@Devintrix , congrats and happy lifes with your wife. this joke is for you :)

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began running unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during system initialization, where it monitors all other system activity. Applications such as PokerNight 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5 and Monday Night football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run some of my other favorite applications. I am thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but un-install does not work on this program.

Can you help me please?

Thanks,

Joe

——————————————————–
Dear Joe:

This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely a “UTILITIES & ENTERTAINMENT” program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and designed by its creator to run everything.

It is unlikely you would be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating files within your system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0 so nothing is gained.

It is impossible to un-install, delete, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this. Some have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system.

I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and just deal with the situation. Having Wife 1.0 installed myself, I might also suggest you read the entire section regarding General Partnership Faults (GPFs). You must assume all responsibility for faults and problems that might occur, regardless of their cause. The best course of action will be to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE. The system will run smoothly as long as you take the blame for all the GPFs.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but very high maintenance. Consider buying additional software to improve the performance of Wife 1.0. I recommend Flowers 2.1, Jewelry 2.2, and Chocolates 5.0.

Do not, under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This is not a supported application for Wife 1.0 and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support

I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...

Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

*deep breath*

Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.

*deep breath*

Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)

In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.

There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.

Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.

It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.

However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

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.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.

No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.

If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.

You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.

Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your offshores, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.

One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.

But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

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.

This story starts over two years ago... I think I'm doomed to repeat myself till the end of time...

Feb 2014
[I'm thrust into the world of Microsoft Exchange and get to learn PowerShell]

Me: I've been looking at email growth and at this rate you're gonna run out of disk space by August 2014. You really must put in quotas and provide some form of single-instance archiving.
Management: When we upgrade to the next version we'll allocate more disk, just balance the databases so that they don't overload in the meantime.

[I write custom scripts to estimate mailbox size patterns and move mailboxes around to avoid uneven growth]

Nov 2014
Me: We really need to start migration to avoid storage issues. Will the new version have Quotas and have we sorted out our retention issues?
Management: We can't implement quotas, it's too political and the vendor we had is on the nose right now so we can't make a decision about archiving. You can start the migration now though, right?
Me: Of course.

May 2015
Me: At this rate, you're going to run out of space again by January 2016.
Management: That's alright, we should be on track to upgrade to the next version by November so that won't be an issue 'cos we'll just give it more disk then.

[As time passes, I improve the custom script I use to keep everything balanced]

Nov 2015
Me: We will run out of space around Christmas if nothing is done.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: The question is not how much space... it's when do you want the existing storage to last?
Management: October 2016... we'll have the new build by July and start migration soon after.
Me: In that case, you need this many hundreds of TB
Storage: It's a stretch but yes, we can accommodate that.

[I don't trust their estimate so I tell them it will last till November with the added storage but it will actually last till February... I don't want to have this come up during Xmas again. Meanwhile my script is made even more self-sufficient and I'm proud of the balance I can achieve across databases.]

Oct 2016 (last week)
Me: I note there is no build and the migration is unlikely since it is already October. Please be advised that we will run out of space by February 2017.
Management: How much space do you need?
Me: Like last time, how long do you want it to last?
Management: We should have a build by July 2017... so, August 2017!
Me: OK, in that case we need hundreds more TB.
Storage: This is the last time. There's no more storage after August... you already take more than a PB.
Management: It's OK, the build will be here by July 2017 and we should have the political issues sorted.

Sigh... No doubt I'll be having this conversation again in July next year.

On the up-shot, I've decided to rewrite my script to make it even more efficient because I've learnt a lot since the script's inception over two years ago... it is soooo close to being fully automated and one of these days I will see the database growth graphs produce a single perfect line showing a balance in both size and growth. I live for that Nirvana.

"Windows can't update because you don't have enough disk space"

HOW ABOUT YOU STOP FUCKING POPPING UP A GIANT UNFUCKOFFABLE OVERLAY IN THE MIDDLE OF MY VIDYA GAMES FOR THE 10000th TIME?

I fucking know I have no disk space, if you complain one more fucking time, I'll make disk space -- by deleting you.

(I'm joking, linux/mac game support is so fucking trash)

There’s a junior on my team, who has an ego problem.

Within 6-8 months, they have not progressed much, up to the point they still struggle with language and framework syntax.

Yet, they want to get the credit for doing big and important tasks, the ones they have no clue at all how to execute.

Our team tried to break more the tasks and tickets almost to the point of a tutorial. Junior got upset and complained that they did not want the tasks to be broken for them.

If we give space, tasks take forever to get completed. If we try to pair, Junior does everything in their power to cut the meeting short and again take forever to complete anything.

If we prioritize our own tasks, Junior complains that nobody pairs/assist them.

Took one for the team and started to work on finding ways to get this wonderful person to learn. Junior does not learn. In fact, almost feels like things enter from one ear and leave from the other instantly. Despite being repeated multiple times. Chewed. Presented in all sorts of way. You name it, I’ve tried.

Yesterday was the last drop. They fucking rolled their eyes while was explaining something.

This person is dead for me and I will make my personal crusade to not go out of my tasks to help them.

Thanks for coming to my TED rant.

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.

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

Lead dev: Hey boss, you really do like Python right?

Me: No

Lead dev: Well it's cuz I was think....wait what? WTF do you mean no, you have automated a fuckload of BS with Python and we are still using it, why tf would you use Python if you don't like it?

Me: I like it enough for the automation scripts that we have and for parsing documents or generating glue scripts, its already installed in every server that we have, so testing bs in dev and then using them in prod is cake, it doesn't mean I LOVE python, I like it for what we use it.

Lead dev: Well ain't already bash and perl installed as well?

Me: Do you know bash and or perl?

Lead dev: No, don't you?....

Me: No......

L Dev: (using a Jim Carrey impersonation) WELLL ALLRIGTHY THEN! What is the other language that you used for X project?

Me: Clojure, do you remember that one?

* he said paren paren paren paren yes paren i space paren do close paren close paren etc etc
L Dev: (((((((yes (i (do)))))))) and nevermind, I'll get back to working more with Python

Me: das what I fucking thought esse

I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.

8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.

Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.

No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.

Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.

I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).

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.

Money isn't everything.

When I graduated, I chose the job I have now because of the pay and benefits. A couple years into it, and I realize now what a mistake that was. After my first year teaching myself Apex and automating most of my team's work, I hardly spend any time as a developer because of the low number of jobs at the company that allow me to do that level of work within the first five years of employment. I've consistently asked my supervisor if I could move into a more technical space with proof of my work as reasoning to no avail. If your job pays a lot but isn't challenging, you can wind up being just as upset as if you had to work 60-70 hrs/week.

Jim comes in and tells me that server RENEGADE-DB1 has no more space left and that he tried to remove a few ridiculous sized log files, but that the system wouldn't allow him. So he used some 3rd party tool to shutdown the processes that used those log files and then succesfully removed them.

Now the database is not working and Jim needs my help.

Hello darkness my old friend.

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

!rant
So the other day, my mother came to visit me after a while of not seeing each other. And one thing we used to do together was go searching through old weird junk stores. We go searching through one, and there was a box of floppy discs. I was excited, because I haven't seen one since I was a little kid. I brought it to her attention, and she said, "Wow. A floppy disc!" I laughed and read the disc aloud, "Oh man. Only 1MB." Then proceeded to laugh even more. And she said "I remember thinking 'theres no way anyone would ever take up that much space!'"
That just absolutely blows my mind haha.

Google can you fucking not just kill off random projects that still have a very active userbase!!!
I know you want to merge the play music streaming with youtube music. But that is no reason to kill off the default music player on Android. Cause, y'know, A FUCKTONNE OF PPL STILL USE OFFLINE MUSIC!!!!
And to add more insult to this, Play Music is a default app on pretty much all Android phones. This means it cannot be uninstalled at all. (Unless you root) So thanks for the waste of space!!!

Coworker: so once the algorithm is done I will append new columns in the sql database and insert the output there

Me: I don't like that, can we put the output in a separate table and link it using a foreign key. Just to avoid touching the original data, you know, to avoid potential corruption.

C: Yes sure.

< Two days later - over text >

C: I finished the algo, i decided to append it to the original data in order to avoid redundancy and save on space. I think this makes more sense.

Me: ahdhxjdjsisudhdhdbdbkekdh

No. Learn this principal:
" The original data generated by the client, should be treated like the god damn Bible! DO NOT EVER CHANGE ITS SCHEMA FOR A 3RD PARTY CALCULATION! "

Put simply: D.F.T.T.O
Don't. Fucking. Touch. The. Origin!

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

I wrote a prototype for a program to do some basic data cleaning tasks in Go. The idea is to just distribute the files with the executable on our shared network to our team (since it is small enough, no github bullshit needed for this) and they can go from there.

Felt experimental, so I decided to try out F# since I have always been interested with it and for some reason Microsoft adopted it into their core net framework.

I shit you not, from 185 lines of Go code, separated into proper modules etc not to mention the additional packages I downloaded (simple things for CSV reading bla bla)

To fucking 30 lines of F# that could probably be condensed more if I knew how to do PROPER functional programming. The actual code is very much procedural with very basic functional composition, so it could probably be even less, just more "dense"

I am amazed really. I do not like that namespace pollution happens all over F# since importing System.IO gives you a bunch of shit that you wouldn't know where it is coming from unless you fuck enough with Ionide and the docs. But man.....

No need for dotnet run to test this bitch, just highlight it on the IDE, alt enter and WHAM you have the repl in front of you, incremental quasi like Lisp changes on the code can be REPL changed this way, plethora of .NET BCL wonders in it, and a single point of documentation as long as you stay in standard .net

I am amazed and in love, plus finding what I wanted to do was a fucking cakewalk.

Downside: I work in a place in which Python is seen as magic and PHP, VB.NEt and C# is the end all be all of languages. If me goes away or dies there will be no one else in this side of the state to fuck with F#

This language needs to be studied more. Shit can be so compact, but I do feel that one needs to really know enough of functional programming to be good at it. It is really not a pure language like Haskell (then again, haskell is the only "mainstream" pure functional language ain't it not?) but still, shit is really nice and I really dig what Microhard is doing in terms of the .net framework.

Will provide later findings. My entire team is on the Microsoft space, we do have Linux servers, but porting the code to generate the necessary executables for those servers if needed should be a walk in the park. I am just really intrigued by how many lines of code I was able to cut down from the Go application.

Please note that this could also mean that I am a shit Golang dev, but the cut down of nil err checkings do come somewhere.

Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s

Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.

> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR

> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things

At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.

Ready?

3

2

1

> SAME FUCKING ERROR

In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.

If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it

me: boss the server is full, no more disk space

boss: run my cleaning tool

me: it didnt clean anything!

boss: fix my cleaning tool

me: *facepalm* -_-

I’m a team lead in the tech team, myself and another team lead manage the on call processes for the department, so when stuff breaks we need to fix it. I assume there is sufficient documentation available for me to fix a process that is not mine.

one of the other managers processes breaks. He’s on annual leave and is away for another week. I attempt to fix the process. No documentation. What do i do?

I go to my manager the next day and tell her the process is broken and I can’t fix it because there’s no documentation and I don’t know what the full impacts are. She agreed we should leave it until he comes back from AL.

He comes back a week later. I tell him the process is broken and it’s been failing since he went on AL.

Him: we had a handover before I went on holiday
Me: no, you showed me where the ‘documentation’ was. Said documentation is not defined enough and is out of date. I didn’t want to break it further by trying to repair it when it’s not completely critical
Him: but it is critical, it has to run every day
Me: so why doesn’t it say that in the documentation?
Him: ............
Me: can you fix it please
Him: no, I’ve got too much to do having just come back from holiday
Me: more critical that a process that has to run EVERY DAY and has been failing for the past 10 DAYS??
Him: I’ll see if I have time

2 hours later...

Him: Lets put in some time for handover so you can understand the process. Is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, you tell me, it’s your process, you know what’s involved and how long it should take to explain
Him: well is an hour long enough?
Me: I don’t know, it takes however long it takes you to explain it
Him: I’m asking you
...........

At this point I’m getting more and more angry, how can you not know how long your process is gonna take to explain when you’re the one that wrote it?! I fully well know that it’s gonna take longer than an hour because it’s an SSIS package that looks like a plate of spaghetti, you spend 15 minutes working out what box flows to where before even looking at any SQL, and he’s still asking me how long it’s gonna take and distracting me from my ACTUAL critical work

Man is a waste of space, so quick to give you work that isn’t his but never takes responsibility for his own... honestly have no clue whatsoever how he became a manager....

This rant doesn’t seem like much reading it back but I swear it’s the last in a looooonnngggg like of his fuck ups that other people have had to deal with 🙄🙄

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP

Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

TLDR: Read the post.

Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.

I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.

I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.

I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.

Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.

As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.

At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.

its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.

The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.

One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...

I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to put a 64 gb ssd in a laptop needs to rethink their decisions.

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.

I am back with some more emotional shit.

So tomorrow is my last working day at my second employer where essentially I'll just walk into the 10 seater serviced office to drop my laptop in a cupboard because no one else is here.

So today, an hour ago, they had a virtual farewell for me and everyone spoke of me highly with specific examples.

Well that's not what this post is about, but the emphasis is that I am still in dual mind of whether I made the right decision to quit my second employer so soon (in just 10 months)?

If I had stayed for two months more:
1. I'd gotten a hike this week
2. More RSUs in that hike along with cash
3. Joining RSUs would have vested for the cliff period of 1 year
4. Tenure would be at least a year
5. Would have found a better job with higher pay (on the new hiked salary).

I surprisingly got the grip of the product and that's when I decided to quit.

The reason I quit is I wanted to optimise for WLB and timezone with better team culture.

While the next job is surely a company I wanted for a long time and that too in B2C space, I really lost my affection for that role and that's where it came to me upfront and I rejected them initially before picking up the offer again.

My second employer is a very global and one of the largest brands. Really wanted to stick around and never got to enjoy the benefits which others did.

Only time can tell, because when I chased something I never got it, when I stopped, it came to me.

And what I am chasing now is something I am unable to achieve.

Why is life so fucked. Seems like I am about to lose one of my biggest and only life and career dream.

Maybe I fucked up this decision. Maybe not. Only time can tell.

!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.

MTP is utter garbage and belongs to the technological hall of shame.

MTP (media transfer protocol, or, more accurately, MOST TERRIBLE PROTOCOL) sometimes spontaneously stops responding, causing Windows Explorer to show its green placebo progress bar inside the file path bar which never reaches the end, and sometimes to whiningly show "(not responding)" with that white layer of mist fading in. Sometimes lists files' dates as 1970-01-01 (which is the Unix epoch), sometimes shows former names of folders prior to being renamed, even after refreshing. I refer to them as "ghost folders". As well known, large directories load extremely slowly in MTP. A directory listing with one thousand files could take well over a minute to load. On mass storage and FTP? Three seconds at most. Sometimes, new files are not even listed until rebooting the smartphone!

Arguably, MTP "has" no bugs. It IS a bug. There is so much more wrong with it that it does not even fit into one post. Therefore it has to be expanded into the comments.

When moving files within an MTP device, MTP does not directly move the selected files, but creates a copy and then deletes the source file, causing both needless wear on the mobile device' flash memory and the loss of files' original date and time attribute. Sometimes, the simple act of renaming a file causes Windows Explorer to stop responding until unplugging the MTP device. It actually once unfreezed after more than half an hour where I did something else in the meantime, but come on, who likes to wait that long? Thankfully, this has not happened to me on Linux file managers such as Nemo yet.

When moving files out using MTP, Windows Explorer does not move and delete each selected file individually, but only deletes the whole selection after finishing the transfer. This means that if the process crashes, no space has been freed on the MTP device (usually a smartphone), and one will have to carefully sort out a mess of duplicates. Linux file managers thankfully delete the source files individually.

Also, for each file transferred from an MTP device onto a mass storage device, Windows has the strange behaviour of briefly creating a file on the target device with the size of the entire selection. It does not actually write that amount of data for each file, since it couldn't do so in this short time, but the current file is listed with that size in Windows Explorer. You can test this by refreshing the target directory shortly after starting a file transfer of multiple selected files originating from an MTP device. For example, when copying or moving out 01.MP4 to 10.MP4, while 01.MP4 is being written, it is listed with the file size of all 01.MP4 to 10.MP4 combined, on the target device, and the file actually exists with that size on the file system for a brief moment. The same happens with each file of the selection. This means that the target device needs almost twice the free space as the selection of files on the source MTP device to be able to accept the incoming files, since the last file, 10.MP4 in this example, temporarily has the total size of 01.MP4 to 10.MP4. This strange behaviour has been on Windows since at least Windows 7, presumably since Microsoft implemented MTP, and has still not been changed. Perhaps the goal is to reserve space on the target device? However, it reserves far too much space.

When transfering from MTP to a UDF file system, sometimes it fails to transfer ZIP files, and only copies the first few bytes. 208 or 74 bytes in my testing.

When transfering several thousand files, Windows Explorer also sometimes decides to quit and restart in midst of the transfer. Also, I sometimes move files out by loading a part of the directory listing in Windows Explorer and then hitting "Esc" because it would take too long to load the entire directory listing. It actually once assigned the wrong file names, which I noticed since file naming conflicts would occur where the source and target files with the same names would have different sizes and time stamps. Both files were intact, but the target file had the name of a different file. You'd think they would figure something like this out after two decades, but no. On Linux, the MTP directory listing is only shown after it is loaded in entirety. However, if the directory has too many files, it fails with an "libmtp: couldn't get object handles" error without listing anything.

Sometimes, a folder appears empty until refreshing one more time. Sometimes, copying a folder out causes a blank folder to be copied to the target. This is why on MTP, only a selection of files and never folders should be moved out, due to the risk of the folder being deleted without everything having been transferred completely.

(continued below)

Hello my Friends.

TL;DR i meditate as I draw, here’s the result. What about you?!

Does any of you exercise on any kind of meditation? Not the popular meditation forms, more alternative meditation? I. E. walking meditation, dancing meditation, reading medidation, etc. ? Remember, it’s all about being here and now and letting go of any pre-programmed thoughts, right?

I myself, have a ritual which is performes once-twice a year. I call it drawing meditation. When daylight ends, and the moon rises, I sit at my desk in a dark room with one light, which is hanging aboce the white sheet of paper. I take black pencil, turn on some music mildly and turn off my thought receiving part of the brain. I hear every thought which is passing by, but I have no attachment to it. My hands are drawing, without my interception. It feels amazing, and I believe this method helps me to clean up some space in subconscious file system.

This activity of mine, takes strangly short/long time. Once I’ve sat for about 16hours, once 6hours.

Furthermore, I’m always amazed by the abstract art pieces which are the end result. I’m attaching the image of the last drawing made in this way to the post.

Can I hear what you see in it?

My project manager just had a project review at a bar because there was no space at the office. There are literally so many people at the office that we're out of chairs. And space. In a few days three more developers are scheduled to arrive. I don't know where we will put them.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

story time:
I use onedrive for sharing some files and shit. So one day one of my folders, which I got from a downloaded zip, caused an error "files couldn't be synced because of unallowed character in the title".
Turns out there was a space at the end of the folder title. I change the name, I get some error.
"Okay, no problem, I don't need that folder anymore anyway" So I delete it, doesn't work, the error message reads "Can't delete folder because it no longer exists.". "What the hell" try deleting it some more. Emptying it before deleting. Deleting the parent folder. I try formatting it before deleting. Nothing works.
Deleting from the online onedrive client causes it to briefly disappears but refreshing places it back right where it came from.

So I resort to my last hope, customer support.
I explain the whole thing.

I get a reply. Oh boy.

I get explained that if the recycle bin is full, the file will be placed back.
After that, I get an explanation on how to remove a file xD

Thanks OneDrive Team, really helpful.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

fuck time zones and time changes, why the fuck we don’t have one time on the planet and one date that is just day.
No month, no years - all the complexity would be gone, day wouldn’t have 24 hours but it would be something more precise, there won’t be a second

time that earth goes around sun is

365,25964 days

31558432896 milliseconds

we should start count time differently so it’s not relative in space time continuum, what should be relative is the mass

This will definitely trigger many but the truth regardless of how you feel is the greatest programmers are those who understand both the hardware level and software .. only then are you more than a dev or programmer.. you are an engineer...

I challenge the devs who dis believe to go out and learn to build circuits, write optimized, efficient bare metal code.: no sdk.. no api... no drivers ..remove the unneeded abstraction layers that have blinded you...build it yourself, expand your potential and understanding..

Not only will you become more valuable overall, but you will write better code as you are more conscious of performance and space and physics of the physical layer.

I’m not talking about Arduino or raspie

Those who stand strong that high level abstraction languages and use of third party apis is a sufficient sustainable platform of development are blind to reality.. the more people who only know those levels, the less people pushing the industry of the low level.., which is the foundation of everything in the industry.. without that low level software the high level abstractions and systems cannot run

Why did we have huge technology advancements from 70s to early 2000s.... because more people in our industry understood the hardware layer..: wrote the software at the less abstracted layers..

Yeah it takes longer todo things at that low level abstraction.. but good robust products that change the world and industry don’t take a few week or months to build.....

Take this with what you will... I’m just trying to open the eyes of the blind developers to the true nature and reality of our industry

porra; caralho; toma no cu.

this fucking shit xamarin. I wish the ass who programed the xamarin vs2017 integration to go fuck off.

srsly, I just want to fucking code this fucking fucker VS2017 keep shitting all around me

first I was gonna install it. didn't install because no memory left. fair enough, my fault there.

cleaned 35 gbs.

finish installing VS, with xamarin. FIRST GOD DAMN TIME I create fucking project, 2 fucking errors and 3 warnings. I DIDN'T EVEN TYPE A COMMA.

ok, tried fucking it. it seems to be conflict between version of Android and xamarin forms. fucker you it shouldn't be like this. anyway.

tried downloading the updated Android version.

it failed at 80%! what error you ask? missing fucking space ok, fuck that thing is huge, ok, my fault again. uninstalled all programs I was not using, all projects I'm not current working on. more fucking 30GB free. tried again. ANDROID IS TOO FUVKING HUGE CAN'T INSTALL IN 30GB!!!

Ok. instead of updating android, gonna downgrade xamarin, can't downgrade. ok gonna remove and install an early version.

unistalled. CAN'T FIND XAMARIN DLLS.

I was like, fuck this project, gonna start a new one. ok, all seems fine, for some weird reason. Except no. I try adding a new page, ops, APPARENTLY VS2017 CAN'T LOAD A GODDAMN .XAML

Ok, I can create a .cs page. done, except now I get a fucking timeout error. fuck.

I search the internet for a workaround, see a guy saying I could manually add a .xaml + .cs by creating this files and then adding them to the proj file.

did it. I go again, everything seems fine. but now I can't freaking reference the damn page.

I'm fucking losing my mind here.

In the mean time I have to turn in this project at the end of the week AND I CAN'T FUCKING OPEN THE GOD DAMN FREKING PROJECT PROPERLY!

FUCK. MY. LIFE.
FUCK XAMARIM AS WELL
FUCK VISUAL STUDIO
FUCK MICROSOFT
FUCK THAT DAMN SSD
FUCK THAT BOSS WHO THINK THAT A 128GB SSD IS ENOUGH
FUCK IT ALL...

Saturday 9.00 AM. I was sleeping, my colleague (on holiday) sent me a text: "We got a problem on our system, probably we ran out of space". I checked the log and found out that several cron jobs failed due to not enough space on the disk. I started deleting some unnecessary logs (we're paranoid) and ended up to squeeze the vm like a lemon to save some space. Sent an email to the sysadmin, "We got to add more space ASAP, users are getting 500 errror for almost everything". Silence. I thought to myself: "Until monday we're safe..". I did a df (96%) and sent a screen to the sysadmin, just to be sure that we understood each other. Finally monday comes, nobody worries about the issue. At noon I literally takled the guy of IT dept. "Yeah, we read your email. I think the sysadmin didn't take you seriously". "Why? Which part of 'we're running out of space' isn't serious?!!!". "He just told me that we have unlimited space on that vm". Unlimited space...sure.... "Right.....the disk is at 96%, buuuuut if he said so No news to worry. Don't call me if everything burns. Have a good day!!!"

Product Owner keeps demanding developers do items outside of Sprint, deleted story points to get extra items in, signs off holiday for my staff, even hired some unqualified developers, etc. for my team (I'm the Dev Manager). I'm blessed to report into the PMO who backs up the Product Owner, in front my own reports, meaning I have no authority. What would you do?

PMO has decided that if we drag items from Sprint to Backlog when they reach SIT, we have more space for Dev items in the Sprint :-| Though he expects developers to actually do the SIT work, including writing the SIT tests :-|

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

Story time:

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

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

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

I needed to know why...

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

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

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

Smart

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

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

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

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

Spent the last half hour helping my wife over text trying to "fix" FireFox. She said any site she tries to go to just "spins and spins". Chrome, Edge, all work fine. Tried the trusty 'ipconfig /flushdns'.

Me: "Open the command line, by selecting Start and start typing cmd. You'll see the Command Prompt application. Right click and run it as an administrator"
<15 seconds later>
Her: "Do I left click or right click to run as adminstrator?"
Me: "Left click. You'll get a pop message, just click yes"
<about 10 seconds later>
Her: "This thing popped up, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
<more waiting>
Her: "Says something about making changes to my computer, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
Her: "Is it going to make changes? Are you sure I should click yes?"
Me: "YES!!"
Her: "Don't yell at me. You're supposed to know how to do this, not me. What do I do now?"
Me: "Type ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'Type ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, just ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "Yep, just put a space between ipconfig /flushdns and press enter"
Her: "Is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of ' ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, the space goes between ipconfig /flushdns, not before."
Her: "You're not making yourself clear. OK, now what?"
Me: "Press enter"
Her: "It didn't do anything."
Me: "Did you press enter?"
<more waiting>
Her: "OK, it's done. Now what?"
Me: "Restart FireFox"
Her: "Still not working. Just spins and spins."
<not 100% sure restarted FireFox>
Me: "I'll look at it when I get home."

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!

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code

It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining

There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?

The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it

So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point

Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it

It's saying there's no disk space left, how do I download more disk space

You know what I hate more than bugs/shitty docs/no VCS?

Recoding the whole damn thing in another language, from ground up to do exactly the same shit. Why WHY must developers shit hundreds of solutions into space only to say "Huh, look at my software, it was I who developed it." No, you simply recoded it and wasted your time and everyone else's time searching for a solution.

I'm very short tempered at the moment.

A lot like Dr Cox in Scrubs.

And really ... You mother fucking stupid idiotic developers with your tendency to discuss absolutely everything just to not have to work for a dozen more minutes...

But ok. Let's discuss.

But even that seems to be absolutely impossible for you little shitheads.

Instead of discussing solutions, nooooooooo....

We're grown up developers so we discuss how the baddy manager hurt our lil feelings by saying that we're morons for wasting all the fucking time without coming up with a solution.

Now my lil cry babies, once the baddy manager got your pacifiers so at least once in an hour my migraine finally calms down for not hearing your bitching pathetic lil whiny noises...

Face it. Over the years you collected a huge ton of mother fucking tech debt because no one of you actually took a bit of time to use that empty space in your head to think at least a mu further than the dumb jira task you were given.

And yes. That ends badly.

And yes. As it is now in a state of cluster fuck, guess what. You have to work. You get money for it, remember?

And yes. if you would stop moping and bitching and crying and being a pathetic lil piece of shit, you'd realize we could come up with solutions very fast.

But nooo... Let's talk about our feelings.

And how we are over worked.

And how nothing works.

Cause yes. That will be the hail mary that saves us all.

Let me give u a hint: it's a mother fucking waste of time bitches.

I think it's time I put a pacifier not only in your mouth, but arse too. Maybe it helps overcoming the anal and oral phase of childhood so we can at least have something close to adult talk.

*breathes in*

Gooozfraba.

A meeting to redefine the definition of done. Which a "senior" programmer threw in.

3 hours after we are still there to "define"... All of this because this developer and a couple more want to keep a physical board which has no space for a "testing" section, so the tasks need either to be done-but-not-really and this is technically wrong (who cares?) or in-progress-but-not-really which is technically wrong (again, who cares?).

Just effin find a bigger board and don't waste 3 hours of my life and/or start thinking pragmatically and accept tasks can move backwards or have a ticket saying "testing" stuck to them, ffs!

The funny part? This dev is probably one of the grumpiest devs I met when you talk about meetings which are actually useful.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

So despite being able to do my entire job much more effectively from home, it's been demanded that I go in 2 days a week that "show my face".

Upon getting to the office there's no parking spaces, I go round the carpark again and woohoo there's a space!! Awesome..

I come back a few hours later to work the afternoon from home and find 2 cars double parked behind me..

Both owners seem to be off site currently.......... I guess this is my life now sitting in the car park waiting for people to move their cars 😂

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

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.

Our company hired a "Human resource consulting" to help with our internal processes and policies. Yesterday they showed us an Excel that we should fill when we travel to attend meetings, events, courses, etc.

This spreadsheet... OH, THIS SPREADSHEET... you should've seen that.

Most of the "labels" of the "fields" were writen with terms that we do not use in our daily basis. The fields were ambiguous. You shout put a number on the Transportation quantity (ex.: 5) but have no space to describe which transport you will use (bus, metro, uber... so... 5 what?). When we asked which name shoud go on the field "superior" (director, pm, scrum master...) the woman from this consulting said "oh, I don't believe you're asking about this" (and since then, she became more rude by the end of the meeting).

We care for quality in our apps, and UI/UX is a big thing in our company. The last thing we want is need to read a f*#1n manual to fill a spreadsheet. Make it intuitive and you will not need an hour and a half to explain how to fill this obsolete form.

It's sad to think that this person was hired to improve our company, but did not bother to understand the company's culture (and values, and terms) first.

No wonder why Google Chrome takes up alot of RAM when running, I've just seen chromiums dev requirements:

System requirements

- A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.

- At least 100GB of free disk space on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. FAT32 will not work, as some of the Git packfiles are larger than 4GB.

- An appropriate version of Visual Studio, as described below.
Windows 7 or newer.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Update on my devRant client SwiftUIRant:

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

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

What do you think?

The more i work dev stuff in web3 the more i realize how cancerous this space is. Shits terrible over here. Not only is it extremely difficult to program but the biggest.... Idk whats the best word to use, irritating? Annoying? Stressing? Degenerate? Biggest shit thats happening are scams scams and fucking scams. Honestly you never know who's legit and who's about to scam

A 16 year old kid rug pulled 6 nft collections and stole over 10 million dollars so far. He's even arguing on twitter publicly claiming he's the Batman

People are robbing everyone for millions of dollars

You've probably heard about Luna ponzi scheme that collapsed and the founder stole BILLIONS of dollars

And the worst part about all of this:

THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES! WTF?

So why the fuck should i work a job and try to be legit if i can scam degenerates for millions of dollars because there are no consequences??

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I work as pharmacist, but code as hobby and recently change job. Have far more options to improve work enviroment, but IT guy sucks balls so much.

Better no password, because you have to remember them.

Some users don't have privilages to do some things, but everyone knows boss password with all privilages.

It guys connects via teamviewet whn I check prescriptions with quite vulnerable data and after my step in he responds that he creates this Pharmacy store and has deal with boss to access database and others.

Due lack of controls there is working against law all the time

Small city so everyone knows everyone and you have to be ultra polite to doctors and after my little unpleasent situation doctor starts to be mad at all employers.

It guy was asked to change disc space on OS drive, but he replies that it will takie at least 2 hours and he doesn't have time, but it takes me 15min top and he was mad at me.

Ffffff....

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

Fucking java library publishing. It's a nightmare. You have to fucking own a domain to publish a shit onto jcenter/bintray/whatever. You have to own the domain, that your lib's package name is. And you MUST verify it, otherwise you won't publish anything. Or you can shit allover your lib with package name like com.github.dumbcoder.mycoollib.

You must to create a ticket for some shitheads that are going to verify your shit for two weeks. They gonna ask you for source.jar, docs.jar and whatever shit.jar they need.

What THE fuck? Who was the asshole that decided name packages in reverse domain name? No FUCKING more ecosystem has such a bullshit. In .net you just make a lib, create a free nuget account, fill some basic info and boom! you have .net package published. Same for npm and rust for example.

Because the fucking package name should be just for structure not for a some dick to own it. Namespace is name-fucking-space.
FUCK JAVA.

There is no more space in my server.

Monitoring is buggy.

About a year, maybe two years ago I stupidly spill drink on keyboard, immediate RIP.

Got myself a new one right away, obviously. Didn't have much money at the time so I cheaped out on it, got a piece of trash that can't read more than two inputs at once. Like say I can't hold down shift, press W and then space to jump, shit like that. I developed a little muscle memory to get around it, just quickly switching between running and jumping. Dumbest shit ever, it kills your momentum.

Anyway I don't mind that but I've started noticing the caps are disintegrating. Particularly Meta, Shift, Arrows, they're just destroyed. The Enter keycap flat-out shattered. I can see which key I hit the most by how much the plastic has... well, melted and caved in. my touch is fire (baby) oh yeah.

So, go into normie internet to look for stuff to buy. Yay consumerism, everything sucks. Look at these pieces o fshit. And these fucking websites man. Who designed this your mother, don't answer, your mother would've done a WAY better job. Ugh. Fucking bullshit.

And why is everything "gamer" and has that horrible rainbow aRrGeebEe shit. Dafuq, boi. This is some of the most visually displeasing shit I've ever seen, and I am a shit poster by trade, I have witnessed some of the most cavernous depths of the internet's unholy butthole. I thought bleeding through the urethra was painful, but no, this is somehow worse. I am experiencing such profound disgust it has affected me physically. Also am I just a ranting geezer at 31, heh, well best to be a rapidly mentally aging son of a bitch than a fucking jerkwad with an atrocious taste that somehow gets picked up and circlejackaloped off by an entire fucking industry.

But enough about your terrorized rectum, I have money to spend. Is that mechanical shit worth it I wonder. Like those oh so ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ shitbags that take keys away from you and yet charge you more for it. Like I don't care about it being cute, will the keys witstand the ecstasy of my flaming fingers. I type a lot, and I mean a lot, man. Have you ever seen my repos, millions upon millions of pseudo pornographic keystrokes spent on shit that does nothing, I am unashamed to admit it, now where is my medal of sin bestowed on me by the finest of malignant sponsors.

Anyway, fuck this rant, I lost my train of thought midway through and it became an abomination that I am too stubborn to hit delete on.

Also I have no delete key pls halp.

I'm so glad I'm leaving my company soon. Big international group. At the moment they've started to change everything at our desks to make a giant open-space. Ignoring that literally 100% of the studies prove it's a bad idea for worker productivity and health. And then they dare lie to our faces that it's more productive, increases communication and makes employees happier.
Sure, with that they make savings and can add more desks... for contractors because fuck having real employees right ? It's much better to be able to fire them whenever they want !!
NO IT DOES NOT YOU FUCK FACES
FUCK OPEN SPACES, FUCK YOUR SAVINGS AND FUCK YOU

Yay finally summer started
Ye no fuck that
After being "migrated" into a newer smaller office and getting another team member we are now three people on about 5 square meters of space.

Another good thing is that we don't have an air conditioning unit in the new room and gained a few more PCs.
Oh and did I mention that we are on the sunny side of the building now.

Basically we are working in Satan's Asshole now. Good thing is that I am working on a thermometer now.
35 degrees Celsius is still alright isn't it?

Oh and our fan broke today.

"Can't you just write an if so the failing queue kinda restarts and processes the disappearing job when the bug occurs?"

No, you dense fuck. We've been over this every time you bring up this rotten, diseased garbage of a project. The queue does not work because the project was developed with a PHP version that was already EOL at the time, in an old framework that was also EOL at the time by the way, surely because someone told the brainless intern to "just copy paste from another project and change a couple of stuff" probably (that wouldn't be you? No? You sure?) and the queue fails because of a bug with the framework itself and I am NOT going to waste my time trying to decipher what the fuck this c programmer was trying to achieve with these 1600 lines of code in a single method. Yes I've seen the flowchart. No it still makes no fucking sense.

It reads from a csv. Updates some mysterious and undocumented mongodb collections. Some mysql tables as well. It also updates some fucking text files for good measure too. Text files. Oh, and It also connects to a third party API and does even more changes based on the responses. There are PHP IIFEs all over the place. Property names so short you'd think we were trying to save up on space but that clearly isn't the case, is it?

And am I expected to somehow unfuck this while babysitting the rest of the devs, write some fucking documents so that you can justify asking for more money because of your own technical debt fuckups, handle nearly all deployments, unfuck more doomed projects that were never stable or documented?

Can't wait to leave this shithole of a company. You can't attract talent. You can't retain talent and you actually made all the competent devs quit with your bullshit.

Now I'm the only senior, tech lead, devops, sysadmin and you want me to take on pm duties as well since the other pm left? Fuck. Right. Off.

At a previous job, I worked on a multi-vendor e-commerce website. It used Magento2 as an API and a separate application we built with Node, Express, and React that consumed it to avoid using Magento's frontend.

The whole stack used should be a rant in itself but our checkout process was dependant on work done by some contractors in India. In short, this entire checkout process would break multiple times a day with no way on my end to fix anything, and that's what I had to reply with every time a bug ticket would come in; which is honestly the worst reply ever to a huge issue like that.

After several attempts of pitching the idea and being turned down for building the checkout in-house to remove the dependency and work on even streamlining the process, the product manager of the brand said as quote "Well the checkout isn't really that important".

At first, I was kind of speechless. How is the functionality of actually buying a thing in an online store NOT important? Shouldn't that be the most important?

Then I realized over time that the only thing they cared about was being a Nascar version of a website, essentially being a canvas of ad space that sellers on the marketplace could buy and paying money just to list their items.

I hated working on that project, and that made it so much more soul-crushing. Gotta chase that revenue right?

I swear I'll snap if someone tells me it's weird that I resize applications to be taller than they are wide. I keep them that way because widescreen monitors came into existence when computers became mainstream and the market shifted to the plebs who only used them to watch videos and wanted to not see any bars on screen, and now we all have to suffer.

Web pages are organized vertically so it makes no sense for me to browse the web in full screen, it wastes space where otherwise all the content is contained and distraction free, most pages strip the side-bars so you'll also see a few less ads. I can also use and organize multiple apps how I want. Small thing too but browsing the web in full screen means pages can find the exact dimensions of your screen and learn more about you (I don't care about this but it's also worth mentioning).

I promise you there are so many good reasons to not use apps in full screen.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

Anything i try in this life, it fails. I have done hundreds, and have 0 successful projects. When someone asks me "what have you done in these 1/4th of a century existing on this useless floating space rock?" ...... I have nothing to say. It would appear as if I've done Nothing. I have nothing to showcase of projects because its not running live on production. It's all on private repositories. The more i try the harder i fail. I am energy drained. I am uninspired. I am unmotivated. Seeing how some 19 year old NOBODY kid just comes out of nowhere, makes NFT project, scams people for millions of dollars and haves fun in his life and doesnt have to work anymore, is fueling me with RAGE. This is starting to become madness. Am i having too high goals and ambitions and that's why i percieve myself as if im unsuccessful? But how is that possible if a 19 year old nobody is capable of becoming a multi millionaire by scamming people in web3? If i lower my goal expectations, then I have no reason to live. I wouldnt care if i die tomorrow or continue living. I wouldnt bother looking left right while crossing the road because I Do Not Care. What must i do to succeed just Once and meet my goals and expectations? I dont understand. I hate life. Life is empty and meaningless. I have became a Nihilist and i believe in that religion more than anything. It makes no sense that someone scams millions by doing jack shit at a young age while someone struggles and tries hard his whole life and still isnt successful even 0.01% of what the 19 year old is. IT. IS. NOT. FAIR.

Needed money for my company, not enough clients to support business on SaaS alone. Took on a 5k / month job building a platform that competes with my SaaS (more niche, less generic). Also sign up new client who that company's owner is part owner onto my current SaaS. Win / Win?

I do a lot of custom work to my platform to fulfill their needs, which is why I ran out of time for the 5k / mo project. I did these customization for free. Losing money to keep client, but also improving my system.

Work gets busy, I need to drop the 5k project. Client is upset I am working more on his other company (he is not majority owner). I return 1 month of funds to the owner and say I cannot continue.

Owner threatens to make other company that he is part owner stop working with my software if I do not complete project. Blacklisting...great. I agree to work with an overseas developer to do it and PM it for 3 months at least. Making nearly nothing from it (now 1k / month for PM), working nights to deal with India, losing sleep...

Other company suddenly folds due to conflict of egos with that SAME owner. Users drop from 16 to 1. I drop the project, no more strong arming me. Everything is a loss, all effort and money lost for nothing. Bad bet..however...

Owner becomes 100% owner of the other company, and of the software company. I transition him to PM his own project, he still uses my software because It doesn't, nor will it, ever do what the one he is building does. Also, partners from previous company break off and use my software again. New Client. #profit.

But holy hell was it stressful in the interim. People's business tactics are disgusting. Stay calm, play it neutral. Win. Sometimes you have to do what you don't want to do in order to succeed...at least for a little bit.

I was so scared that how he screwed his partners he would screw me over as well if I built one of the modules I have planned for my System, but haven't done yet.

If I did it for him first and then built my own (totally diff codebase) I really didn't want to run into any legal issues considering the schematics he has now are mine, but I didn't finish that part of the system for him. He is obivously highly competitive. Even though he wanted me to, and still does, want me to run his company for him.

Who knows, maybe in the future. To be CTO / COO of two SaaS CRM's in the same space may make sense. But I will never sell my software to him or partner with him. Too much drama. Avoid the drama. Be careful out there fellas.

If you are a creator, people will take advantage of you in every way imaginable. Read the fine print, read the people, document everything. Don't put yourself at risk.

so I started a side project a while ago.
the only thing it could do was to create some files with desired names and extensions. so this was basically a pretty simple editor.

I left this project with no future plans for a month or so until I started working on it again this week. I added comments to the editor, a console user interface.

the ui isn't futuristic. the program runs in the console. it just lists all the files and folders where the program is currently located in. in the beginning it could take user input and that input was the location where the files created in the editor would be saved. then I thought: it would be more interesting if I created a folder in which I saved the files from the editor. so I did this thing.

then I thought, again: hey, this console is pretty boring and stuff. why should I add some special commands? and so I did.
now you can create an empty folder, before you created a folder and saved at the same time the files created in the editor. now you can open another folder in which you can do the same stuff as before. you can get the current location of the folder you are currently in, so you don't get lost in your fancy computer. you can delete a folder completely, set color, reset color.

but one thing that I lost almost ONE FREAKING HOUR ON IT TO MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER was the following: when creating a folder, either empty or with the files from the editor, the program automatically opens the folder, not in the console(hey, I didn't thought of that) but in the file explorer from the os. now it only works for windows and windows explorer because I used system(const char*). I know it's not portable or efficient but I just wanted things to work, I will optimise it later.

the thing that made me lose that one hour debugging was figuring out how to open that file.

ok, so I used windows api with GetCurrentDirectory, I knew how to use system, I knew how to form the path that would match up with the folder, I almost knew how to open the folder with system().

the problem was that I had the path complete, but if the folder had white spaces system() wouldn't recognise the freaking command!

so the string with the path would also contain the command used in system() and I would just .c_str() the string so it could work. as an example my wrong way to make the path was this:

"start C:\\path"

can you figure out what is the problem?
you don't?
it's just so trivial.
how cannot you figure it out?
of course you NEED to put "explorer" between the start command and the actual path!
pffft, you idiot! so easy to figure it out.

so yeah, the right way to open a folder is like this:

"start explorer C:\\path to heLL!!"

p.s.: I still don't understand why putting explorer works and without it doesn't. without explorer it just just says that path with the first word before the white space doesn't exist.

YGGG IM SO CLOSE I CAN ALMOST TASTE IT.

Register allocation pretty much done: you can still juggle registers manually if you want, but you don't have to -- declaring a variable and using it as operand instead of a register is implicitly telling the compiler to handle it for you.

Whats more, spilling to stack is done automatically, keeping track of whether a value is or isnt required so its only done when absolutely necessary. And variables are handled differently depending on wheter they are input, output, or both, so we can eliminate making redundant copies in some cases.

Its a thing of beauty, defenestrating the difficult aspects of assembly, while still writting pure assembly... well, for the most part. There's some C-like sugar that's just too convenient for me not to include.

(x,y)=*F arg0,argN. This piece of shit is the distillation of my very profound meditations on fuckerous thoughtlessness, so let me break it down:

- (x,y)=; fuck you in the ass I can return as many values as I want. You dont need the parens if theres only a single return.
- *F args; some may have thought I was dereferencing a pointer but Im calling F and passing it arguments; the asterisk indicates I want to jump to a symbol rather than read its address or the value stored at it.

To the virtual machine, this is three instructions:

- bind x,y; overwrite these values with Fs output.
- pass arg0,argN; setup the damn parameters.
- call F; you know this one, so perform the deed.

Everything else is generated; these are macro-instructions with some logic attached to them, and theres a step in the compilation dedicated to walking the stupid program for the seventh fucking time that handles the expansion and optimization.

So whats left? Ah shit, classes. Disinfect and open wide mother fucker we're doing OOP without a condom.

Now, obviously, we have to sanitize a lot of what OOP stands for. In general, you can consider every textbook shit, so much so that wiping your ass with their pages would defeat the point of wiping your ass.

Lets say, for simplicity, that every program is a data transform (see: computation) broken down into a multitude of classes that represent the layout and quantity of memory required at different steps, plus the operations performed on said memory.

That is most if not all of the paradigm's merit right there. Everything else that I thought to have found use for was in the end nothing but deranged ways of deriving one thing from another. Telling you I want the size of this worth of space is such an act, and is indeed useful; telling you I want to utilize this as base for that when this itself cannot be directly used is theoretically a poorly worded and overly verbose bitch slap.

Plainly, fucktoys and abstract classes are a mistake, autocorrect these fucking misspelled testicle sax.

None of the remaining deeper lore, or rather sleazy fanfiction, that forms the larger cannon of object oriented as taught by my colleagues makes sufficient sense at this level for me to even consider dumping a steaming fat shit down it's execrable throat, and so I will spare you bearing witness to the inevitable forced coprophagia.

This is what we're left with: structures and procedures. Easy as gobblin pie.

Any F taking pointer-to-struc as it's first argument that is declared within the same namespace can be fetched by an instance of the structure in question. The sugar: x ->* F arg0,argN

Where ->* stands for failed abortion. No, the arrow by itself means fetch me a symbol; the asterisk wants to jump there. So fetch and do. We make it work for all symbols just to be dicks about it.

Anyway, invoking anything like this passes the caller to the callee. If you use the name of the struc rather than a pointer, you get it as a string. Because fuck you, I like Perl.

What else is there to discuss? My mind seems blank, but it is truly blank.

Allocating multitudes of structures, with same or different types, should be done in one go whenever possible. I know I want to do this, and I know whichever way we settle for has to be intuitive, else this entire project has failed.

So my version of new always takes an argument, dont you just love slurping diarrhea. If zero it means call malloc for this one, else it's an address where this instance is to be stored.

What's the big idea? Only the topmost instance in any given hierarchy will trigger an allocation. My compiler could easily perform this analysis because I am unemployed.

So where do you want it on the stack on the heap yyou want to reutilize any piece of ass, where buttocks stands for some adequately sized space in memory -- entirely within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, evicting shit you don't need and replacing it with something else.

Let me tell you, I will give your every object an allocator if you give the chance. I will -- nevermind. This is not for your orifices, porridges, oranges, morpheousness.

Walruses.

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Hello, world!

Okay, guys and gals... I need your creative minds. I need a concept for sort of a property manager for my game.. I have an idea of my own, feel free to tear it apart or throw it out the window.

So basically.. You'll no longer have one Computer System (and you wont instantly hit the login screen for that System on startup) Instead, you'll have a lot of things. They will probably only be represented using text and menu's (likely no 3D or 2D environments or anything.. Though, a setup like News Tycoon would be epic, but I think that would be too much for this game.) You'll basically start off with a small space (probably a basement) with x amount of free space. In that space, you'll need to add things like a desk, chair, and a laptop, or tower + monitor. You can also buy things like server rigs with a ton of space, but those are pricy and bulky. Each item costs X amount and takes up X amount of space. Also, you'll need a desk for a monitor (or multiples..) and other things.. (Like your rubber duck collection ;P JK) You can also rent and manage servers. (renting is more exspensive in the long run, but things on your server are not on your property. But, if you own a server on your property you can rent space to to NPCs) As well as manage your devices, properties, stocks, etc..

Also, there will be in-game time. Depending on how "comfortable" you are will determine how long you can stay up in a day. In-game events will take place later on at specific times so staying up (or not..) will need to be managed well. Especially if you're being targeted by a rival (NPC) hacker.

Why in the fuck can't you transfer a domain name for 60 fucking days? This makes no sense. My dumbass purchased a domain from Google Domains and registered it with Google Sites. Now I just realized that Google Sites is useless as fuck. It's more useless than a plastic bag of dicks. The dust on my window seal serve more purpose on this planet than Google Sites. That's how useless Google Sites is. Now I want to switch to Square Space or host it myself but have to wait 60 fucking days.

I could just buy a new domain for 12 bucks but I had the perfect name. Fuck ICANN for their stupid idiotic pointless motherfucking policy. Fuck.

wk195 sounds like people are describing the weirdest places they had sex. Lmao, I'm sure this has gone through somebody's mind at one point.

Let's see, what else to vent about. Ah yes, today I took the public transport because I had to be somewhere in the evening and I wanted to avoid traffic congestion. Guess what? I ended up sandwiched between hordes of people in public transport. I hate that much more than sitting in my car dragging the clutch. At least I was somewhat relaxed and I had my own space (so to speak). Being smooshed between a horde of stressed people? And pushy people trying to ram their way through others "I have to get out, I have to get off here" while the others are clearly heading out too? No, that's not for me.

And I know what's gone through one's mind at one point: "Look at this sad state of the world, look at the highway inefficiently and disrespectfully stuffed, look at these people, most of them wearing sad looks on their faces from the routine of life and their subconscious dissatisfactions. The current system has many shortcomings. In fact, the entire system is wrong."

Well, I'm glad I'm home now. Space, temporal as well as physical and psychological, is indeed a core component of one's space (no pun intended). It's at times like these we need to look at our lives and make the necessary changes to change at least our own lives, there that the system is hard to change.

Play Store's $25 registration fee - for getting PWA listed in their shitty catalogue? Who in the right mind would even jump in this clusterfuck of store to find a *web* app? For all you know, Google, there is such thing as QR codes - and customers can just scan the code (or type in that sweet address). Voila! Boom!!! Ching-ching!

Hello-hello, monopolistic cashgrabage! I came to inform you that your TWA bullshit is unneeded in ETHICAL space. The only ones who would benefit from this thing are permission-hungry publishers. And I'm already sick of this culture where people are put into store bubbles. You can't hide the fact that this data and features you provide, with "native" layer, may be misused in a jiffy - and by big players, no less. Of course, as a vile dumpster that you are, you don't mind it.

Don't even bring up a battery consumption that comes with PWA and browser. This doesn't matter if you use an app for some 2 minutes to tick your mental checkboxes! I'm just sick of app stores and native apps that collect the data without normal warning, and dare to take more than 1 second to fucking load the cached data. Take a lesson or two from PWAs that collect (probably useful) cache, instead of my specs, and load almost instantly.

My New medication is !AMAZING....
Yesterday went to the Doc (another 100€ sniff) and got a new update on medication...
(check my profile history for the posts last weekend if ya curious).
One of them must be opium or something... I got so high It looked like Opium (I never did heavy drugs).
Now I'm falling all the time, Can't remember much last night and... man... I use/used Cannabis as medicine for years (on and off as needed) ... Still, remember when I could get high... And the highest time was when I learned cannabis it's great to stop suicide (A friend got me so stoned I couldn't move... Even if didn't really take out the tendencies and thoughts to kill yourself, you can't do it anyway...)
But this new Pill... ONLY SHEEAAATTTT...
Only problem,,, I can't really do shit Until my body gains tolerance... and I was doing so much cool ideas in my Office...
Btw, no more Space Again... The more drawers I place, the more stuff gets here...
But I think I'll lose all my energy again for the next months, so, fuck it.

For reasons I won't disclose, I am just switching off reality in a pretty hardcore way.

Hours, and I mean almost half the fucking day, spent soloing my own TTRPG. It's actually the most fun I've had in years, I think I'm becoming slightly addicted. Dude, I have an abyss of grimdark lore, it's fucking crazy. I'm just bending the space-time continuum with my sorcerous ways, turns out the piece of shit $2 mechanics I designed are so flexible the game simply takes no effort to enjoy.

Anyway, I don't feel bad for this specifically. I do my daily work hours so I'm at peace, and allow myself to just do what I want to do.

Everything else is what gets me down. Fucking shit, man. I'd be ashamed of complaning, as I have it very good. I like my job and I like my game too. No problems there.

But the fact that I cannot go anywhere beyond those two things does raise little bit of an alarm, buried somewhere deep beneath the hundred tomes of forbidden spells I'm collecting on the alcove, down by my quarters on the cursed tower.

Tomorrow night, I'm going on more mystical adventures together with my vampire homegirl. She's a total boss. I was at 1 HP with both my fucking legs broken and no mana, just sitting on the sidelines trying not to die, while she fended off an inquisitor two times her level, all by herself. I know she's a fictional character but I said thank you for real a couple times, just to be nice, as she totally saved my arcane ass.

Now, you get me, right? It's escapism, and I'm great at it, a little bit too much. Honestly, once I'm done with my responsibilities for the day, I just don't feel like doing much of anything else, and I'm not crazy enough (yet) to not notice the downside, that being, no fucking life outside of working and locking myself up inside dark fantasy wonderland.

I suppose this is my roundabout way to say this better than sex, but I don't know if you would understand the sentiment.

Anyway, shutting off reality again in twelve or so hours, can't fucking wait.

So I decided to install a third OS on my laptop and oh boy, I never thought I'd have to deal with so many issues!

First, I had to make space for the new OS, so I did the only feasible thing - Shrunk a windows partition (Used for gaming only), then installed the third OS into it. (For clarification, one OS was Windows, the second Debian for work and the new one was Kali for a course at school about security and ethical hacking)

Well... After I installed and tried out that the Kali worked... My Debian began to make problems. It would hang for almost a minute during start as it tried to mount a (for some reason) no longer existing Swap partition.

After it gave up and I found out... I, fortunately, fixed it after just a bit of googling. At least I learned to repack the ramfs.

It worked all fine and dandy... Only... My Debian now shared the swap with Kali.

Few weeks forward, last friday, I tried to boot up Kali at class... Only for it to... Stop at a black screen, weird.

Some minor detective work later, I found out nothing was... Wrong really.
But... For some mysterious reason, my complete GDM just.... No longer worked.

One LightDM and XFCE instal later (Thanks god that at least TTY still worked fine), it finally worked again, and this time, I booted back into Debian, shrunk the Kali partition a little more and dedicated it's own swap there. Setting and resetting everything, and finally had a working triple-boot laptop...

My only question is... Why?

Does sharing Swap really affect the system so much, besides hibernation ofc.

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

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

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

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

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

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

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

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

Time to die, those voices still said.

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

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

But nobody did, so he jumped.

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

He didn't want to die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

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

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

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

He also met a woman.

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

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

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

Just the same...

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

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

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

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

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

It is also, though, a metaphor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Day 1 with Chromium OS: Inclusion of packages and stuff

Day 2 with Chromium OS: Setting up CI, and realize Azure is fucking gay because their own agents disconnects after 4 hours.

Just why.

Day 3 with Chromium OS: resolve their shitty problem, now their own agents have no disk space. I blame Google.

Day 4 with Chromium OS: Fix CI in at 10 commits, give up and cry.

Day 5 with Chromium OS: Realized Travis might stood a chance, build time limit reached, now I'm shook.

Day 6 with Chromium OS: Buried myself with endless tabs of Gentoo documentation. Lost count on when's the last time I came out of my room.

Today with Chromium OS: I blame Google for making my life suffer more than the last time I had depression.

Conclusion: Chromium OS is Gentoo with extra steps and I hate it

“Not a security guy” no more😼
I already completed 10/16 chapters of this book, including formatted and updated every code example in the github repo.
There’re lots of fillers in the book.
😑Lots of repeating samples.
The nosql part in node.js is completely broken.🤯
The code mixed with space and tab, so I have to format it before starting the exercise. 🙀
The git repo has about 150 forks, it makes me wonder how many copies they actually sold, since the entire book is closely tied to code samples.🤔

//long rant ahead!

I need to plan a Wiki with SharePoint for not connected Sites.
Im now in dispute with my CoWorker since 3 Months, this is how the conversation goes. My two bosses are involved in this and also unhappy about SharePoint.

[C refers to CoWorker, M for me]
C: Hey, we finished SharePoint with Selfservice Storage Rooms. They even have a Wiki.

M: Okay cool, will check it out

C: Well we need to also plan the Wiki inside, I already asked our Department Head and he agreed, that you will be the one.

M: Okkkkaaayy, normaly it's your job to do such things, but welp, I will look into it, if we can work with it.

(2 Weeks pass)
M: I checked SharePoint out and tested everything. The Wiki is a Nogo, we need a other solution or programm for ourself a Wiki Integration/Engine. Did you maybe check out Confluence? It has also a SharePoint integration plugin.

C: We wont do Confluence, too expensive (already overspent the budget for SharePoint in six digits 🤬). Also we wont add to SharePoint Custom Code, it needs to stay standard.

M: Thats impossible, SharePoint Wiki is shit and also handels sites just like documents, no brain behind! Also you overspent the Budget and now it's my Problem?!

C: You need to do the best out of it.

(3 weeks passes and we get a meeting with the department heads)

M: Alright I made a UseCase and documented where the essential flaws are in SharePoint Wiki and why we cant use it.

Boss: Ok if it's impossible to use, then we will stay on our Fileserver for Documents and wont use SharePoint.

M: Thats not my Point, my statement is, as status today, SharePoint Wiki is not the right solution, code or buy software to it.

Boss: We will do a Prove of Concept, if it doesnt work then we will aboard it.

M: Well it is only some missing essentials, like hierarchy and Groups for the Pages, Example Confluence has this. If we could built in this features in SharePoint, everything would work out.

C: (angry) I told you that we wont use Confluence!

M: (calm) I said we need Features, not Confluence. Please mind the consent.

(3 weeks passes, and one more meating with bosses)

M: alright here again is a analyses, why already in Theory the current SharePoint Wiki wont work. It's already flawed in the core.

Boss: Yea SharePoint is crap, I checked out confluence and thats a real Wiki.

C: Well I dont know anything about Confluence and never looked at it. But if SharePoint is a fail we need the Proof of Concept.

M: Why do we need to do a Proof of Concept, when it already doesnt work in Theory! Thats nonsence and unlogical.

Next meeting will be in 4 weeks and I will give him the FUCKING PROOF OF CONCEPT. I will be a Bastard and build behind CoWorkers back a Confluence Wiki to show the Departmentheads how to built it right.

I hate CoWorker now, he makes a part of my loved Job a hell, I will goddamn cuk Coworker to space, that fucking Cukatron of lazyness and shit 🤬. I provide the Solutions and you just say no, how dafuq will the project advance, if you always say NO! Are you so unflexible and fixed on your Castle of Ignorancy!

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

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.

I'm on a remote contract (has no centraloffice at our company) and was hired to work remote.

New PM wants to reenergize culture. Everyone has to come in and no more flexible hours. Lack of space means no more dual monitors. Lack of desks means we push desks together to form a "conference table." More people working means slower internet. Three people have separate meetings? Someone can stay, someone can sit in reception, and someone is in the hall.

But hey... we can see each other now and we're all available to one another.

Well one of my clients called me yesterday and say his Windows is not working properly. I asked what did hi do and the answer was:

- Windows say that there is no more space left on drive C: so I moved the Users folder to D:. I thought it should work fine.

Seriously!? Why are you touching system folders!? You should move Win32 folder to D:. Or format drive C:. What's wrong with you man?

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

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.

Last night i sat down at 6pm to free up some disk space on /boot, because i didnt properly size it months ago on first installation.

5:20am i close my laptop with a fresh install, and no more WinBlows.

Didnt set out to do it, but Im not mad that it happened.

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.

Spent more time than I am willing to admit debugging a Windows service, had a space between the ; and the next path on the %PATH% environmental variable. Powershell called the executable with no problem.

So, today, I wanted to try setting up a wireguard VPN server on my little raspberry pi at home. I... expected /some/ issues, but what I found dumbfounded me.

1 - I already had the wireguard package from the unstable branch of the main raspbian repo installed... Huh, okay.
2 - Setting up config was extremely easy... Wow, so the rumors were true. Wireguard really is almost dumb-simple.
3 - Failed to create a network interface? Oh, trouble, here it is! So lets see... modprobe wireguard... Nope. Don't have the module? What?
4 - Reconfigure package to rebuild the module - missing kernel headers? Huh... weird

This was the simple stuff... Then I went down the rabbit hole of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem:

1 - There is the Raspberry Pi Bootloader, that is apparently separate from the Kernel itself. And I didn't seem to have any of the standard linux-image-* installed... What? Weird, yet there I was, running a 4.19.42-v7+ kernel...
2 - No kernel and no headers... What... The... Fuck
3 - Okay, so... Lets just... try to install the latest kernel image then? One apt-get install... It downloaded the image, but during package configuration, it failed because... I didn't have... its headers? What? What for? And if it needs them (for whatever reason), why isn't the headers package as a dependency? Ugh, whatever...
4 - Another apt-get install and... Okay, building the initrd image aaaaand...
FAIL
WHAT. What is it this time!?

Oh... Ran... No more space on device? What? Is /boot independent? Of course it is, it has to be, its a bloody different filesystem

Okay, so, lets che-OH MY GOD WTF.

Its just bloody 45 MBs big! The entire /boot is just 45 MBs large. WHY. THE. FUCK.

This was a default raspbian install from I have no idea when. But... Why. Oh WHY would ANYONE pre-configure /boot to be this incredibly tiny!?

No wonder the new init ramdisk couldn't fit in there! Its already used up from 64%!

Thanks, Raspbian Devs, now I gotta reinstall the whole system because, yes, the /boot is, of course, sector 8192. Just far enough from 2048 that there are *some* sectors free - About 3 MBs.

So what did I try? Remove the partition and recreate it from the very beginning. Only... I never tried in in the past, and okay, kernel doesn't like having the partition where its image resides deleted on the fly, it will not give up FDs pointing there or something.

So now, I have a system I cannot reboot, or it will never boot back up :|

Thanks, Raspbian!

I need to get a cheap 1U somewhere or something T.T

because I lacked a portable storing solution (pockets weren't allowed), I couldn't find anything better than using my own skull as a storage box. It turned out it had way more room than expected. The brain itself is quite small, and the whole frontal lobe & the space around the brain is completely empty. Initially, opening the skull was scary and cumbersome, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Once upon a time, when I tried to pop an acne on my forehead, the hole was revealed, and it led to the storage space beneath. I have no idea how it happened, but apparently the skin is too thin. The bone also looks much thicker from the inside. There were two wires — red and black — leading to a standard PC speaker every old computer had. I wasn't a cyborg, mind you, I merely put that speaker there for storage. The acne hole healed with those wires exposed, leaving a permanent mark due to the wire coloring pigment dissolving in my skin.
I used that storage space to hide the contents of some parcels I was processing back then. I was stealing things. Eventually, my coworker — Bruce Willis — confronted me, and I had to strangle him. My arm became very flexible, and I was able to wrap it around his neck several times during a chokehold. It didn't end well for both of us.

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.

!Rant

TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.

MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....

A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);

Dear Systems Analyst,

I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.

In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.

Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.

Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
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I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?

.... The Systems Analyst replied:

Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.

Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.

Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).

Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.

When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.

It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.

Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.

To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).

DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.

BEST WISHES!

Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
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I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.

AI is a long overdue economic miracle the world needs right now:
- It will create a _lot_ of jobs — even a monkey can be trained to be a “prompt engineer”.
- It will shake up and shuffle stale old corporate status quo. You had a contract with Microsoft, then Amazon introduced some AI in AWS, and you jumped ships. Microsoft then caught up, so the market didn’t change, but got shuffled. That’s good! Many new big contracts signed = fat bonuses for a lot of people they will spend on stupid luxury shit with huge markup.
- “We have no fucking idea how to solve X” -> “AI”. A lot of people with more money than sense will spend big on wannabe startups that will hire a lot of people, pay a lot of salaries/office space rent, and then go under without a lawsuit filed. They would’ve kept that money in their offshore accounts otherwise, e.g. where it can help no one but their cum troph… I mean children.
- Lifes of a lot of people will be improved should they be caught in this grift. But not many people will lose their jobs — AI is still stupid AF. Good enough to impress gullible people with money, but bad enough to not actually have any meaningful impact. Perfectly balanced, as things should be.
- If you’re a junior dev, adding AI to the list of things you show people so they hire you will improve your chances of getting a job. You won’t be replaced — with all my insight and the access to all major enterprise AI models there are, I wasn’t able to make it write passable code, let alone good code.
- If you’re a senior dev, just spend an evening reading some buzzword guide so you know how to use those buzzwords, and you’ll be fine.
- AI consumes way less power than crypto!
- That said, AI still has its uses, and I use it daily. It _can_ do useful things if you know how to use it — ask retoor.

TL;DR: it will make a lot of rich people spend a lot of money (we’re talking cash, not stocks), it will create a lot of new jobs. It won’t replace anyone’s job bc it’s still too stupid to do that.