast forward an hour, I'm in my hometown, she picks me up and we head home to check out the situation, and... She had just received the email invoice twice. They hadn't charged her twice, just some email mishap made the email appear twice and she never thought to check her bank account before summoning me home 🙄😂 we laughed for a while and I got a home cooked meal so it's all good but Jesus christ mom. What would you honestly do without dad?1
-
Warning: Long rant ahead!
So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.
Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.
Sounds like a deal.
So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.
I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!
And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!
So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.
Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.
And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.
No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.
So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!
WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?
And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.
going to have a long day...
P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.5 -
Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.
One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.
I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.
I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.
We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.
[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.
tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.2 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.
So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.
Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.
So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.
And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.
Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.
Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.6 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
Fucking Amazon rant again...
TLDR: Amazon specializes in “the last mile”. They are repeatedly allowing a 3rd party shipper (Purolator) destroy their main value proposition. Thoughts at the end.
Me on the phone with their support...
Me: so it says my package was attempted to be delivered today. I did not get a call or notification or anything and I have been working from home all day to wait for the package.
Support: -Sigh- yes, I can see it was Purolator we have been having trouble with them lately.
Me: ok, so are you able to see what happened?
Support: let me put you on hold.
.......
Support: So they said they will not call for a delivery, did they use your building buzzer?
Me: Nope, just stood outside the building and then left I guess.
Support: -sigh- Well you can pick it up at their depot. Let me get you the address.
Me: The one by the airport?
Support: Yes it looks like it is about an hour away from where you are. And they are only open during work hours.
Me: So, after working from home to get this package you advice is to take 3 hours off work and go there to pick it up?
Support: Well, we can refund it? If thats what you want.
Me: No, I would like the package I ordered please.
Support: There is nothing I can do sir.
Me: So before I hang up let me see if I have it straight. When I order a package from Amazon, do I have an option of who ships it?
Support: No, I’m sorry but that is decided on our end.
Me: And I have had this problem before with this shipping agent. So, your telling me that when I ship things to me with Amazon that I have no control of wether I even get the package? Your telling me it is literally a coin toss as to wether or not I ever get my package?
Support: yes sir, I’m sorry but that is all I can do.
Me: So you realize that, for example, if I went to my local grocery store and it was a coin toss that I could take my groceries home (even after I paid for them) then I will always go to another store....
Support: yes, I know. There is nothing I can do.
Me: So from now on I have to order items, wait for them to be shipped, check the shipper and then cancel the order of it is them?
Support: -sigh- you cannot cancel an order after it has shipped...
Me: wow. Sure is great being a prime and audible member. I get fast delivery of 50% of my packages and no delivery at all of the other 50%. Sorry for the sarcasm...
Support: I’m sorry I can’t help more.
Me: So just to clarify. I can expect NOT to get the package I ordered?
Support: sorry
Me: have a nice day.
————
Here are my thoughts as a student of business...
Amazon specializes in “the last mile” (in their delivery service anyway) and when they deliver the package they also deliver on that value proposition.
However, now it seems that one of their shipping providers is failing at getting packages that last mile, which is resulting and destroying the idea of their value proposition in a customers eyes. (Affecting more than me as the rep said)
Now, instead of believing that Amazon will get things to me, saving me that last mile trip to the store etc., I firmly believe that it is a toss up as to wether I will ever receive my package (based on carrier)
I know that if I was in Amazon’s position (a carrier hurting my overall value proposition with consistently unacceptable service) that I would come down on them with a force they have never seen or drop them entirely.
But of course, every company reaches a point where they have such market share and sway that they take their eye off the ball when it comes to their value proposition to customers.16 -
What in the unholy fuck is going on with the world!!
I get how our personal lives and data are bloody good at being used against us and tracking our behaviours but fuck Facebook won't let "good enough" alone and are coming back out with a new way to pay for our most sensitive data. Everything on your phone!
What more could they possibly want from knowing what,where,who,why,when, and probably even how we are shitting in a back ally besides controlling the masses
- no I'm not a privacy nut, just a concerned citizen -
https://theverge.com/2019/6/...3 -
Consumers ruined software development and we the developers have little to no chance of changing it.
Recently I read a great blog post by someone called Nikita, the blog post talks mostly about the lack of efficiency and waste of resources modern software has and even tho I agree with the sentiment I don't agree with some things.
First of all the way the author compares software engineering to mechanical, civil and aeroespacial engineering is flawed, why? Because they all directly impact the average consumer more than laggy chrome.
Do you know why car engines have reached such high efficiency numbers? Gas prices keep increasing, why is building a skyscraper better, cheaper and safer than before? Consumers want cheaper and safer buildings, why are airplanes so carefully engineered? Consumers want safer and cheaper flights.
Wanna know what the average software consumer wants? Shiny "beautiful" software that is either dirt ship or free and does what it needs to. The difference between our end product is that average consumers DON'T see the end product, they just experience the light, intuitive experience we are demanded to provide! It's not for nothing that the stereotype of "wizard" still exists, for the average folk magic and electricity makes their devices function and we are to blame, we did our jobs TOO well!
Don't get me wrong, I am about to become a software engineer and efficient, elegant, quality code is the second best eye candy next to a 21yo LA model. BUT dirt cheap software doesn't mean quality software, software developed in a hurry is not quality software and that's what douchebag bosses and consumers demand! They want it cheap, they want it shiny and they wanted it yesterday!
Just look at where the actual effort is going, devs focus on delivering half baked solutions on time just to "harden" the software later and I don't blame them, complete, quality, efficient solutions take time and effort and that costs money, money companies and users don't want to invest most of the time. Who gets to worry about efficiency and ms speed gains? Big ass companies where every second counts because it directly affects their bottom line.
People don't give a shit and it sucks but they forfeit the right to complain the moment they start screaming about the buttons not glaring when hovered upon rather than the 60sec bootup, actual efforts to make quality software are made on people's own time or time critical projects.
You put up a nice example with the python tweet snippet, you have a python script that runs everyday and takes 1.6 seconds, what if I told you I'll pay you 50 cents for you to translate it to Rust and it takes you 6 hours or better what if you do it for free?
The answer to that sort of questions is given every day when "enganeers" across the lake claim to make you an Uber app for 100 bucks in 5 days, people just don't care, we do and that's why developers often end up with the fancy stuff and creating startups from the ground up, they put in the effort and they are compensated for it.
I agree things will get better, things are getting better and we are working to make programs and systems more efficient (specially in the Open Source community or high end Tech companies) but unless consumers and university teachers change their mindset not much can be done about the regular folk.
For now my mother doesn't care if her Android phone takes too much time to turn on as long as it runs Candy Crush just fine. On my part I'll keep programming the best I can, optimizing the best I can for my own projects and others because that's just how I roll, but if I'm hungry I won't hesitate to give you the performance you pay for.
Source:
http://tonsky.me/blog/...13 -
I previously worked as a Linux/unix sysadmin. There was one app team owning like 4 servers accessible in a very speciffic way.
* logon to main jumpbox
* ssh to elevated-privileges jumpbox
* logon to regional jumpbox using custom-made ssh alternative [call it fkup]
* try to fkup to the app server to confirm that fkup daemon is dead
* logon to server's mgmt node [aix frame]
* ssh to server directly to find confirm sshd is dead too
* access server's console
* place root pswd request in passwords vault, chase 2 mangers via phone for approvals [to login to the vault, find my request and aprove it]
* use root pw to login to server's console, bounce sshd and fkupd
* logout from the console
* fkup into the server to get shell.
That's not the worst part... Aix'es are stable enough to run for years w/o needing any maintenance, do all this complexity could be bearable.
However, the app team used to log a change request asking to copy a new pdf file into that server every week and drop it to app directory, chown it to app user. Why can't they do that themselves you ask? Bcuz they 'only need this pdf to get there, that's all, and we're not wasting our time to raise access requests and chase for approvals just for a pdf...'
oh, and all these steps must be repeated each time a sysadmin tties to implement the change request as all the movements and decisions must be logged and justified.
Each server access takes roughly half an hour. 4 servers -> 2hrs.
So yeah.. Surely getting your accesses sorted out once is so much more time consuming and less efficient than logging a change request for sysadmins every week and wasting 2 frickin hours of my time to just copy a simple pdf for you.. Not to mention that threr's only a small team of sysadmins maintaining tens of thousands of servers and every minute we have we spend working. Lunch time takes 10-15 minutes or so.. Almost no time for coffee or restroom. And these guys are saying sparing a few hours to get their own accesses is 'a waste of their time'...
That was the time I discovered skrillex.4 -
I finally gave in into the peer pressure and made myself a Twitter account.
WHAT A FUCKING SHIT SITE.
When registering the only thing I provided was my email and username. Nothing more.
One day later when visiting Twitter I get a big ass pop-up that briefly tells me my account is locked for 'unusual behavior', 'suspicious activity' and 'not following of Twitter's rules'.
I want to remind you that my account was barely one day old, and had no activity whatsoever.
So if getting your account locked for no single reason isn't bad enough. The only and ONLY way to unlock my account was TO PROVIDE MY FUCKING PHONE NUMBER. No other single way to unlock my account.
YOU WANT MY PERSONAL DATA SO BADLY?
On top of that I didn't receive a single email from them for this 'suspicious activity' or 'breaking of Twitter's rules'.
THIS IS SCAREWARE. Lying to people in order to get more personal data. My account was perfectly fine. And without providing your phone number you can't even delete your account.
GO FUCK YOURSELF FUCKING ASSHOLES WITH YOUR ASSHOLE DESIGN
FUCKING SHITSITE18 -
This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.
One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.
I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?
They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.2 -
Get a call from a customer asking if I can come check out her “printer”. Okay...
Get there and it’s not just a printer but an embroidery machine - never worked on them in my life and I’m not embarrassed to admit that.
I express that to her but tell her that I’ll definitely check it out and I get the reply - “you own a repair shop and have never worked on one of these, I don’t feel comfortable with you working on it.” - even though she had tried “fixing it” and completely fucked up the application and printer moreso than when it had originally stopped working.
Alright, bitch... I’m sorry that I haven’t worked on every fucking embroidery machine that’s ever been made. I apologize that I’m not familiar with your fucking machine, but if you would give me some time I assure you I can resolve your fucking problem; I imagine it’s (l)user error anyway. But no, you go ahead and send it off to the company that made it with a minimal charge of XXX$ and let them resolve your problem.
Yes, I run a computer/printer/phone repair shop, but that doesn’t automatically mean that I specialize in your FUCKING problem, but I can assure you I’d handle it.
Her - “You’re going to charge me when you didn’t even work on it?!”
Me - “I’m sorry, but I drove out here expecting to work, you declined the work; but there’s still a charge for having me come out here. Yes, you will be getting a bill. If you’d like me to work on it and help you resolve the problem, I’d be more than happy to.”
Her - *rolls eyes*
FUCK YOU!!!!
Ndjehwizoofjdnahsicofjrbwbajncncjsjwnbsb1 -
Ordering a Pizza in 2022.
CALLER: Is this PizzaHut?
GOOGLE:No sir, it's Google Pizza
CALLER: Sorry, I have dialled wrong number.
GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Pizza Hut last month.
CALLER:Ok, I would like to order a pizza.
Google:Do you want your usual, sir?
CALLER: My usual? You know me?
GOOGLE: your last 12 orders shows, extra-large pizza with cheeses, sausage on a thick crust
CALLER: Awesome! That's what I'll have.
GOOGLE: sir, we suggest you try our Gluten free veg pizza?
CALLER: What? I don't want a veg pizza.
GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir
CALLER: How the hell do you know that?
GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone no. with your medical records
CALLER: Ok, but I don't want your rotten veg pizza! I have taken medication for my cholesterol.
GOOGLE: But your medication wasn't regular. you just bought 30 cholesterol tablets once,4 months ago from Loyd pharmacy.
CALLER: I bought more from another pharmacy.
GOOGLE: That doesn't show on your credit card statement.
CALLER: I paid in cash.
GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.
CALLER: WTH man! I'm going on island to live without internet & social media.
GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport. It expired 6 weeks ago.2 -
TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.
My Devices really love me.
I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.
Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.
So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.
So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).
Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).
So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.
The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.
Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉2 -
This will be long and it's more of an IT rant, but I think it still fits.
So a user comes to me and says "hey on my phone I can't see anything in my junk email folder but there are a bunch of emails in there on my PC." I take a look at the Outlook app on his phone. The "Junk" folder that he has open is actually in his deleted items folder. So clearly it's not the real junk folder. There are no other folders named "Junk", but there is one named "Spam". I open that and there are a bunch of emails in there.
ME: "Does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "Oooohhh so you think it's called "Spam" instead of "Junk" on my phone?"
ME: "I'm not sure, does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "See, I always thought junk and spam were two different things."
ME: (grinding my teeth and taking a deep breath) "Does. This. Look. Like. What. You. Were. Expecting. To. See?"
USER: "Yeah, looks like it."
OK THEN FRICKING TAKE YOUR PHONE AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.
I didn't really say that last bit, but I sure was tempted to.7 -
May 2020, for me, was still a massively shit month. All of my tech has eaten some amount of shit:
- Spare PC: Board and last spare PSU up in literal smoke all at once.
- PS3: Suddenly rejects *just* the OEM HDD. Also refuses all CFW for seemingly no reason despite being hacked.
- Xbox One: External HDD is having more and more corrupt reads and is taking longer and longer to serve data.
- Wii: Nearly ate shit as the OS disappeared mid-game for fucking no reason but thanks to my 5-year-ago forethought, saved. (God bless pre-boot homebrew menus)
- Phone: grabbed it to read an overheat warning with cold-ass hands, screen exploded.
- Desktop: Literally just now, PSU and possibly GPU fucking died mid-game.
Anything else? You still got like 4 days, you still got time to fucking kill me, May, you fucking bitch10 -
Can we rant about coworking spaces?
I like the coworking office concept and I love this desk I have for myself, I like this building, the supervisor is sweet and I made new clients here...
But I hate one of my "neighbours".
We have several office rules and he constantly breaks them.
No music allowed without headphones. Nope, gotta listen to shitty radio straight from the smartphone speaker.
No loud conferences or phone talks. Nah, let's set the volume to the max. And leave the phone behind and let it ring loudly forever.
You can only occupy one desk unless you rent more. In comes his coworker who keeps occupying an extra desk for free and who's as loud as he is. And bring the kids because hey, growing up bored inside a office is good for them.
And today's newest: no eating in the office. Coworker brought her kid who set up a -dinning table- on the extra desk and began eating her lunch leftovers. It wouldn't have been so bad and I wouldn't have noticed except the office was overflowed with the stench of overheated pasta.
This is a big office. I had to open the windows. I can still feel the smell. It's nauseating.
I didn't say anything because it's not the kid's fault they didn't take her to the building's canteen space. But at the risk of making enemies where I shouldn't, I need to have a "fun" talk with someone.8 -
Not sure if it was 2016 or late 2015, but it's a fun story anyway (and if it's not you'll at least learn something from it).
Back at the time I was quite new to unit testing (weird how it has become second nature in a years time). I was writing some software that was supposed to send out some SMS to customers. Of course this had to be tested. However, it was a bit difficult to test (or so I thought) without actually receiving an SMS to know if it was sent. So I decided to use the live API key to make sure the sending of SMS was actually working correctly. I tried it a few times but didn't receive an SMS. So I kept working on it and running tests.
The testing setup I had at the time was just a continues loop that went through all tests to make sure it all still worked (I've moved to only checking on file changes now, but that is besides the point). Keep in mind I was still running these tests, in a loop, with the _live_ API key.
So the end of the working day arrives and I go home and sit in the train. All of the sudden I receive some test SMS. I was thinking "hey nice, it did work". Then I started receiving more. It soon turned out to be an alarmingly big amount of SMS. It stopped around 100, but don't think that was the end of it. Oh no. I had changed the number to send the SMS to from my own number to a different number (+31612345678 to be exact, which I found out later isn't an actual phone number. I really hope I was right about that). I was beginning to become nervous, but there wasn't much I could do.
The next day I returned to work and checked the API for sent SMS. Turns out I had sent a couple of thousand (I think between two and three thousand) SMS in a couple of hours. Most of them to the test number I had supplied.
This probably cost the company a couple of hundred euros. Luckily my colleagues and team leader all thought it was pretty funny, but did tell me not to do it again. And I haven't of course.
Lesson learned: don't use live API keys during testing (among other things :)).
So yeah that was probably my worst dev experience.1 -
Google
I used to be a fan, but recently they really stopped listening to users. No one asked for a wide angle selfie cam. If you give us that huge notch at least provide a FaceID equivalent or something that makes up for the notch.
Remove the headphone jack, cool. But then make the adapter and Bluetooth reliable. Even after a year the adapter isn’t working and the Bluetooth doesn’t connect on the first attempt. Never. The fix is constantly “coming”.
Google copies Apple without thinking. Apple gets away with shit because they provide something in return.
I was an Android user for almost 10 years, and I’ll say this: I bought the iPhone XS (I’m a purist, non-stock OS is a massive no-no) and it’s a much more usable device than the Pixels or other Android devices I used. It’s lacking in a lot of ways, but overall it’s a much better phone.
Google really needs to hire people who understand what people actually want. An amazing camera on its own isn’t enough these days.11 -
TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.
I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.
When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.
With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].
That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.
I loved it!
However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...
Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).
I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!
little did the naive me knew :)
I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...
Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).
I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)
and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).
A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.6 -
My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.
I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.
About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.
My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.
Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.8 -
We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.
Well check this shit.
At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.
My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)
One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.
The conversation was like this:
Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps
Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!
Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.
Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?
Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours
Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?
Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)
Retard: Well You need to fix this
Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us
Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it
At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.
Me: Did you pay for this app?
Retard: No
Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?
Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps
At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life
Retard: Well....I did not know
Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?
** throws phone for him to catch
Me: Have a good one bud.
And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.7 -
I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.
"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.4 -
So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.
I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.
The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.
But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.
The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.
“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”
The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”
SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.
Talk to your recruiters, not me.
The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞
It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.
The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.
Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞
My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”
It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.
If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.4 -
Four years ago while still a newbey in Android Dev and still using the eclipse IDE which was hell to configure by adding Android plugins,my girlfriend had a birthday.
With my new found love of coding thought of developing a b-day app for her.With so little android knowledge I had a great idea the main activity would have her photo as the background and button which when clicked would show a toast saying happy b-day love.
After spending few minutes in Tutorial point and learning how to display a toast and setting click listeners on buttons I was good to go and compiled the app.
Later that evening I head to her room where her b-day was to be held with some of her lady friends .When presenting gifts I presented her gift said had one more surprise for her and asked for her phone and using bluetooth sent the apk to her phone.
Installing the app I was scared to death on seeing how my grey buttons were displaying on her 2.7 screen size since had no idea on designing for multiple screens.
Giving her back the phone she loved the app and felt like her superman in the room though not for long.Her lady friends had gone ahead took her phone and were critising the app:
Why can't I take a selfie
Why can't the app play a b-day song for her and this went on them not knowing how hurting that was.
Bumped on the lady who lead the onslaught on me and had to go down memory lane.Life is a journey.2 -
Step 1: Acquire Rasbpery Pi
Step 2: Install Rasbian Lite
Step 3: Install PiHole
Step 4: Setup VPN
Step 5: Get a domain name for the VPN server
Step 6: Install OpenVPN on Phone
Step 7: Connect to Rasbperry PiHole Server
NO MORE ADS MOTHERFUCKERS9 -
So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.
Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.
This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.
She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".
You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.
A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.
The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.
That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.
She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.
After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.
Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...
At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.
After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.
Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.
FUCK!4 -
Woo crunch time! The 3 panic attacks a day, no sleep, massive guilt complex, caffiene addiction, lack of seeing my wife, phone breaking(calling doesn't work), lawn needing mowing, upper management bothering all of my team, more guilt, more panic, inferiority complex, theory that coworkers think I am slacking, and technology just not working because the machine spirit decided I pissed it off is starting to get to me a little.3
-
One of the worst guys I've worked with was a guy from Romania that got at consulting gig where I used to work. He didn't have an apartment at first, so one of the senior guys let him live at his house to get going. He repaid that favor by drinking all the wine in the house, leaving glasses everywhere. He also sang opera on the front porch early in the morning disturbing all the neighbours.
At work he spent more time outside smoking his strong foreign sigarettes than inside coding. One day he just disappeared, and no one could get a hold of him on the phone or email. Days turned to weeks, and our manager ended up sending him an email saying "I don't know where you went, but don't bother coming back".
The best part of this story is that when we were hiring the next time, he actually applied. You know what he wrote? "I'M BETTER NOW".. 😂😂
(The sad thing is that the code he wrote wasn't half bad, but the guy? Jesus. We just called him Vlad. Don't know his real name to this date)1 -
So this just happened. Some background before I begin: We're understaffed, my desk is in the back of the building, and there's no one really at the front to greet people. No security either...
Guy walks in wearing a flannel jacket (no shirt under it), pajama pants, and sandals. He looks like hell. Explains he was just released from a hospital and his apartment is locked. I let him use my phone to call his sister.
When I talk to his sister, she barely wants to speak with him. Tells me his apartment is locked for a reason and he's not allowed back. I'm just like: "So... what would you have us do for him?" At this point if his sister won't help, I was going to ask him to leave. Oh, and that hospital was a drug rehab.
So it ends with him waiting for a ride, but he ends up napping on the couch in the front of our office. CEO/Owner and his business partner walk right past and say nothing. They go into a meeting. I'm trying to figure out if I ask him to leave, wait outside for his ride... I'm a developer, this isn't my job.
A good 45-60 minutes later, after the guy walked outside and then came back in and laid back down on the couch, he leaves with his ride. Shortly after the owner walks out of his meeting, so I ask him what to do in this situation - more hoping he'd realize the need for more security.
If this story isn't crazy enough, the business partner pipes up - absolutely serious - and says he didn't say anything because he thought the guy was a developer.
So I've learned that we've got extremely low hygiene standards for developers here, with a relaxed dress code and are allowed nap times on the front couch.
Thankfully our CYBER security is better than our PHYSICAL security. :|1 -
!dev but rant
Samsung
Samsung...
Samsung!! What the fuck is wrong with you?
Some longer time ago you earned forst red red flag called knox. What the fuck you mean there is physical diode in phone that will burn out when I do whatever I want with phone? Its my phone. My. I live in europe and european law is with me. Its **MY** stuff and Im allowed to be super user so fuvk off with knox bullshit.
Okay, now, more and more phone are missing critical feature to save few cents a phone. You were last bastion. You were **that** company who was loyal to audio jacks. And why the fuck you plan to remove it? You know what? That one thing brought your phones from one of best (becouse retained audio jacks and didnt do much of notch fuckupery) to literally worst one thanks to knox.
And before anyone tells me bullshit apple tried to say "thats space saving", no its not true to point where one of their very own Iphones had internally space and traces for audio jacks. Its to save pennies on phone for profit margins and to force us to use bluetooth stuff, that I dislike. I stick to my K518 few years now and I am super happy user of it. Why y'all want to take away good stuff?
Oneplus, your turn. Why the luving fuck your big bulletpoint of marketing was "yes, we will keep loyal to audio jacks" and later down the line you shown one big fat middle finger to all users.
Goos job, guys, well fucked up.
So any good modern alternatives for my OnePlus 5 when it becomes obstole in few years? Nope. Fuck nope.
OP7 pro is awesome but no audio jacks absolutely kills off this phone in my eyes to level of not existance and inability to be considered.17 -
Cousin sis who was brought up abroad is back in the country, looking for further education opportunities.
Says she wants to study graphic design but from the short interaction i had, it seems she has no fucking idea about the basics of what goes into graphic design. Neither does her parents.
Haven't seen or heard any work or hobby from her that would make one think she has interest in graphic design.
Asked whether she tried doing some design and it seems she is not even aware of tools like Photoshop or illustrator.
It doesn't help that she barely talks at all and wants to get back to her phone. Compared to her, i feel like an extrovert lol.
People who barely interacts or expresses are cringey to talk to.
Trying to talk to her, I feel like looking at myself from 10 years ago.
The point is - learn to talk more. It can help you a lot in life.8 -
Arguing with my girlfriend (recalled from my mind, not 100% accurate)
she: What do you expect when you buy an android?
Me: sure thing apple is more "unpack it, use it", easy to use - but android is more like an empty canvas. The first thing when I buy it is setting it up to my needs.
she: You don't understand, what do you expect from your android device?
me: It has to be affordable and work for a certain time
she: No I mean, do you.. when you unpack your phone, expect it TO WORK?
me: Sure, it's not like I buy a pile of trash, I expect it to work
she: you're too stupid, baka
me: ... ? *confused*
she: When you say it is like a canvas, isn't a canvas someday full?
me: yes, every phone, iPhone, Pixel, Samsung, every phone has a limited memory
she: *mad* you don't get it, silly
me: I want to but heh, I don't get it10 -
I’ve had enough of shitty ISPs. Time to shame them 😈
Here in the UK, we have a company called TalkTalk who treat their customers as whores by not giving a shit and taking all their money.
I have had an ongoing issue for about 9 months now where our internet is more unstable, but also slower. We pay for 72Mbps at which we used to get, but now our internet tops out at 30Mbps if we are lucky. It can be 20Mbps one minute and 7Mbps the next, and I’ve had it drop below 1Mbps for no goddam reason.
I’ve spoken (well, argued) argued to their so called customer service department over phone and live chat explaining the situation and all they’ve done is said “restart your router”, or “we’ll send out a new router, it’s probably a WiFi issue”, or some bullshit like “I’ve ‘changed’ something on my end”. On one conversation with a so called technician, I had to explain how networking actually worded, and and even called a 7Mbps acceptable when we were paying for 10x that!!!!!
The thing that makes it worse is they actually have systems that detect any issues with customers internet lines, but they only alert the customer to the issue through an online portal, telling the customer to call up and get it dealt with rather than passing the info to a tech department and having issues fixed without the customer knowing unless it’s absolutely necessary.
So 9 months in and I still have a fluctuating, unstable internet connection which is slow and overpriced with no tunnel in sight. GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMN MONEY YOU FUCKING THIEVING BASTARDS.3 -
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.
Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?
Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.
So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.
The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.
Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?
Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.
At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.
And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.
So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!
Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!8 -
Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".
We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.
It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]
It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.
It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.
And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.
What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.
Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.
1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.5 -
Someone else disturbing me while I'm thinking about technicalities. Makes me lose my shit because recollecting everything afterwards is often more difficult than the problem itself.
Note to self: tell cleaning lady to keep disturbances to a minimum when I'm working, and turn notifications on the Fandroids off before starting work. No I'm not interested in that Telegram message right now. And God bless OnePlus for putting in a physical slider for that.. more phone manufacturers should start doing this.4 -
!devButAlsoKindaIsDev
Alright, time to do some explanation.
TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.
Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.
Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)
So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)
bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!
Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?
bruh: JavaScript.
Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!
I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.
So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.
Deadline? A week and a half.
After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.
Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.
CONCLUSION:
JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.7 -
Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔
He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..
I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..
And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..
On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..
I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..
I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..
But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..
Boy was I wrong..
He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..
So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..4 -
!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.
Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.
My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.
Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.
But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.
There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.
I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?5 -
Most succesful project was around this time last year.
A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.
The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.
Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).
The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.
It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.
It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.
So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.
So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.
My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".
The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.2 -
What kinda blockhead moron at my ISP decided that I require a new modem & router that is managed by THEM! I'm not really baffled by the privacy concerns but more about that I am unable to manage my home network. I literally cant open ports, manage ip adresses and do other shit I NEED FOR WORKING AT HOME.
I cant print!
I cant read mail!
I cant access my network drives!
My website is down!
Colleagues are asking why the Minecraft server is offline!
And using the new brick they gave me as a modem only, is not possible as there is no setting to be found to turn the router off!
And if I call their imbecile's of support they tell my that if they change a setting, that my phone will disconnect. (The phone line is also connected to the modem!) And right after the support guy said that and wanted to start explaing me further steps, his settings apply and I get kicked off the line. Bruh! You knew this would happen so why didnt you work around it?!?!?!!
Thing is, this new modem isnt even necessary as it doesnt use a different standard like fiber for example.
If I cant figure out how to get my stuff to work again, I swear to god I will turn on full Karen mode and ramble into their next store looking to get some manager fired!
(Ill post an update soon!)7 -
TL;DR: Google asked me to PROVIDE a phone number to verify connection from a new device, on the said device.
Yesterdayto log into my work Google account from my personal laptop to check emails, calendars update and so on. I opened up a private navigation window, went to Google sign-in page, entered my credentials, all is well.
Google then decided to "verify it's me" and prompted me to PROVIDE a phone number (work account without work phone means no phone number set up) so that they can send a verification code to the number I just provided to make sure the connection is legit.
Didn't want to do that, clicked "use another method" and got asked to fill the last password I remember, which would be my current password thanks to my trusty password manager. After submitting, I'm prompted with an error saying I have to contact my admin to reset my password because they can't log me in with my CURRENT password.
I ain't gonna do that, so went back to login page, provided my phone number, got the code, filled in the code, next thing I know I'm browsing through my emails.
What the duck? Could have been anybody giving any phone number. So much for extra security.
Also don't care that they have my phone number, the issue is more about the way used to obtain it: locking me out of my account and having no other way of logging in.6 -
Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.
1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)
2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)
3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)
4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)
5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)
6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)
7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)
8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)
9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha
10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)
...
N)
more
----
Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".
All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.
All of these 10 examples are different people.
---
How hard
Can it be
To just
Write
no
---
.
---
For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:
i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.
---
In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears
---
The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....
----
why do you waste my time
if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it
why cant you just say no
why do you drag me
why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it
what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?
to someone who has been a good person to you?
do you feel superior?
is your ego bigger?
----
This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.
All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.
But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.
But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....
-----
This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.12 -
You can get mad about Apple releasing stuff that Android has been doing for 10 years. But also get mad about you not being able to pick up and Android phone that is not a buggy mess. I will pick Apples pretentious products over wanting to throw my phone on the floor at least 5 times a day because swiping doesn't work the first 10 times or because I have to select an input field 6 thousand times for it to highlight or because every action has a delay for no apparent reason.
Yes Apple sucks but truth is Android sucks hell of a lot more. Sorry not sorry.33 -
So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?
The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.
The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.
The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!
Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.1 -
3 months ago our company moved 10km away from where I live. So instead of 10 minutes to work, I now have 50 minutes. Great!
The moving was so rushed, they forgot to order a fucking internet connection.. So they panicked and bought 4x 4g modems and a 50 Mbit connection. This connection was then shared by the whole office of 50 people. The connection could barely handle our needs, and for 3 months all streaming or unnecessary use of the internet have been prohibited..
But today! It finally happened!
We got our fiber connection!
No more streaming from my phone!
Bye bye productivity!
Spotify and YouTube here I come!1 -
So i just saw a post about not pushing to production on Friday's and that reminded me of something.
A team we are working with (we needed help on something so we got another company to send us a team and do it for us) recently push to production on a Friday at around 5pm.
We didn't know that they had done it until a shit ton of errors started happening and we had no idea why (it was working so far, none of us did anything, so what the fuck is going on).
To make things better, one of my colleagues tried calling them and they wouldn't answer the phone. They knew what they did, so they went home before we could notice it and we had to correct their mistake.
We had everyone calling us saying they had gotten an error, and they needed to get home but couldn't because of it (it messed up a process that only happens at the end of the day before people go home. I can explain more in the comments if anyone is confused, or just wants to know).
Eventually everything was solved, but that was a very stressful ending of the week.
So yeah, don't deploy on Friday's please and thank you7 -
Regus sent me to collections.
Jist: if you ever think about renting an office from Regus, for the love of your bank account and your credit, just don't. Go into the kitchen and pan-fry your face instead. it'll be better.
Moral: get it in writing. What is "it"? Fucking everything.
------
I needed someplace quiet away from my children to work, so I rented an office from Regus. They said they had a minimum 6-month contract, which is fine, but at the time I was pretty sure I would be moving within three to five. They said they understood and offered the quivalent of a month-to-month plan: I could cancel my contract whenever I wanted, given a few weeks' notice, and that would be that. It wasn't in writing, but both the accounts person and the regional manager were there offering it to me, and they seemed cool. Awesome! I agreed, signed the contract, and paid a hefty damage deposit.
Long story short, I ended up hating the office, and chose to bear the distractions at home instead. Seeing how much I disliked it, the accounts person I talked to originally called me and offered to cancel my contract. I agreed, and she walked me through the steps to cancel it and request my deposit back. Done. I aske her if that was it; no more payments, no more contract. "No more," she said. "You're done." I liked the sound of that. Done and done.
The next day, I check my bank account; no deposit.
Two weeks later, still no deposit.
A month later, still no deposit.
They did say it could take up to three fucking months or something, so whatever. I waited.
Another month later, and instead of my refunded deposit, I get an overdue invoice notice? Seriously?
Apparently they never cancelled my contract, don't remember offering me the month-to-month agreement, nor does the very chick I talked to remember telling me over the phone that everything was paid up and done. Apparently my contract wasn't even for six months like they originally promised, but indefinite? despite all of this? and despite the two of us fucking cancelling it? together?
But no, the legal agreement is binding and explicitly states that they are fucking assholes and due their pound of cash.
So fuck that and fuck them.
And in response, they sent me to collections.
Huge fucking surprise.
and now collections is calling me saying I owe $1900, which works out to a lot more than the couple months it's been since I cancelled that crap, AND.
AND IT'S LESS THAN THE FUCKING DEPOSIT REGUS NEVER RETURNED!
SO NOT ONLY DID THEY NEVER CANCEL MY CONTRACT, THEY CHANGED ITS TERMS (or lied up-front) AND DECIDED TO POCKET THE DEPOSIT INSTEAD OF APPLY IT TO MY FUCKING IMAGINARY BALANCE!
FUCK YOU SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS!10 -
Rant/story
Ok, I've always respected my PM and took everything on me, but since a while I start getting bored at work and realised many wrong things with the company and management in general.
So, brief contextual situation for you guys, I used to be very shy, unconfident and submissive. That was 2 years ago. Now am much more confident and got my own techniques in managing my constant "in the moon"-mind and relational discussions with colleagues. No more stuttering and am now answering on the spot and focussed on the discussion.
So I was having a nice day extinguishing fires on our website, this evening my PM stressly-rushed into my office (which I share with 2 other colleagues), and pressured me into giving a phone call to some developer for a situation clarification: a Json endpoints seems to truncate text after some characters.
Just came back from the loo (not sorry for the details), had my thoughts about something else, as usual, and I was just like "chill, let me get my mind together and prepare myself to be on point for this phone call". Told her I need a few seconds and she was like "now now now" knowing me I'm a bit laid-back.
Grabbed the phone, saw she was laughing (always laughs whatever I do, I must be very funny) and went talking about me to my colleague (not backstabbing but like "I don't get why he needs to get prepped for a phone call"). I managed the phone call like a boss - like usual since I got more confident -, my pm left, I finished the call, went to her to tell her my conclusions on our issue, asked me if I checked the contract with our CMS company.
Told her nope, the Json is compatible with our DB-manager's API.
She coldly answered "right, will do it myself then", I was like ok, I know you won't do it, I'll get it done.
In 15 minutes I found the contract, notified her, analyzed it, and wrote a technical email to support.
Seriously, stop taking me for some retarded person and let me breathe
Huh.2 -
No I will not use Facebook to schedule an appointment.
If you're unwilling to answer the phone and do it yourself, I'm more than willing to take my business elsewhere.3 -
Welp, got the weekend off and since computer doesn't work anymore, me has no entertainment.
Me is sad. 😞
Me is in a financial clasp.
If the phone gives in too (which, let's be honest, it's nearing it's natural death time) I'm majorly fucked. Let's hope it doesn't give in for a few more months at least. (until I finish thesis, at the very least)
... I think I'm gonna spend this weekend just being sad. 😞 And PMS, ofc. 😐 🔻26 -
Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.
I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.2 -
Be a fellow who's distracted af. You just had a presentation in another city. You're driving home and a light lits up saying you need gas. You stop at the petrol station, pour in some gas, grab a cop of joe while you're at it, pay and leave. You're 15minutes away from the gas stop already and an unknown number is calling you. You pick it up. A male voice says
Voice: "hello, this is police. Did you just leave a gas stop 15 minutes ago?"
You: *wtf, what the fuck did I do now!* "yes, I sure did."
Voice: "you forgot to pay for the fuel"
you: *oh shit, he's right! I remember now - I only paid for the coffee! Shit! I'm in trouble now. *
"oh.. Right, you're right, I forgot... I'll turn around and come back to pay
Voice: "wait, don't rush, I may be able to help you. I'll call you back, keep your phone close" *hangs up*
5 minutes later phone rings again.
Voice: "can you pull over, please? Here's a phone number of that gas stop. Give them a call, I'm sure you'll sort it our. Have a nice day!" *hangs up*
you call that number. A woman picks up.
You: "hello, I forgot to pay you for the gas, gimme a few minutes - I'll turn around and get back to you"
Operator: "do not worry, I think I can help you! You can pay for it at your home town if you like, but I'm afraid they might not be working today. But they will tomorrow! Would that be OK for you?"
you: "umm, yeah, of course! It's my fault - anything is OK for me!"
operator: "ooorrr.. I could pay for you now and you would pay me back. Would that work? Here's my bank account, I'll pay for you when you send me those 50 something €"
a fantasy story? Made up story? Bed time stories? Dysney movie plot? Phishing? Canada?
No. This is Lithuania :) believe it or not, this is a true story, and there are more like this one.
Respect to the police!12 -
-" hey Linux, webdeveloper from ****** is on the phone and he is having some trouble"
; "aight send him over"
;" Linux speaking"
+" Hi its ***** from *****, my site wont work"
I ask him about more details and the the name of the sites, I quickly realize something...
;" Uhm, it seems like that you have not uploaded any files yes?
+" no I have not, I just wanted to test if the site on your hosting that I just bought Works as I was promised by the salesman"
;" FML"3 -
PayPal = GayPal
PHASE 1
1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card
PAHSE 2
7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done
8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money
9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill
10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it
PHASE 3
11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY
12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal
13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:
"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.
As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."
PHASE 4
14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:
"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk
You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out
Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.
Do you understand?"
15. They reply:
"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."
16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?
HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?12 -
Yesterday I had a phone screening with a hiring manager and was expected to talk about more of my expertise and just my experience overall. With four years of experience, I thought I could tell her everything she needed to know.
However, this interview was just kind of... weird. Literally every question she asked was defintiions. It was as if I was doing a short answer quiz.
"What is object-oriented programming?"
"What is a hashmap versus a list?"
"What is class inheritance?"
Like... What the fuck. These are questions that give no insight into who I am or how I work. This is shit you see on a second-year midterm exam. What a waste of time.9 -
After more than a year I decided to download whisper (app) again and see what was being said near me.
Holly shit the app is a total disappointment, first it crashes my fucking phone the instant I open it, I try to open it again and my God I'm presented with adds everywhere and a load speed so slow a dying tortoise would run circles around it.
The app finished loading the content and it's a clusterfuck of insipid commentary and images, "I bought beautiful new panties", "my lesbian friend doesn't think I'm cute", "any girl want to talk to me?".
After looking at the decaying state of the app I noticed I had notifications, apparently my account is active somehow, I tried to delete it but as it turns out the app has no way of doing that, YOU NEED TO CONTACT THE FUCKERS!
What the fuck?! Who the hell made this steaming pile of shit and said it was an app?!
Nothing more to add, I deleted right away.1 -
Joy is when you learn that long press on microphone button on your earphone changes the track..
No more need to Everytime unlock the phone to change the track..1 -
Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".
I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.
HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.
Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.
---
With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.
I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.
What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.
Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.
Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.
Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...
"It's for your security."
"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."
"But we can't, for security."
"It's not security. Get me your boss."
...
"It's for security."8 -
This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.
1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.
2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.
//Fun part coming
3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People
Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people
Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.
Easy peasy, right?
Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3
Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.
Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.
4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.
When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.
But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.
If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.
5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).
There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.
SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.
6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.
So TL;DR
Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)
And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?
If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!2 -
TL;DR: I don't like working with 'most' Indian people. And some stories supporting that written below:
=====================================
A client calls me directly to get features/fixes done on their site. No middle management shit at the company I was working at, at the time.
So I quit the company, but the client has my phone number. So he starts texting me to get more work done. I tell him "I work for money, if you can pay me that, I'll do all the work you ask of me".
They praise my blunt-ness and say they will discuss it. And I never heard from them ever again!
=====================================
Client reaches out to me and gets me to work for them for 2 hours/day and pays me INR 8,000 (about 95 USD) a month. I say fine, I'll do the work.
I do the tasks as they say for 3 months then I ask for a raise to INR 10,000.
They start pointing out mistakes in my work, and they say they're not seeing the "dedication" in me. Only when I asked for the raise. Not before that, mind you.
=====================================
Vice President of the company tells me that he saw me in his dream the night before.
I've told this one before so I just threw that in.
=====================================
At the end, I do like some Indians that I work with. It's just that most of them try to massively underpay you, or want to get the most work out of you as fast as possible and sometimes both.7 -
Don't feed the pigeons.
A cautionary tale.
When you feed the pigeons they keep coming back. They don't stop pestering you for help, and they don't ever listen to you.
I gave my father-in-law my old laptop, and installed the latest version of Office 2016 because I'm a nice guy.
Now, every week at family dinner there's something he needs me to help him with.
Mind you, his previous computer had Windows XP and the one I gave him had Windows 7. So it was quite the texh upgrade for him.
Except one of his octagenarian siblings wrote a family recipe book, and wrote it in Word Processor. (because Old People!) Well fuck of course it has pictures, clip art, special formatting, vertical and horizontal lines. It worked fine on XP because Word Processor was supported by XP.
The following is me explaining to him over the phone why his recipe book wouldn't load into Word. I was in his house picking up 2000 rounds of ammo for my and my wife's pistols (target practice) while he was out and about.
FIL: "It's the link on the desktop. It comes up in Word on the old computer but when I tried to put it on the new computer it wouldn't work. I used a thumb drive."
Me: "Okay well I tried to..."
FIL: "I don't know why it would work in Word on one computer and not the next."
Me: "Okay, well I clicked on the link to the file on your old desktop and it opened in Word Processor, not Word."
FIL: "No it opens in Word on the old computer, but it won't open on the new one."
Me: "It opens in Word Processor on the old computer, it won't open in Word on..."
FIL: "Which computer are you sitting at? The old one is on the left." (as if I wouldn't recognize the computer I had for three years and just gave him a month ago!)
Me: "The old one."
FIL: "Okay so it should open in Word on the old computer."
Me: "It won't. It will open in..."
FIL: "I was thinking maybe it had something to do with a screen that popped up when I logged in to the new computer. Something about antivirus software?"
Me: "It will open in Word Processor on your old computer, but it isn't formatted..."
FIL: "Yeah, it's a '.-w-p-s' file so it should work in Word."
Me: "Word Processor is a different program from Word. This opens in Word Processor."
(long silence)
FIL: "So which one do I have?"
Me: "You have Word Processor on the old computer."
FIL: "So how do I get Word Processor on the new computer?"
Me: "You don't. It is defunct software, it was discontinued ten years ago. You can try to get a converter online, but there's no guarantee it'll work."
FIL: "Alright, I'll be home in a few minutes. I'll take a look then."
This was at 10pm last night, and I'd been out all day since 7:30am. He still didn't believe me that the book was written in Word Processor until I showed him the different startup screen for Word Processor, where it says "Word Processor" plain as day.
I fed the pigeon. And it looks like there's more of this to come.3 -
Long long time ago when recharge coupons we a thing, I used to try out more codes in the series and waste my time. After failing a lot over this, I started trying out different USSD codes to see what other stuff is out there. This got me to stumble upon facebook and twitter on USSD. I'm not sure now but, twitter was probably *515# from my carrier.
Facebook. I remember chatting for quite a long period using this. Very slow and limited yet, fun. The USSD message expires within ~60secs. so you have to type the chat message before that or you lose everything you typed. The phone was no smartphone that would allow me to copy the text from the USSD input. On top of that panic, was a character limit to these messages. I remember hitting send while being midway through a message just so I don't lose what I typed, on a T-9 keyboard. Still miss those!
The person on the other side would receive a half message due to this, and would start replying without any patience, to which I panicked as now there's a new thing to respond to, and a half message which I'm waiting to complete.
Later over the weekend when I was allowed to visit the cyber cafe for an hour or two with 15-30 INR, reading the chat threads, being able to use the five sticker packs:) and thus continuing on a computer was fun. But, as the time at the cafe expires, I had to immediately shut off my session or I'd be charged more. Thus, I was left in the middle of a conversation again, and had to continue over USSD.
Using social media without any internet like this was quite fun in a weird way. If I get a new message, I'd get a USSD alert, and then an sms if I didn't reply in some 10-15mins!
This had all the features like like and comment. Friend requests too. For the posts in a "timeline" which was new and fancy in those days, all you see is the caption of a post which also gets truncated quite a bit as USSD also has to show it's options like:
1. Like
2. Comment
3. Next Post
4. Main Menu
This was around '13 or '14 I guess. After which I later got my first computer- a laptop. Anyways, the tactile feel of pressing the buttons on a T-9 keypad is nostalgic to me. 😅 And if you were a pro at texting, u must hv used shrtcts lyk dis too w/ emojis lyk :-) <3 -
Storytime!
(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)
TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.
My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.
I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )
At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.
However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.
The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.
At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...
What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).
I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:
1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.
2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.
They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)
I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.
The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.
But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.
In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.
Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.
Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.4 -
God I hate my job I hate my job I hate my job.
I know that you are supposed to make more than what you have been hired in the first place today, especially in tiny company, but I expected to code a little bit...
This week, all I have to do is to deep-etch pictures in photoshop, send packages, answer the phone, do the SEO and be the community manager on Facebook. No time to code at all.
I just have to stay till august, then I will finally be able to switch company. Please make it fast...6 -
Bittrex is "amazing"...
I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!
0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!
1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...
2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>
3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!
4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.2 -
So a problem end client of mine made my life hell for 3 months.
She hired a design agency to design her a bespoke site, she signs off on it and then once I've made it she decides that it's just a draft.
She then spend the next 3 months emailing me multiple times a day, calling the office and calling my personal phone. I'm still not sure how she got my number.
after 3 months on a two week project, many conference calls and changing every single template so that the site is unrecognisable it is finally live.
This woman literally went around her whole office, building and street asking them what they thought should be changed.
Not only that but half way through she suddenly told me she wanted it live in 2 days with a list of changes as long as my arm. I managed it and she wanted more changes anyway so it didnt go live...
The moral of the story is, never go the extra mile for a client more than twice, make sure you charge them for your extra time, try not think about how someone so retarded is the head of marketing at a huge company and that a true rant has no structure.
PS she also complained to me often that the changes had not been made less than 24 hours after requesting them, showed a half built site to her board of directors and then moaned at me that it didn't look right.6 -
When I used to code I'd use the Pomodoro Technique.
It helps me get tasks done more quickly and efficiently when I know I only have to focus for 45 minutes and then I get a 15 minute break.
It also helps if you're stuck on something, because when you come back to it you have fresh eyes.
Also, music without any lyrics helps me focus better than music where someone is singing. Be it Mozart or dubstep, as long as there are no words I can work with it. 😂 (I highly recommend Instrumental Core)
Finally, my phone would be in a completely different room or in my desk drawer in DND mode. I set it up so that it only rings for certain people (parents, brother and boyfriend), so no-one can bug me while I work. It's fantastic. -
Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.
Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.
Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.
A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.
The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.
Consider this example.
Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..
As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.
But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.
One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.
But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.
So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.
As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.
If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.
Thanks for reading.8 -
Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...
Exhibit A:
- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}
- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}
Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.
After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".
So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.
3 hours goes by...
He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"
Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....
His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:
example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"
smh....8 -
Wow man. Can the day get any worse
Mother fucker creator of Android. Now I'm A long time android user, but
Android+Snapdragon 6XX chip+Moto= worst combo ever. Damn you creators, may You be deepfucked by a mad bison in heat. Cocksuckers.
The heat my Moto X play generates, I could make an omelette on top of it. And the newest feature, where you try to type, but you can't see anything happening, when 30 secs later, you suddenly start seeing the after images of all the buttons you pressed, all the text you typed. Why maybe I typed at the speed of light and android couldn't keep up. No.
NO! You dumb fuckin POS. NO. I threw my phone 20ft, broke the tempered glass. The case protected this shit. Once I can save enough, I'll either sell a kidney and get an iPhone or even better a OP5.
Nothing disgusts me more than slow hardware.12 -
I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.
Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)
As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )
I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.
About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.
So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.
I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.
So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).
Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.
I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.
For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!
Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.
So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.2 -
Fucking hell, I can't even cook in piece without my mother constantly shouting shit, because the phone doesn't make beautiful selfies anymore. hint: there's a fucking crack over the lense,because you dropped it and no changing all possible settings while throwing out all patience, common sense and ability to read will not improve this situation
i tried to tell her that she could still try to make do with her main camera and when she switches she asked me: "But why does it still make normal photos when I rotate the thing?!" Because unlike your mind this camera isn't damage now fuck off, with all your nervousity I tried to relax and cook us something, but that was more stressful than all the work I did today.10 -
Phone always on silent. And disable notifications on most apps.
Have been using a Pebble Time for a while and can't even remember the last time my phone has been ringing or beeping.
Sadly Pebble is no more 😧3 -
Thank God it's Friday and my brain is toasted from this specific email to IT department which I had to call to get more details. Here are the parties involved.
1) Original sender (OS), 2) Sender to IT (SIT), 3) IT (Me)
SIT: Can someone from IT print this for OS? She's having issue printing.
Me: It's just an image file in the email. What issues is she having when trying to print?
SIT: Idk. She said she's having issues printing.
Me: Yeah, but what issue? She can't connect to printer, the file won't open or what? Can you ask her what the issue is?
SIT: *hold on...comes back... She just said that again..issue printing..
Me: Well, we need to know what issues it is so we can fix it. In that case she can print and not keep sending documents or files to someone else to print. Btw, did you try printing the image file?
SIT:Since she said she's having issue printing I figured to send to IT to fix the issue and print. I didn't print it.
Me: 😕😂🤔🤨😒..what? First of I still don't know whatever issue she is having. Second, you should try printing it and if you also have issues, let me know.
SIT: Ok how?
Me: *shows her how to get
SIT: Thanks it printed. Now I'm also wondering what issue she was having because this was easy to print..
Me: Can you transfer me to her phone?
Now pay attention here. She is SIT's boss.
Me: Hi OS, what issue are you having when trying to print the image file in your email? I'd like to fix it so you don't encounter that issue from now on..
OS: No issues. I was too busy to do it so I asked my secretary to do it.
Me: So you can print image files with no issues, correct?
OS: Yes.. actually I just printed my a picture my daughter sent me.
Me: Ok, have a nice..
*I call SIT back
Me: She's all set
SIT: Thank you so much fo fixing her issue.
Me: She didn't have any issue. She can print fine..
SIT: WTF!?!
Me: Have a good day, SIT..
😂😂😂😂 I was WOWED!!!6 -
TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.
Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.
So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.
As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.
It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.
I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.
Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...
Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.
Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.
In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.
After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.
What a beautiful search result that was to find.
I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.2 -
I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.
But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.
And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.
People treat me like the adult that I am.
I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.
I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen. -
Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.
But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.
And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.
Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.
And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...
The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".
Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!
"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.
And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...
"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "
"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".
But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "
"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.
That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.
Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!
And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.
And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.
[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?
We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?
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Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!
Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>
:~11 -
Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.
Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.
I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.
Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.10 -
!Dev related but still freelance.
So.. I do 3D stuff, scenes, animation and so on. The e-sport pub manager I know told me about this guy that wanted to start a local organizations around FIFA, hold tournaments at the pub and so on. He had some finance, contacts and needed a 3D scene of a stadium to highlight top placers as 3D Fifa cards.
Gotcha, so I hooked him up with said stuff, he was happy, manager was happy, first tournament went well. Now to the shit show:
He wrote to me a couple of days later asking if I'm up for more jobs, which k respectfully declined because l was on a bigger project that took about 2months to complete. Since that day, he spammed both me and the pub manager with request and wishes on wanting to do more.. and I mean SPAM!
Like the dude can't take a no, sorry. He tried to call on phone and messenger, messeged me several times / week and asked the manager of he heard from me.
Both the manager and I were perplexed of his attitude and after asking several times to stop and we both had other things for now (events / projects).. he.. he didn't stop. So.. blocked and that's that, right? Fuck now.. other clients of mine asked me if I knew of him because he tried to contact them to get to me.. like WTF?! How hard is it to take a no and move on?! Jesus.. client of hell in a nutshell2 -
There is a drawing competition for my currently most played game.
I'm on vacation and the deadline is when I get back. So what did I do?
I made an inspiration cluster with the character and drawings having this arrogant face (laptop, gimp).
I sketched on my phone and put it on my laptop (the sketch). I have no desk here so I'm drawing on my bed. I have no drawing pad so I'm drawing with my mouse. Then I draw it in gimp with colors and everything (the stroke in another program on my gfs laptop), put each layer in inkscape to svg-ify them and to hq-render them back in Gimp. Corrected a few things in Gimp. Added more detail, effects (glow, gradient instead of flat color ...).
~6 hours over two days. That was fun. And fucking unprofessional.7 -
I haven't been able to work on the computer without getting a headache very soon after for almost 2 weeks straight now.
I presume I have grown a sensitivity to bright light, stemming from the time I dimmed my phone all the way about 5 months ago and never set it back until just now.
In my classes I will get random headaches that hurt like heck and make me feel groggy, making me unable to focus at all. And while doing computer work, I'll get the same thing.
I've tried getting my eyes checked again, and got new glasses about a week ago - still no help.
Prior to this incident I was working hard on a volunteer project with a small team. Since then my progress and commits have dwindled greatly, and I feel stressed out because I can't do what i want to do without hurting and feeling like absolute shit!
I'm currently trying to get my eyes used to bright lights again by setting things like my phone screen to a brighter setting, changing some dead light bulbs in different rooms of the house, and getting more involved outside.
I hope this goes away soon - I don't want to have this stupid headache every time I go to code or work in class.12 -
FUCKING CHINESE SUPOSED IP CAMERAS...
First, they aren't Ip cameras, they are p2p cameras with different settings and more limited...
then took me 3 days to open 5 ports for 2 cameras, config the cameras, till they work.
YEY they finally work, can see them over the Internet (no default settings, even changed the Alias), have my Ip camera viewer on the Phone... but one doesn't activate on moviment.. in this 3 days only took 2 pictures with motion detection on and people passing in front of them... the other was working for like 5 minutes... giving black and white 7kb jpgs... after a few teeks... can't make it work again.
Now I have two cameras that I can see if my house is being robbed but no motion detection to warm me, or at least save some pictures on the server to serve as evidence (and maby finally get the team that is robbing one house a day, If they try to rob my house again...).
The cameras are very good as baby monitors or to play around, for 14$ and 20$... (love the 360º ball) , but as security cameras... Unless you have them connected to a security station and with a repeater close by... worthless...
Oh, and they may give me 1 good frame a second or lag to 10+seconds a frame...6 -
!tech
recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.
i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .
I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).
I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.
the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)
I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.
shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.
then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?
i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.
i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.9 -
So one day I got an email from a client just before I'm about to go home saying she wanted to update some images on the homepage slider. "No big deal" I thought. So she sends me the images and two of them are squares and the other is a portrait. All of which have phone camera quality and are way too small for the desktop version of the slider. I trim and rearrange the two squares so that fit but the other one was hopeless. I cropped it poorly and hoped she didn't care about it too much.
Of course it was the most important picture she wanted.
I ask the client to send me a higher quality picture which would fit in the slider and she sends me a picture which is even taller and less wide.
"Great," obviously at this point I figure she must be checking on just her cell phone and that's why a tall picture makes more sense to her.
And of course now she needs this before tomorrow morning so now I'm staying late to edit images.
Since she's obviously only looking on her cell phone and she's made me stay so late to do this I just take the tall image and mirror it so that it looks like there are two products side by side and it fits well on mobile screens.
Ugh. -
I work for an investment wank. Worked for a few. The classic setup - it's like something out of a museum, and they HATE engineers. You are only of value if work on the trade floor close to the money.
They treat software engineering like it's data entry. For the local roles they demand x number of years experience, but almost all roles are outsourced, and they take literally ANYONE the agency offers. Most of them can't even write a for loop. They don't know what recursion is.
If you put in a tech test, the agency cries to a PMO, who calls you a bully, and hires the clueless intern. An intern or two is great, if they have passion, but you don't want a whole department staffed by interns, especially ones who make clear they only took this job for the money. Literally takes 100 people to change a lightbulb. More meetings and bullshit than development.
The Head of Engineering worked with Cobol, can't write code, has no idea what anyone does, hates Agile, hates JIRA. Clueless, bitter, insecure dinosaur. In no position to know who to hire or what developers should be doing. Randomly deletes tickets and epics from JIRA in spite, then screams about deadlines.
Testing is the same in all 3 environments - Dev, SIT, and UAT. They have literally deployment instructions they run in all 3 - that is their "testing". The Head of Engineering doesn't believe test automation is possible.
They literally don't have architects. Literally no form of technical leadership whatsoever. Just screaming PMOs and lots of intern devs.
PMO full of lots of BAs refuses to use JIRA. Doesn't think it is its job to talk to the clients. Does nothing really except demands 2 hour phone calls every day which ALL developers and testers must attend to get shouted at. No screenshare. Just pure chaos. No system. Not Agile. Not Waterfall. Just spam the shit out of you, literally 2,000 emails a day, then scream if one task was missed.
Developers, PMO, everyone spends ALL day in Zoom. Zoom call after call. Almost no code is ever written. Whatever code is written is so bad. No design patterns. Hardcoded to death. Then when a new feature comes in that should take the day, it takes these unskilled devs 6 months, with PMO screaming like a banshee, demanding literally 12 hours days and weekends.
Everything on spreadsheets. Every JIRA ticket is copy pasted to Excel and emailed around, though Excel can do this.
The DevOps team doesn't know how to use Jenkins or GitHub.
You are not allowed to use NoSQL database because it is high risk.2 -
Worst interview experience was a marathon. 3 interviews in a day.
I asked the recruiter to assemble them like that after I had to remind her I was still employed and could go about having interviews all week. I took a day off and departed.
The first interview was with a company that had moved fro their previous address. Since the recruiter obviously checked that, I got to the right place late and with little mojo left.
The second interview was with a company that explained to me how they actually did not need my expertise.
The third was with a company that had just won Apple's Best of the Year award:
Me: So how is it having received the award?
Him: Nah, it's just another one. You get used to it.
[A little more interview]
[We wrap things up and stand up to leave]
Him: Well, thanks for stopping by and talking to us. And sorry we had to do this at our ping pong table. You know, the CEO and I are always playing. He says he's the best, but I always beat him.
All of that sprinkled with a very energising bellyache I had to take to the toilet every now and then (no idea what I ate the night before).
After the marathon, I told the recruiter the third company seemed the most promising, although I couldn't see myself working with someone that pretentious, to which she replied "I thought you had very similar personalities and you have a lot in common".
WHAT?! I've never said anything like that my whole life and now you're telling me you know me from the three fucking phone calls we had?
From that moment on, I've moved away from recruiters and towards networking.1 -
So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .
In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )1 -
I'm working on a bug I can't figure out. I go out for a smoke to clear my mind. Some time passes, I get an idea, finish smoking and I wanna go back up to my desk ASAP.
I have to go up to floor 14. Building has a basic elevator with 2 buttons:
UP arrow - "I wanna go up"
DOWN arrow - "I wanna go down"
User-friendly, intuitive, idiot-proof, you might think. NOPE.
Elevator stops at floor 1 because moron who wants to go down pressed all 2 of the over-intuitive buttons.
Floor 1 moron: "Going up?"
Other people: "Yes"
Floor 1 moron: "Oh"
Me (in my mind): "Oh? BITCH, there's an idicator telling you where it's going. Don't fucking press UP if you're not going up."
Moving on.
Elevator stops at floor 3.
Frustration sets in.
Floor 3 brainlet steps in, doors close.
Floor 3 brainlet takes eyes off phone screen and realises we're going up.
Floor 3 brainlet makes an "oops" kinda noise because "it" obviously wanted to go down.
Floor 3 brainlet stops elevator at floor 5 because "it" doesn't want to go all the way up to floor 14.
Rage sets in.
Me (in my mind): "I hope I get lung cancer so I don't have to deal with this shit anymore"
Moving on.
No more incidents, I calm down. I get to my desk and begin brainstorming about elevator coding. My preferred idea so far:
Elevator is called at floor X but nobody steps in? Elevator doesn't stop at that floor for 2 hours. elevators.size() strikes and the entire floor uses stairs, BITCH.
I spend 1 hour reading rants and writing this. Now I have to get back to my bug. I would appreciate other punishment ideas for elevator misuse.5 -
So I now bought an iphone 6 again for development and tried just for fun to make it a daily driver and it feels really limited, especially because apparently theres no jailbreak yet for 11.2.5. (I feel near everything could be solved as soon as cydia etc. get fully released to the alibaba jailbreak)
I didnt even remember, that it doesnt have any option to have haptic feedback when typing, such a basic feature has to be jailbroken..? I thought I remembered that it had it, last time I had one - did they remove such a basic feature?
Also the fingerprint reader is really weird compared to other phones from the same year, first getting it to actually fill all fingerprint lines without saying "try again" or it trolling you and vibrating as if it recognized your finger, but actually didnt (really frustrating when its the last 2 lines...) - is a real challenge, might be that I have some mutant fingerprints, but when I asked my s/o to try it out, it also failed most of the times, so you have to position your finger in a very specific position for it to work, even if you add the max amount of 5 fingerprints.
Most ads on iphones feel HORRIBLE, the amount of lag some can add is incredible, wait till it loaded or youre fucked and besides using some shady adblocker vpn, theres no way to block them, without again - a jailbreak.
Another feature that I used many times on my android phone, is controlling it from the desktop, connect it via usb and then just use it for demonstration purposes on a projector or to instruct how things work - theres no such function without a jailbreak, even if you use osx..
Then theres the feature, that instead of just setting your cursor to a specific location, you have to hold and it zooms in, not sure if I just got too used to the android way of doing it, but I can see myself making less mistakes of where I positioned it with the ios way.
The hardware mute switch feels like a great feature, its just sometimes weird, so if you were inside an app that was playing sound and you mute it, it still plays it until you either close and open that app or just change to another one temporarily, so its not an actual hardware switch as I usually thought, more like a request to mute the phone.
The cable that comes with it is too thin, I am afraid to even unwind it, as it would probably break, so I had to get another one.
Please don't turn this into a shitfest from any of the fanboys, I really just wanted to share my image of finally being able to try it first hand again.4 -
I think the fact that even Apple can't unlock your phone if you forget your passcode proves that they use very naive encryption method.
Suppose my data is "Hey This is Some Data" and Passcode is 1234, I could just Jumble this data using that passcode and It will be difficult to decrypt without Passcode. And If data is huge, it will be fairly impossible to do so. But that doesn't make it a good encryption method.
Such encryption, though safe is not practical, Imagine if there was no "Forget Password" Option on any account, I usually forgot my password very often when I was a child.
Apple has been doing such things for years, Using Bad things as a selling point. Apple users are dumb anyways because they don't want to control their phone.
Reset Password is a weak point which might be exploited but in such cases, usability is more important than security. Any service which doesn't allow resetting Password is a shitty service and I would never use such a service, They are too naive.705 -
*Friday morning*
Me: "Ok the client wants to talk with you on Wednesday at 10 am. It's a conference call on Hangouts, here's the link: [ link ]. Be on time, I have already sent you all the details about the topics you'll have to cover. I will be available during the weekend if you need help, we cannot afford to make mistakes"
Smartass Dev: "Don't worry, I am on it"
*Tuesday, after lunch break*
Me: "Just a final check: is everything clear with my email? I'm working late tonight, call me if you need something else. They'll probably share some slides, be sure to join from your laptop: [ link ]"
Smartass Dev: "No problem, I am fine"
*Wednesday, 11.15 am*
Smartass Dev: "Hey, what a shitty client! I waited more than an hour and they did not even tell me that the call was canceled. This is so unprofessional."
Me: "The call was not canceled"
Smartass Dev: "Dude, I had my phone here on the desk. I was ready to answer but they never called"
Me: "Did you open the link?"
Smartass Dev: "What link?????"
Me: "It was on Hangouts, I sent you the link twice"
Smartass Dev: "Really...? I'm so unlucky these days. Next time will be better 🙂" -
I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.
I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.
So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.
But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!1 -
!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.rant life story current project ugh megarant why are you doing this to me life schrodinger's tags 🐈 life3 -
I fucking hate those cringy Indians commenting dogshit on almost every youtube video. Never have I even seen anyone more dumb than these retards. Almost every programming tutorial on youtube is infested with "plese sir pls teach me hw to hck i wnt to be a hckr" and "sir my phone no is xxxx and my email id is xxxx send me the cod plz". I mean even on css tutorial videos? seriously? No other third world country has such boneheads. I just hope each and every retard like this drops dead the moment they write stuff like this.14
-
Tldr: no router, almost not work.
Ok I recently moved into a new house, and I signed a contract for an Internet line.
Problem is that the router has been sent at the ISP shop, where I was supposed to get it personally. But guess what? Covid emergency happened two days after, and the shop closed.
So, after spending two days calling customer service of both ISP and Postal office without being able to speak to anybody, I received a Sms saying that the pack was not delivered because the receiver was closed.
After some more unsuccessful calls to the same two entities I managed to find the actual shop's phone number, that was actually thw owner's house (he's working from home). I spoke to him, told the problem, and he changed the router destination to my house.
Today I checked the package status on the postal website and I saw that it seems that they tried every day, at 7:02 am, to deliver the bloody package again at the shop! I truly hope this was a bug on their tracking system. It's weird that the hours were always 7:02am, because the package delivery office opens at 8:30 am, so again I'm praying any existent and non-existent god that that's just a bug. I'm kinda tired of being stuck with my phone hotspot with limited GB and with ISP public routers with about 5Mbps.
I wish I had @netikras skills with router building.4 -
Company now sends everyone to home office.
Expected - "Yeah! No more time spent with bus/subway. I can finally escape from people stopping me when I'm ready to leave."
Reality - "mail received at 8pm and phone ringing 'did you get that file? Need it ready ASAP.'"2 -
I removed Facebook Messenger **Lite** from my phone last night after reinstalling BetterBatterStats.
I thought using Lite meant no more background update or at least very little but...
Anyway after uninstalling, I've been unplugged for 10hrs, still 87%...
No need for battery pack anymore...3 -
Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.
Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.
Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.
Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."
My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.
They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.
That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.
Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken... -
Music, but if it has words they need to be foreign. J-rock, deadmau5, gogo penguin, carrion... All are good.
Dark themes everywhere unless it's java, because it helps me compartmentalise my languages.
Second screen hooked up with the stuff I want to be viewable all the time, as it doesn't change when I switch workspaces. (bug or a feauture?)
Door shut to muffle sounds from the rest of the house, window slightly open so I don't suffocate.
Pomodoro timer on, but put phone into silent mode so no notifications disrupt my focus.
Drinks and bathroom breaks happen in the 5 minutes between pomodoro sprints. Food happens in the 15 minute breaks.
Extra RAM stick is in the mail so I lose less time waiting for android studio to exhale or whatever it's doing as it holds up the whole computer.
I might just do the java parts of my project in bluej if this ram stick doesn't alleviate my problems. I could go outside and drink mud through a metre long straw with a filter on the end sooner than android studio gets unstuck.
If anyone can add more sensible ideas I'd be happy :)1 -
Is Google trying to win a "who can create the shittiest file picker" award?
The file picker of Android OS can not even remember the last selected sorting options, and its default sorting is alphabetical. Does anyone really use alphabetical sorting? Sorting by the last modified time or by size is far more useful than alphabetical sorting can ever hope being.
The only use for alphabetical sorting is sorting files with incorrect time stamp attribute but a correct time stamp or number in the file name.
The file picker of Android OS also features pull-to-refresh. As already said, pull-to-refresh is not a helpful shortcut but a useless anti-feature. ( https://devrant.com/rants/9831669/... ) Why would anyone need to refresh in a file picker? How likely is a file to not exist before opening the file picker and then appear while browsing for the file? All pull-to-refresh does here is draining the phone battery by reloading the thumbnails.
The file search feature of the Google file picker can only search the entire storage. A search can not be limited to the currently viewed directory. Even the file picker of Windows Vista from 2007 could search only the viewed directory.
Obviously, it lacks any kind of range selection. No A-to-B selection that is like shift-click selection on desktop, and not even the inferior drag-to-select that Samsung has implemented, which would still be better than annoying individual selection.
Microsoft could build a better file picker at a time some of us were in primary school than Google can build today. Come on, Google, just scrap your garbage software and go copycat Microsoft. Useful plagiarized software is better than useless self-made garbage.
At least the Google file picker does one thing right: It remembers the last directory the user picked a file from and opens it next time.8 -
So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!
Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.
Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!
Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!2 -
This is what I’ve got on LinkedIn today People are getting creative, not sure how to respond to that. I am curious to see what this scam is all about 🤷♂️
Dear PappyHans,
I hope this email finds you well and safe. My name is **** and I work for ******, a leading expert network company based in New York. I am currently working with a client who is conducting a project and needs expertise on Digital Engineering - ***** .
After some research I did regarding the topic, I concluded that you would be a great fit for this project, given your experience.
Please, let me know if you would be willing to share your expertise on this subject through a paid phone consultation. For your input and time, you will be compensated with a fee that you can set yourself. As a reference – the average rate of our consultations is around 400$/hour.
It is essential to note that in no way will you be asked to discuss your current employer nor any kind of confidential information during the phone consultation.
Should you be interested in this subject, I would be more than happy to address any questions regarding the topic on LinkedIn or by phone
Kind Regards
(Sender name)9 -
I guess I should relate what work experience I have: my internship.
A little backstory I suppose. It's required at my school to do an internship to graduate except under certain circumstances. They encourage work experience a lot where I study. It was around time for me to apply for internships. However, the closest I got was a phone call with Amazon that I biffed when they started asking about stuff like sorting algorithms and other Big O notation stuff. So I was pretty desperate. I found a small company that were looking for internships and got an interview with them. The pay was dirt (I made more as a crew trainer at McDonalds) but I needed that internship and they were only 10 minutes away.
Immediate red flags when I showed up to the address. At first I thought I was wrong, But I noticed the sign of the company pointing up some stairs that were installed on the side of the house I was in front of.
Interview was a bit weird. It was with the CEO and the marketing manager. Again red flags. I show up for work a week later.
Turns out, they have no full time developers. 1st day was getting my workstation ready and 2nd day I was running Ethernet cables to the basement where the phones were connected. Spent around a week doing that.
This was supposed to be a Software Engineering internship?? Excuse me?? I came here to learn how working on Software is supposed to be like! I was also their "tech support" both for their computers and their crappy software that was built 16 years ago that people still pay for that I had NO idea how it worked because I just started and NOBODY taught me anything! To make matters worse, even if I wanted to delve into the code to see how it works it was all made in ancient Perl which didn't make things any easier.
But I needed that internship to graduate. And thus begun my 9 months with them and boy howdy I have stories to tell. Stay tuned in the future.3 -
Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:
3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.
I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.
They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).
During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).
Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.
The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.
This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.
I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).
I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...
The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)
Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.
Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.
I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).
So... any thoughts?7 -
I keep phones for two years, or try to anyway. Later this year I will hit that two year mark, and rather than excitement at the idea of getting a new phone, I find myself thinking that there's nothing out there that excites me at all. And also, my current phone is in no way deficient. It doesn't hold a charge like when it was new, but that's totally normal, and as degraded as it may be, it's still not a problem at all.
A powerful phone with a snapdragon and 6 or more GB of memory, that measures under 5" and doesn't have some bullshit OEM skin on it. To my knowledge, it doesn't exist.6 -
Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.
** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...
Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *
Me: Hello Ma
G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)
Me: It's really nice to he...
G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.
Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...
G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.
Me: Excuse me Ma, but...
G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!
** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**
CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?
Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.
Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**
G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**
CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*
Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!
But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.
While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.
CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?
Me: *Explained the situation to CC*
CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.
Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!
Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.
GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)
Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello
GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?
Me: ... 😲
CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...
G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?
CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.
Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **
G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.
Me: All good ma'am
CC: ** Hangs up **1 -
This is why we can never have enough software developers
It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.
Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.
Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.
Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.
Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.
Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.
Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.
A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.
If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.
With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work. -
Today in the office: colleague no.1 picks up the phone. We hear a doctor telling him that she does not work tommorow. I say: gynecologist? And my colleague no.2 replies instantly: A vet is more probable 😂 You know why? Cuz he is a beast!2
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More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.
Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!
Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.
Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).
Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.
Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.
Only to discover....
....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.
Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.
WTF? /waves arms in the air
OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.
But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did... -
More than once recruiters have thought it's a good idea to phone my desk to try and recruit me. Fine I can just say no thank you and move on, it does however get a bit awkward when you're interrupted talking to your boss by a recruiter phone your desk and you've aliased their number on lync as 'ass clowns'1
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Last week: Build out a landing page and contact form in Pardot. Deliver to client after a quick QA pass through.
Friday: Get nasty message from client via basecamp about how the entire page looks like complete crap. We're also very unprofessional and can't deliver a simple request, while we charge a premium for our services.
So I, wondering what I managed to screw up so horribly, hop on to the test page I sent them. Except, its different and looks like crap.
They edited the page after it was sent to them and are pissed it doesn't match the comps they sent over. So I edit it back - except for the form. The one they added selects and textarea boxes to. Fields they didn't include in their comp and there was no mention of them wanting to use.
Today: Phone call with client. Every single complain they have about the page template they delivered all goes back to one of 3 things.
1. Their designer doesn't know how to use their global styles in his designs. So when things match their global styles (as they specifically asked for) they don't understand why they don't match the comp in a side by side view.
2. They change their mind on a design after the page was built. They won't admit this is the case and want to blame someone else for it not looking the way they want it. You know, "Spirit and Style of their current site"
3. They're idiots.
So now, I put aside a much more fun React project for an Amazon owned grocery chain and work on this nonsense. -
Update about my boss:
I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.
But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.
But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.
But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.
However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.
The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.
They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.
And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.
We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!
It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.
Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.
They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.
I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.
As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?
I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.
My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.
I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..
These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.
But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.
This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.
I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.
I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.
And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.
I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.
I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.
I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.
Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.
I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.
I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.
Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.5 -
Summary of My Experience With Recruiters
1. They do everything until they get a phone talk. They also go cold turkey if they don’t have what you want, no politeness if you are not useful to them.
2. They are OK with your highball salary range at first
3. Once they got that you are hireable, they show their true nature
3a. Trying to lower my forever salary expectation to guarantee an offer and their one time bonus
3b. They scare you implying I would be fired from job anyways, if I don’t like some aspects of the current job
3c. They call you multiple times a week with no scheduling beforehand
3d. They lecture me on why salary shouldn’t be a big reason for job change(bitch don’t even…)
3e. They say shit like I want you to get this job(dude, you say that to every job seeker)
I will add more if I remember. What are your other bad experiences4 -
I am sick of Android cave dwellers go outside everytime iOs released and make their old tired “inNOvatIon” joke.
Apple does not say we brought these things first, so there is no base for a joke even. But when Apple does, you can be sure it will be far more perfect than your average Android phone has, or even top end ones.11 -
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 devRant14 -
Webpack? More like Fudgepack 😡
OK sure, I know it's cool to rip on Webpack without taking 5 minutes to understand it, but I really have tried. Every time I want to do anything which used to be trivial with grunt, gulp or brunch, it requires a whole bunch of sorcery and every post I see online around the same topic inevitably ends with something like "that's not modular", "WebPack doesn't work like that", "you're holding your phone wrong" etc. And it's not like I'm someone who is afraid of new or uncomfortable things. I try new languages almost as often as there are new JavaScript fads (OK maybe not THAT often). I use "weird" keywords and experiment with different key maps all the time. I swap my daily window manager on an almost quarterly basis (and xmonad is no picnic as an introduction to Haskell). But what the fuck is it with so many people in positions of influence in the frontend world always taking one step forward, two steps back and an occasional hop sideways when it comes to tooling (and dragging everyone else along with them)?
How did such a turd of a tool become defacto for so many frontend frameworks? Do hard core JavaScripters just really really hate outsiders and want to deter others from their precious as much as possible? Fuck Webpack and fuck everyone responsible for helping it permeate so thoroughly through the software development industry.2 -
iPhones have never been more unlockable, as literally a picture of someone on your phone can be used to unlock their phone.
On the subject, I would also like to know what the point of an unlock is? If a criminal has my phone, they are stealing it, period. If a good Samaritan has it and wants to identify the owner, they can't because there is a lock.
This means that the only potential way that I am ever getting it is that there is no lock and a good person found it.3 -
i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.
as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)
-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)
previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...
but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.
friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.
no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.
so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone
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so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.
once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.
but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.
if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.
i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.
mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?
but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔6 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .
Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?
Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .
All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!
IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .
Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .
IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.
One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .
I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.13 -
IOS keyboard is utter garbage. IOS as a whole is utter garbage, but the keyboard is the cream of the crop of garbage.
Wasting a user's time and destroying/changing the user's input against their wishes is malicious design of the highest order and this dumpster fire excels in it.
Type something completely valid and autocomplete changes it to something that doesn't makes sense. It not only gives you a terrible suggestion half the time, it will also change previous parts of the sentence that it somehow allowed you to keep. If you reject its suggestion, it deletes your current word and previous word(s), instead of restoring it to what it was before it made the terrible suggestion, like every other keyboard does.
Need to go back and adjust your sentence? If you tap it will hijack the cursor and highlight the nearest word it doesn't like instead of moving the cursor where you touch. If you accidentally hit a character on the cramped and unusable keyboard, congrats, you get to type the word again.
I know about hold space to drag the cursor.
I don't want Apple to decide for me that I actually wanted to go to the closest word it doesn't like, or the current word, or the next word based on a dice roll. I want the cursor to go where I tap. Like literally every other input device functions.
Want readily accessible numbers and punctuation? lol no
I know there's gboard, but compared to Android it's also almost unusable. This leads me to believe the keyboard is little more than a skin over the IOS keyboard engine, like Safari, another IOS dumpster fire. But, it is slightly better than the stock keyboard, which isn't saying much.
I yearn, minute by minute, for the time I can ditch this dumpster fire for a real phone.11 -
Bro I fucking hate Flutter and android studio. I have just started android development and oh my god the bunch of errors i’m getting is crazy af. Like I don’t get one point, flutter was created by google and android studio was also created by google… then why tf they don’t focus on normalizing the development process. Why so many errors ???????? And no easy fix for it like whyyyyyyyyyyy?????
Anyways sorry for the rant but there’s more to it. I just built a fuckin app which was running fine in my AVD and then when I sent it to my friend he was seeing a grayed out screen and then I searched for the error and then I was like bruh, I was sitting for sooo long building the first app of my life and here we are. My app can’t even run on someone else’s phone because of a fuckin gray screen error (i’ll fix it tomorrow)10 -
After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.
I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?
Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...
On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...
Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...2 -
Does anybody else have the project where every time you try to change something, no matter how small, you always end up screwing it up and needing a bunch more time to fix it just to get back to the starting position?
I have this project I've done, a custom Ambilight system for my TV, and everytime I try to add a feature the lights stop working altogether... Tried adding detection of when I start my media player to automatically start the Ambilight mode (I made several modes, one of which is just shine a certain color all the time which is great if you don't want to use normal lights and want to be able to control the lights from your phone).
I had the code for detecting app start and stop from before when I implemented it for a slightly different system. I just changed the few things that are different and poof, no more lights... I managed to forget the other system checked a flag after every process exit and overrode the mode and I removed the setting of the flag, but not reading of it...
Every single time I do changes on this it's something... Other projects sometimes go smoothly, sometimes not, but this one just doesn't want to be kind to me....
Results are awesome, though :)5 -
Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.
I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.
I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.
It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.
Back to my iPhone for now...
🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵9 -
Ideas I've had over the years that could pan out and be useful:
SMS-DB: Stands for SMS-Data Burst. Used to allow those with low cell signal or no data plan to transfer data between a phone and some client via the standard SMS text space. Would be slow, but would act kinda like dial-up over SMS (as mobile lines are compressed on all service levels, even LTE, so traditional dial-up wouldn't work!) I have a general idea on how packets would be laid out, but that's about it so far...
everything2PNG: Allows one to transpose any file's data into a PNG with a 3 byte per pixel (full color RGB), which allows for a "compression" of sorts (about 91, 93% on preliminary tests) AND allowing further, more efficient compression of the resulting file. (Plus... it's just kinda cool to see files transposed as PNGs.) I actually have a simple transposer to go to PNG, but can't yet go back. Large files (around 600MB) use upwards of 4GB with efficient paging and other optimizations via NumPy so far, so it's not *viable* yet, but it's coming along nicely.
RPi-GPIO Interconnection Bus: A master/slave or round robin method to allow for Raspberry Pis to communicate using GPIO, which can help free up network bandwidth in RPi cloud computing clusters. At most, this'd allow for 4 bits used for pushing to the GPIO "bus", and 4 bits used for pulling from the "bus". 8 pins total are usually unused minimum, so either 3 or 4 pins for upload, 3 or 4 for download, and potentially 1 or 2 for commands, general non-data communication, etc. I made a version of this concept using Round Robin for a client, but it was horribly slow. (I also don't have distribution rights for the code, so i'm working from scratch.) Definitely doable. -
Another potential client contacted me, they wanted a website building. I asked what the aim of the site was to the reply "there's no aim, a friend said I should get a website".
They run a gardening service. So I gave them a few examples of aims. They decided they wanted to showcase their work with the hope that it would bring in more jobs.
I emailed them a list of requirements as we had decussed over the lengthy phone call.
Two weeks after no response I get a call, "is my website built yet"
I explained that with the tiny budget and without content there is nothing really that could be built.
Needless to say I never heard from him again -
!dev
I got two phone numbers, first is prepaid registered for me, second is on some shitty plan registered on my company.
Today I am trying to merge those two numbers to be company numbers and first one should be main number.
Have been in telco company office twice already.
2,5 hours and still no success.
Now I got back home and waiting for phone call from consultant because some software is not working and he can’t do anything right now.
I got used to fact that the bigger company the more shitty software it have and nothing is working as expected but it is happening to me every time I try to improve my life and make it simpler.
Fax was more reliable then todays software.
I miss paper and analog way of doing business.2 -
Well my last job was nothing but a call center with AT&T, but I will tell the story of how I got my current job which is also my first job as a developer.
I was living in Texas. I just moved out of a house I was renting and my girlfriend at the time moved back to Missouri and she was about 5 months pregnant.
She wanted us to all be in Missouri because that's where her family is. No big deal for me, but we didn't have a place to stay yet in Missouri and it was difficult to find a job in a city that has very little to offer in what I do, and of course, wants experienced people despite what said they were looking for.
For 5 months I kept looking for a job while I stayed with my parents and worked at the call center and she with her mom and stepdad so I could save up to not only make the trip to Missouri but to be able to make a payment on a place which we were also having trouble finding.
Even if I didn't have a job or if we didn't find a place, I was not going to miss the birth of my child. So, within about 3 weeks of her due date, it was time for me to make the trip to Missouri. I still haven't found a job but at least we were going to have a place ready for my child within the week. With all the money I saved, we could get through a couple of months of rent, bills and necessities, but still needed to find work.
After only a week after we got the place, I almost gave up so I started to apply at restaurants as a backup after I found a couple more places. The restaurants were quick to respond and I had interviews scheduled for the week that I applied. I knew I was going to be miserable working at a restaurant, but I needed a job, any job. As a last attempt, the day before my first interview with one restaurant, I found a new posting for an entry level position early in the morning. I quickly sent in my resume but didn't expect anything until weeks later. It only took a few hours for a reply and he wondered if we could do a phone interview. I said yes, of course. After the interview, he said that he had one more person to interview but he would let me know. I thought, great, there goes my chance. After only an hour of waiting, while I was looking for more places to apply, he calls me back saying that he wants to hire me. Immediately after I got the job I cancel my other interviews and I started the next day.
It was great I got the job, but it was a far drive. However, they did offer telecommuting, but I had to come in every day until they felt I understood their work flow. I did inform my boss that my son would be born really soon but he was okay with letting me take off when it was time.
I started on a Wednesday in May of 2014 and made the 1.5 hour drive every day. After only working 10 days, my girlfriend calls me at work saying that it's time for the baby to come but it would be a while so I could finish my shift and then come straight to the hospital.
I get there but still no baby. It was a long labor which ended up in C-section at 4 in the morning the next day. My son was finally born on a Wednesday and it was the greatest thing in my life.
But now, I am a single dad(about a year now and it was mutual) and I am the only developer as of a couple of weeks ago. Despite how they handle things and my annoying coworker that sits next to me which I have ranted about in a previous posts, I do enjoy working there trying to improve and move the company forward. After all, I work from home 3 days out of the week now. The rants will still come lol.
Sorry for the mood kill at the end but that's my story. 😁 -
all they want is to lure you to a feed and let you scroll through it forever. TikTok will even scroll for you. Your right hand is for holding a phone, your left hand is for cramming junk food into yourself, your head is for feeling acute guilt. After junk food is no more, you make yourself puke, wipe your eyes and go on a compulsive shopping spree to fix your self-esteem. All paid for with your credit card, of course. As if you were able to afford the whole ordeal in the first place. Then, go to your local bar and get wasted.
Never explore yourself. Never stay with yourself one on one, without an algorithm taking the pain away through the screen, all at the expense of making it stronger in the long run, because that’s how addiction works. Never talk to yourself, never ask where did certain feelings come from.
Without pain, there is no motivation to change. And you shouldn’t change. You. Must. Drive. The. Economy. Die early, of heart attack because of junk food, or by suicide because all that mental strain and misery. Never retire. We shouldn’t pay you a penny back.
Now switch back from devRant to Instagram. Now.2 -
Yes I know this is more of a stack overflow question but no one seems to have asked it and not going to waste time getting downvoted and having my account banned for not knowing something again .-.
Just wanting to know if anyone is able to recommend some libraries that would be useful for making mobile Linux apps with GTK?
Preferably ones that will interface with Vala as I'm wanting to build a mini ecosystem of apps for the pine phone to interface with Elementary OS? -
It's insane that to get a phone with decent specs without getting one that's even bigger than what I have(a 5.5" asus that feels like a behemoth) I had to get a phone that was released almost two years ago. I figure sony will release a new compact some time soon, but the price was right on the XZ2, and it feels wonderful to use a phone with one hand again.4
-
As i was shitting on toilet I realized something very important. This could be THE answer.
The question: what is the formula for achieving success? I realized this must be THE ultimate answer:
Money + connections + luck >= success
Why?
MONEY:
You must have money to make more money.
CONNECTIONS:
Some average joe can tell his friend Cockty to phone call his friend Dickson who's a good friend with Cumston to message his millionaire friend Asslicker who is gonna help the average joe succeed.
LUCK:
No matter what you do or how hard you work, how many achievements you have or degrees, you can spend 10 million dollars on a project -- and still fail because you're not lucky.
Let's calculate this probability:
have = 1
missing = -1
money = 0
connections = 0
luck = 0
success = 1
money + connections + luck >= success
Case 1 (have everything):
have + have + have >= success
1 + 1 + 1 >= 1
3 >= 1 ✅
Case 2 (no money):
missing + have + have >= success
-1 + 1 + 1 >= 1
1 >= 1 ✅
Case 3 (no connections):
have + missing + have >= success
1 - 1 + 1 >= 1
1 >= 1 ✅
Case 4 (no luck):
have + have + missing >= success
1 + 1 - 1 >= 1
1 >= 1 ✅
Case 5 (no money, no connections):
missing + missing + have >= success
-1 - 1 + 1 >= 1
-1 >= 1 ❌
Case 6 (no money, no luck):
missing + have + missing >= success
-1 + 1 - 1 >= 1
-1 >= 1 ❌
Case 7 (no connections, no luck):
have + missing + missing >= success
1 - 1 - 1 >= 1
-1 >= 1 ❌
Case 8 (no money, no connections, no luck):
missing + missing + missing >= success
-1 - 1 - 1 >= 1
-3 >= 1 ❌
We have: 4 possible outcomes that we want, k=4
Out of total: 8 possible combinations, n=8
Probability of achieving success using this formula is: P(A) = k/n = 4/8= 0.5 * 100% = 50% chance of being successful in this shit life
This is correct in theory. HOWEVER:
Case 1: someone having
- a lot of money
- a lot of connections
- a lot of luck
In practicality is damn near IMPOSSIBLE
Maybe 1 in 100 million people are born like this. That's 100,000,000 people / 8,000,000,000 people = 0.0125 * 100% = 1.25% of people are this blessed and gifted in life. This might be even less so we can ignore this probability as a possible outcome and average it out to realistic average joe daily life.
Therefore giving us a total of 7 combinations, 3 possibilities to succeed in this shit life
So: k/n = 3/7 = 0.4285 * 100% = 42.85% chance to be successful in this shit life
Mathematically proven how life is pure trash
Funny enough we can round it to 42%. And 42 is the answer to life, universe and everything in existence4 -
So I work with an old ICT Responsible.
Today he wanted some information about the internet.
He takes the phone and start calling...
I was like what are you doing ? Can't you just send them an e-mail ?
He said "no, calling someone is more time efficient and quicker"
So he is there calling an internet provider after closing time waiting...
Music playing... still waiting...
After 5 minutes the call is ended telling that they are closed...
Next he was "well I will send an email then"
Like wtf. How is that efficient and faster ? You could have send the mail and finish any other task... What is wrong with old people and calling everybody for small stuff.
When you call someone, they have to litterally drop what they are doing and answer the call. Just send emails and let them anwser when they have time dammit !6 -
Jfc why do phone meetings always have like 20 cumulative minutes of radio silence? I swear, I ask a question and I may as well be listening for a pin to drop over there because no one in team leadership is saying a n y t h i n g.
It's upsetting because it makes me painfully anxious because Oh God What Did I Say but more than that, it feels like this huge waste of time to just...sit there. On the phone. And then when we go over time later in the middle of pointing a user story leadership's like, "Hey, can we wrap this up?" like sorry? That's not...my fault? I'm...
And I totally get it if you can't answer my question immediately, but if it takes you more than like a minute to come up with something just gimme a, "I'll get back to you on that," and move on. No need to wait for the end days, dude. We've got lives to live and better things to do, Clearly.4 -
So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.
So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.
After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.
PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.
I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.
I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.
I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.
Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.
Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.
But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer. -
The future will look back on this period in time with astonishment. The fact that people could still browse the internet without using an app or a mobile phone will seem like a bedtime story.
It’s not even fucking close to ok that this very paragraph is inside of a H1-tag with a font-size of 26px! The UI is so big and dumbed down that I feel like I’m trying to navigate a fucking Pixie book with buttons the size of duplo-blocks. And this shit is happening to more and more sites!
It’s like the CSS-stylists assumes that everyone goes around with a pair of binoculars duct taped the wrong way to their forehead. No no, that was not a typo. Writing CSS is not development dude, it’s more like filling out a coloring book. And still most of the “paint” seems to go outside of the shapes somehow. Even I, a backend developer, know about media queries and that you shouldn’t specify font-size in pixels. How come that these guys do not? It’s like a taxi driver not knowing how to switch lane for fucks sake.
I know I can just adjust the page scale with a simple ctrl scrolling maneuver and believe me I do! I just don’t think it’s right that people, by the millions, should be afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome just because of their ignorance.2 -
Has anyone ever figured out why the fuck Android reboots seemingly out of nowhere at random times?
Is it kernel panics? Is it some shitty bug that has been plaguing this cursed OS since its inception? [sidenote: boy that was a mouthful of 's'es]
Or are we already at the mercy of the Big Brother, and someone at the controls likes to play random pranks on us when they're bored?
Thinking of switching to LineageOS more and more, but I'm kinda worried about resetting my phone since I've never done full backups/restores and I have no experience in the matter...7 -
what is the point of me being here i do nothing but sit in my room and do absolutely nothing. i have no car. i have no job. i have no money. i cant do shit i cant go out with my friends bc it’s always i need money to anything. i’m not good at school i’m so fucking far behind i’m practically a freshman i have no point in even doing anything i’m so useless. so easy to replace i just want a life. i want to live in the city so i can get a better job or even a job at all i wanna go places do things get a car and a job see the boy i’m so in love with. but i cant i’m so trapped in this house it’s not even funny. i have no phone as soon as i leave the house. i cant call or text anyone important. i wanna graduate. move out. go to cosmetology school. live with the love of my life. start a life. move on with this shitty one i’m living now and pay for my own things. but until then i’ll just dream and dream about everything i could have and do. i wish i was that kid who had money who got handed a car from there parents and got to leave the house with no troubles like how am i gonna pay for this or who’s gonna get me how am i gonna get there and back. i want nothing more then to just be happy and be accomplishing things but i can’t. i am the worst daughter ever.3
-
Well fuck Amazon. I am trying to get into my account because for some fucking reason they say my payment method is faulty while they actually write off the subscription of prime of it. But to get into my account I need to login again with 2FA as I have that turned it on. So far so good. But since it's an old phone number I can't login. Well just change the phone number wouldn't you think? Well yes but to change the phone number I need to login in with the old phone number to which I have no longer access 🤦♂️. Eventually found a phone number I could call. I get a lovely lady on the phone which guides me to resetting my password but for that, you guessed it, I need to do the 2FA again. I get send through to the next person as she can't change it for me because of privacy reasons (oh well). That guy first askes the last 4 numbers of my creditcard like 5 times because he can't remember it (write it the fuck down then asshole) then he starts mistaking the 6 for 9 (like how the fuck do you do that) and then the text messages don't come in while I am on the phone with him which he tries to blame to my service provider because they would block Amazon (like why would they do that?). But since I got a text message of them 15 min before I shot that down quickly. Then he finally admitted that they might have a disruption going on. So I think we'll fine I'll just ask my question to him how it's possible that Prime stops working as I am watching it because my payment method is faulty according to them (but manage to write off the subscription) and he starts talking just shit. Just admit that you don't know and connect me to someone who does know how that can happen. In the the end I just hung up because I knew I wasn't getting anywhere with this guy and don't you know it, as I start writing this the text messages come in. Problem solved you would say just out that number in the website and you can change your phone number. Well no because I have to tell the number to the guy who I hung up with because the texts weren't coming in 😒. Now I should call them back but I think I'll wait till tomorrow hopefully the day shift will be a bit more knowledgeable on how shit works and can actually remember 4 digits.2
-
A follow-up to a previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2296700/...
... and how the senior dev recently took it up a notch.
To recap: Back then the senior dev in our two-man project prepared tasks for me so thoroughly they became typing monkey jobs. He described what to do and how to do it in minute detail in the JIRA tasks.
I talked to him back then how this is too detailed. I also talked to our boss, who agreed to nudge mr. senior in the right direction and to make it clear he expects teamwork.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. An existing feature will get extended greatly, needing some rework in our backend project. Senior and me had a phone call about what to do and some unclear details in the feature spec. I was already frustrated with the call because he kept saying "No, don't ask that! That actually makes sense, let's just do it as the spec says" and "Don't refactor! We didn't request a budget for that from our customer". Like wtf, really? You don't consider refactoring part of our job? You don't think actually understanding the task improves the implementation? Dude...
We agreed this is a task for one person and I'd do it. It took me the rest of the day to wrap my head around the task and the corresponding existing code. It had some warts, like weird inheritance hierarchies and control flow jumping up and down said hierarchy, but nothing too bad. I made a mental note to still refactor this, just as much as necessary to make my task easier. However... the following day, I got an email from mr. senior. "I refactored the code after all, in preparation for your task". My eyebrows raised.
Firstly, he had made the inheritance hierarchy *worse*. Classic mistake: Misusing inheritance for code reuse. More control flow jumping up and down like rabid bunnies. Pressed on that matter, he replied "it's actually not that bad". Yeah, good work! Your refactoring didn't make things worse! That's an achievement worthy of being engraved on your tombstone. And didn't he say "no refactoring"? Apparently rules are unfortunate things that happen to other people.
But secondly, he prepared classes and methods for me to implement. No kidding. Half-implemented methods with "// TODO: Feature x code goes here" and shit. Like, am I a toddler to you? Do you really think "if you don't let me do things myself I feel terribly frustrated and undervalued" is best answered with giving me LESS things to do myself? And what happened to our boss' instruction to split the task so each of us can work on his parts?
So, this was a couple of days ago. Since then, I've been sitting in my chair doing next to nothing. My brain has just... shut down. I'm reading the spec, thinking "that would require a new REST endpoint", and then nothing happens. I'm looking at the integration test stubs ("// TODO: REST call goes here") and my mind just stays blank, like a fresh unpainted canvas. I've lost all my drive.
I don't even know what to do. Should I assign the task back to him and tell him to go fuck himself? Should I write my boss I'm suddenly retarded? Could I call in sick for a year or so? I dunno... I can barely think straight. What should I do and how?5 -
I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.
My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.
I got my first computer when I was 16.
Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.
Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.
My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.
My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.
They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).
They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.
I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.
Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.
long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"
TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!4 -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.1 -
Maybe not specifically "dev" but certainly a relatable rant to anyone here:
Moms small business gets "hacked," or standard spyware phone call from India let us save you for only $149 kind of crap. She obviously gets upset had a panic attack and thinks about all the sensitive shit on their network. Then, ONLY THEN, does she call me and the rest of the cavalry i.e. over payed and undermotivated IT guy to ask what's up why it happened and whose fault is it.
All is well, no ransom paid, no data lost or tangible damage done, but I am positive it will happen again, because it is impossible for people to internalize that they're the problem that money can't fix.
You clicked the unsolicited link. No amount of antivirus bloatware will ever be able to stop the monkey from trying to see what's in the box.
TheBut keep not paying me or people more qualified than me, and then scream and yell and pout when your shits gone and we can honestly say with a grin and a clean conscience that there is nothing we can do. -
To put a tiny mechanical switch on the side of my phone that’ll turn of the Do Not Disturb mode. No, not buttons. Standard momentary buttons don’t have a persistent state. I need the state to be persistent even when the phone itself is turned off.
How hard can it be?
Too bad literally every android smartphone since the very first one has that switch, it’s like one of android’s iconic features, and crapple still can’t manage to do this. Clearly they cut on prices, I mean switch is more complicated than a momentary button.10 -
I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?
Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?10 -
i think i will start a thread of my rants against the new mnc laggards that i am supposed to join.
me vs my new job : part 4/n
so today is 29th, and after going through a major EXHAUSTING paperwork for the last 2 days (which included e-signing of papers from a literal govt portal that was down 90% time and i had to manually do polling on it to get it to work), i finally have the onboarding papers ready and i headed to office for laptop collection.
i was told that today the only formality that will happen is the laptop collection, so i scheduled all my personal stuff accordingly and planned to just goto the office, take the laptop and come back home. hardly a work of 3 hours, lets get it done by 11 am.
how the fuck did i forget that this is a sloth company :/
- i reached office at 10, and my spoc was not picking up the phone.
- after multiple tries, he picked up and told me that he is on leave and gave me the number of another.
- the other guy was not picking up, so i called him back. he said that the guy will start his shift at 11, so call him after 11 (?)
- i ended the call and bashed straight into office. asked someone where he sits, went there, and his mates told me that another guy was supposed to attend to me (hopefully i got saved by another redirect, once that guy had picked up his phone)
- what's more, the other guy told me that he had mailed my HR that i should be coming at 2 pm to recieve laptop(!?!) and laptop will not be ready before that.
- my hr fucking didn't tell me this and now its 11.15 and i am sitting in the lobby waiting for my laptop with no food, water or shit inside of me :/
with fuckery like this, I will either surrender and become one of the laggard like them, or become a rebel, just do my work and shit on their timings and redirects, and soon leave for a better shit :/
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previous rants
part 3/n https://devrant.com/rants/6533348/...
somwhat part 2 and 1/n https://devrant.com/rants/6304423/...1 -
I had to do a modular deduplication project that could read, parse and clean up the data.
The data? Personal information: Name, Surname, phone, address and more.
Imagine the zip code in any of the following formats: ####AA, #### AA. Names with and without dashes. Address with(out) spaces, dashes, underscores etc. as well as typos! Now clean it up, and dedup.
But what files have priority over another? What data is newer? How to process address changes?
Deadline: 2 moths, impossible deadline for a (at the time - 4 years ago - rookie developer)
Anyway, night before the deadline, code was running somewhat (Java) and was able to get a Regexed address cleanup of about 70 - 80%.
My boss comes in to check the progress, sits me down next to him and says: Not good enough, let's do it together tonight, it was 4pm, day normally ends at 5pm.
No thank you, I can't do that. if you don't want this code, then I can't meet your deadline.
bye -
web dev is hell, really, how hard can it be to add a background-image to the body in a mobile.
seriously, I had it fixed, left bottomx no repeat and contain, just that! as simple as it can be (not really, it would be simple if it hadn't vas at all)
"it works great, but your page can only have one paragraph, more text than that and I will ignore your background in your phone" this is the css talking.
fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it! -
I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.
Okay, great, so what?
The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.
I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.3 -
Sigh. I don't like the methods of first line helpdeskers. Computer problem? Restart it, or.. re-image it. The hell..
I know these are standard practices but I don't like them at all. Just because there's a small issue with a device, you're going to throw everything away? No troubleshooting at all? I don't call that troubleshooting nor helping.
My friend works as first line helpdesk and I told him: "Hey, WhatsApp isn't giving me double checkmarks anymore for my messages to you since last night. It's odd." and his response is: "Restart your phone". My god.. how much more technically ignorant could he be? Everything network-related on my phone is working, including WhatsApp, but no.. "restart your phone". Anyway.4 -
Okay soo I’m not a database guy.. I’m an embedded engineer but I’m helping one of my interns make a hardware tracking database... so we are tracking assembled products (dev samples).. but also tracking the pcbs within the product.. depending on the product it might have more than one pcb or contain other components to track.
The question is how would I set up the relationship in the tables, so depending on the say “type id” of the product it would link to a table full of feilds specfic to that “type”.. say the product is of type phone and has a pcb of this and a camera of that.. blah blah blah.... but say another product is of type “washing machine”.. which has no screen, it has a different pcb, but also has other things..
There would be a type table .. washing machine, phone, tv, camera, pcb, ecu.. etc.. but those type would need their own tables...
I guess the question is how to relate a field to different tables depending on the value of the field... is this portion all done thru query results and logic rather than pure data base schemas?
What would be the question in terms of database lingo to google search the answer lol2 -
Thinking to start smoking 🚬
Never tried it once in 26 years not even a sip even refused temptations from school friends
Now by starting a job, i have no security, ironically. I feel like i stepped at the leap of a bottomless pit and tomorrow i jump into it and fall... and fall....and fall..... No end.
I have no idea how to use ansible and rexify.org and thats what I'll need to use. I have no idea how to do devops with Azure, and thats what ill do. I only build devops with terraform on Aws.
The unknown of 9-5 is frightening me more than starting a business. Paradoxically, i think it would come as a relief to get fired within the first week from failing to complete literally everything
On top of that my blonde gf disappeared yesterday for 3-4 hours. No texts no phone calls. Called for 2 times no answer. Called 3rd time and got a voice message the phone was shut down. 3-4 hours later she said she was with mom at shopping and didnt have internet
I also caught her texting some random guy on instagram. They both have vanish mode enabled (texts delete themselves as soon as you leave the conversation). Confronted her today. She wont tell me the truth. Likes his pics on ig. Keeps lying. On a question "why do you have vanish mode enabled with him?" her answer is "well i guess married men always use vanish mode"
Im tired
Too much shit unraveling. The opening of 2024 already doesnt look good
Why do good people die in accidents or diseases but i dont and i live? Shits unfair. Why doesnt nature/God fucking kill me? I beg to die. I hope to die. I pray for something to kill me. It would come as such a relief.
This life is meaningless and empty to me. typeof(life) yields a void. I dont value it. Its shit. Whether succeed or fail its meaningless. Nihilism was right
I am literally a walking dead. Physically moving but spiritually dead. Mentally lost. I am the captain of a ship in the middle of the ocean who no longer knows where the ship is going
Why cant i just get cancer or something. Can cigarettes help me get it? Cause I'll start consuming that shit right away to speedrun that process
End it17 -
So I'm a 4th year computer science student, and my school has mandatory Co-Op requirements, of which I need to complete an internship for 3 semesters. I have already completed 2 semesters at a tech company, and have continued to work part time for them for the past year. Though, for my last co-op block I wanted to try to go for a bigger more well known company that would look good on my resume after graduation. For several reasons, I was looking for something in the Boston area and I came across two companies that seemed like great places to work at, so I began preparing.
For both companies, the process was very similar: I applied, got a phone interview, completed a coding assignment, made it to the final technical interview. For both technical interviews, I did some research and found the typical prompts that these companies ask. I took a look at both of them and they both involved a relatively simple challenge that involved string manipulation in the language of your choice. Before both interviews I practiced these challenges to make sure I could do them, it was no problem, could do each of them my first try in about 15 minutes. However, when it came to sitting down with their engineers, it was totally different.
Even though I literally practiced the problem before hand, I for some reason kept blanking on things during both interviews. For some reason I was finding it extremely challenging to talk and code at the same time. The first company interview went very well except for the coding portion in which they gave me feedback saying "I didn't seem confident in my coding skills", which is why I didn't get that position. For the second interview I couldn't even finish the assignment in the full hour even though I practiced it beforehand and did it in 15 minutes on my own. It is very frustrating because I feel that out of all the aspects involved in an interview, coding is in reality my strongest, but it just seems completely different when I have to explain what I'm doing while I'm doing it.
Has anyone else experienced this sort of thing? If so, how did you get past it/prepare for it?1 -
since my favourite phone automation app llama is no more i discovered automate. you build your 'scripts' with functional blocks. it's quite fun but debugging is messy.
mildly interesting: implementing a guided setup instead of defining the values directly leaves me with 77% setup and ui vs 23% actual task.1 -
It's these individually tiny annoyances in products and software that together form a huge annoyance.
For example, it's 2022 and Chromium-based web browsers still interrupt an upload when hitting CTRL+S. This is why competition is important. If there was no Firefox, the only major web browsers would, without exception, have this annoyance, since they're all based on Chrmoium.
I remember Chromium for mobile formerly locking scrolling and zooming of the currently viewed page while the next page was loading. Thankfully, this annoyance was removed.
In 2016, the Samsung camera software was updated to show a "camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up window when both front and rear sensors of the smartphone were covered while the camera was launched by pressing the home button twice, on the camera software Samsung bundled with their custom version of Android 6. What's more, if that pointless pop-up was closed by tapping the background instead of the tiny "OK" button or not responded to within five seconds, the camera software would exit itself. Needless to say, this defeats the purpose of a quick launch. It denies quick-launching while the phone is in the pocket, and the time necessary to get the phone out could cause moments to be missed.
Another bad camera behaviour Samsung introduced with the camera software bundled with their customized Android 6 was that if it was launched again shortly after exiting or switching to stand-by mode, it would also exit itself again within a few seconds. It could be that the camera app was initially designed around Android 5.0 in 2015 and then not properly adapted to Android 6.0, and some process management behaviour of Android 6.0 causes this behaviour. But whatever causes it, it is annoying and results in moments to not be captured.
Another such annoyance is that some home screen software for smartphones only allows access to its settings by holding a blank spot not occupied by a shortcut. However, if all home screen pages are full, one either needs to create a new page if allowed by the app, or temporarily remove a shortcut to be able to access the settings.
More examples are: Forced smartphone restart when replacing the SIM card, the minimum window size being far too large in some smartphones with multi-windowing functionality, accidental triggering of burst shot mode that can't be deactivated in the camera software, only showing the estimated number of remaining photos if less than 300 and thus a late warning, transition animations that are too slow, screenshots only being captured when holding a button combination for a second rather than immediately, the terminal emulator being inaccessible for the first three minutes after the smartphone has booted, and the sound from an online advertisement video causing pain from being much louder than the playing video.
Any of these annoyances might appear minor individually, but together, they form a major burden on everyday use. Therefore, developers should eliminate annoyances, no matter how minor they might seem.
The same also applies for missing features. The individual removal of a feature might not seem like a big of a deal, but removing dozens of small features accumulates to a significant lack of functionality, undermining the sense of being able to get work done with that product or software when that feature is unexpectedly needed. Examples for a products that pruned lots of functionality from its predecessor is the Samsung Galaxy S6, and newer laptops featuring very few USB ports. Web browsers have removed lots of features as well. Some features can be retrofitted with extensions, but they rely on a third-party developer maintaining compatibility. If many minor-seeming features are removed, users will repeatedly hit "sorry, this product/software can not do that anymore" moments.