!rant

Little reverse bot psychology

HR: "We are a family here."
Engineer: "No, we fucking aren't."

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

People complaining "oh I always have trouble figuring out if the clock goes forwards or backwards in October"

Bitch please, I'm dealing with 12 databases, with SQL dates as local timezone timestamps, and an influxDB in UTC. I'm dealing with a backend server configured in CEST and a middleware layer configured in Pacific time, and a hundred functions which try to keep everything straight because no one dares to migrate it all to UTC at this point.

In the whole argument about DST you hear about sleep psychology, electricity bills and farmers.

But what about me, the poor database administrator? What about all these ugly legacy systems, what about all the UX designers trying to fix time input pickers?

I spend 2 months a year in agony having nightmares of rips and folds in the flow of time. DAYLIGHT SAVING DOESN'T FUCKING MAKE SENSE HOW CAN TIME EXIST TWICE?

My words to live by...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

Game Development,
Because it merges together so many interesting fields so well. It has a ton of physics, a lot of art and design, psychology, philosophy, storytelling, music ...
And it really gives you the possibility to make anything work to your rules. The only limit there is is the limits of logic and your hardware.

Why I quit playing video games 15 years ago, and how that impacted my life.

In a land far far away (probably from where you are) on a distant planet (probably for aliens reading this) In a typical city, in a typical apartment, I woke up from a deep deep sleep, the kind of sleep that you can only have if you've been up the previous 2 days binge playing final fantasy 7.

It was a day like any other, except, on this day, I had a haunting thought:

"What if I played my LIFE, like I did video games"?

Long story short. I couldn't play video games anymore. Instead of "working" I saw it as gaing exp points. Instead of "failing" I saw it as necessary to build up character flaws.... etc.

I haven't looked back. I created 3 businesses, I learned psychology, marketing, programming, law, etc etc.

I look at my current status, strength points, charisma points, intelligence points, etc.
And I'm proud.

You get the idea.

Later, I realized something else. If I work all day in front of a computer, how can I play in front of a computer too?

This could be a better post, but you get the gist.

Know the role video games plays in your life, and don't let it play YOU.

This guest at our house was checking out the whiteboard in my room. It had some JavaScript code i wanted to keep in mind and some ReactJs stuff

Him: you know, I can recommend you a book, if you're into reading?
Me: well, I don't have that much time to read, I prefer online tutorials

(We're interrupted at that point)
(Later at dinner)

Me: which book were you gonna recommend me btw
Him: there's this psychology book I'm reading...
Me: oh.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

TL;DR age != competence

My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.

Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...

But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...

I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...

I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck

He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...

He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...

I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...

We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:

Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?

Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.

( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)

Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.

Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!

Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.

Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.

The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

My uncle : "It's all about genetics, if you are born dumb, you'll die dumb"

Then it means I'll never be a good Dev? It doesn't matter how hard I'll work, I'll never improve? Does it means everything I'm doing is meaningless?

I don't want to believe that, I don't think you're "born" dumb or you can't improve. I hate when people try to take down your motivation.

So fuck you, I'll try to improve anyway.

No, I won't try, I'll do it, even if it takes me some time. That's the biggest lesson I learned during my internship.

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

wow😯

As the news that hackers have kept new "pirates of the Caribbean" on hold, this kind of comment reassures the trust or acts as reverse psychology to pay up.
Any ways they have got better customer service than any other big corporates

Currently on train, listening music and browsing devRant. Music stops for a while and all I can hear is a person <A> saying: I'm not able to use so shitty operating system. I look up and see iPhone on <A>'s hand. Next to <A> sits an Android user <B>.

Not trying to spread bias about anyone. Just drives me mad, that people are turning down anything unfimilar so easily. Or maybe person <B> is trying to force <A> to use Android. 😲️

Next up on Public Trasportation - Human Behaviour Observations and Analysis: Ackwardness and Mental Get-Away Methods.

my mom thinks designing something with photoshop or illustrator is easy asf, like after 15-20 mins its done. yeah, sure if u want it to not look as good as it can be when you do it 2 or 3 hours. when i design, i dedicate time for it cause believe it or not, when it comes to that, i want everything to be perfect. up to the last 2 object being perfectly aligned to one another.

she wants me to design something for her and be finished in a few minutes and i rejected her because i still have loads of stuff to do. i wouldnt go to university at 9am just to do them if they weren't that important. and now i look like im the bad kid who doesnt wanna help her mom out ughhh irritating asf, its like reverse psychology.

==> I NEED A STRESSBALL RN <==

Our code base is shit.
To improve, we went through different coaching style: Freudian Psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, gestalt

- Freudian Psychoanalysis: After several years refactoring and discussing our technical debt we can say that we really understand our code in deep. But it's still shit

- Behavioural psychology: after some months of work, we built a lot of testing. Now the code is still shit, but we don't get dirty anymore

- Gestalt: after few weeks sessions, the code is still shit. But we don't care anymore, we accept it and we are happy

(note. it's an adapted psychology joke)

I have noticed that C/C++ developers that deal with backend server technologies are very much likely to resort to PHP for some reason. I have noticed it from serveral developer friends of mine or simply by noticing how the topic comes along sometimes on web discussion forums.

I believe this is the reason why certain extension codebases that deal with php are(for the most part) exclusively done in C++, take Phalcon, written as an extension in C or PHP Swoole, which is written in cpp iirc.

I wonder what attributes does the language, or the tech stack as a whole has that would make this particular kind of developers feel attracted to the platform. Is it that is easy and widely available and they just say "fuck it, I don't wanna spend too much time in this shit" <--- which is a very valid point really.

Or them just having an innate preference towards it?

The Psychology Behind Developers: By Dr AleCx04

Yep, I think I'm telling everyone I majored in Psychology from now on... Maybe people will stop asking me to fix EVERYTHING--not just computers, but EVERYTHING...

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in w/c people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability."

Sounds like my coworker to me. If it doesn't work, he blames others. WOW

An open source, psychology based job placement and training platform. Free for anyone that wants to put the work in, and for those who want to gain teaching experience. To ultimately put colleges and technical schools out of business.

Positive reviews are ok.
Compliments are weird.

I love receiving good reviews on my software.
(negative but constructive feedback is welcome as well, of course)
But receiving compliments, especially in person is really weird.
On the one hand I know that I did a good job, I know that the features are useful and the UI is classy and comfortable. On the other hand I still feel not comfortable receiving compliments for doing something good.
I don't have any social awkwardness and yet this feels so weird.

Am I alone at this?

I've been inspired by cpg grey (I think that's the name), mainly his 10 tips on how to be miserable, to write a blog or some kind of post explaining the 8 things you need to do if you hate your coworkers and want your codebase to go to shit.

So it'll be like a anti-SOLID, anti-pattern type of blog promoting every code smell imaginable

I feel like 8 tips to fuck up your codebase (php perhaps) might he more memorable than actual helpful advise. I'm sure that this has been done before, but I was wondering:

Do you think this would be effective? Would it help people understand why not to do the 8 tips? Does this reverse psychology work?

I'm prepping for my psychology exam and I'm typing notes with Word.

Almost every bullet point ends in ";".

Well...at least my headings aren't wrapped in <h1> tags...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can tell everything I need to know about you by looking at where you put your curly brackets.

Apparently if you go to an interview desperately filled with hope, your eyes and body language will rat you out and people won't want to hire you. Ok, so they want to hire someone who's not desperate for a job? That's not easy to hide..

God why is it so hard to let go with people around, especially potential friends or partners... It could be so easy to just have fun and do the things you always think about, but then you mess it up and that somehow.. purposely.

Someone on WhatsApp asked me did I like the new update or not ?
Well here is what I replied,
WHAT THE FUCK ?! NOOooo ! already there is Snapchat whose USP is this feature, Snapchat is Snapchat, then they introduced this feature on Instagram that's ok...but WhatsApp should be WhatsApp.
ALL I WANTED IS A SIMPLE PLAIN MESSAGING APP, THAT'S IT !

Now it's wasting my time more, earlier I just used to see Instagram & Snapchat stories in my free time BUT now !? I will see these fucking stories again here on WhatsApp too... BECAUSE I can't help it, it's in our human mind psychology too, we are curious beings, we are somehow bound to open that Status Tab when we will see a green dot ! If it's not true SEE THE NEWS ! NASA just found a whole new Solar System just ~40 light years away ! YES we are curious, we explore, we invent things.

I hope they will roll it back, but NO the ugly truth my friend is people will rant about and forget, and we will end up using it too, hate this seriously ! for instance the new iPhones have no 3.5mm audio jack, WTF ?! well say goodbye to my favourite ear buds ! and buy these FUCKING NEW Monstrously over priced bound-to-buy pair of earbuds if you need high quality audio out.

AND are we bound to be slaves and continue using these features because everyone else is doing so ? NO ! I will use whatever I like the most, I will go back to the roots, may be use those old school IMs and may be ask others to join it.

Dear developer guy who wrote this documentation node!

You're a developer yourself. Don't you know that inverse psychology is something you should avoid, because it will not work?

Thanks!
---

Okay for real, why shouldn't one parse Build.FINGERPRINT on Android? I was looking for a way to determine if the device is an emulator or not, and came across a solution using this, and read the documentation.

I just got called an expert for using Linux 😂 I'm taking this computer research in Psychology module (Matlab), and I was the only one using Linux.

!rant
tl;dr: programmer's excuse vs civilian excuse funny moment in conversation w/ gf

pertinent info: gf has access to my calendar; I added my class schedule for the upcoming semester earlier today

gf: you're taking human psychology where as im taking human development lol

me: I'm taking human psychology?
wat

gf: <screenshot of my calendar entry (it's human physiology)>
see

me: OH
Physiology
!=psychology
psybnlogy
close enough
the human brain's word recognition relies on lossy compression
not my fault
.-.

gf: ohhhhhh
I don't have my glasses on and my computer is far so that's my excuse lol

me: LOL
I assumed I misread it
didn't even double check your spelling

When they handover your codes to some arrogant developer, and the guy starts complaining in almost every small feature.

At least get some time to understand other people's psychology and coding style man!

so my official question is how you guys so naturally funny but why i have to try to be?

Understanding vulgarised politics and psychology, it showed me good examples to understand some design patterns or concepts like interfaces...

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.

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

So, this is a place I can possibly get some feedback on this and have never really been able to explain it to anyone because they lack the knowledge. Hopefully there are some programmer philosophers/psychologist here.

Thought - you know? That thing we do every day? The main component that we use to communicate?

I find I think in OO, ringed holons of sorts. There is a subject, and various subjects within that subject. Say colors that link to ranges of wavelengths.

And I see quite often, especially when arguing or mad, that this logical connection breaks down in other people. e.g. you will say you dont like a specific flower, and then all of a sudden someone assumes you hate flowers. Or even bigger leaps in logic, assumes you hate nature. Jumps up a OO class or two.

Anyone else find the OO model of categorizing things in their mind? Anyone else notice people can't prioritize and organize 'data' into a model that makes sense and agrees with itself?

It pisses me off to no end when people get mad because they can't keep topics together, or make arguments up in their head because they can't coherently remember and link what they just input. Worse yet, when they can't understand how I link things together and me explaining ~this~ concept. How they are incapable of grasping similar objects similarities but are able to go, "You said something is hostile? I'm using that word now because I heard it, and now bananas are hostile because you used a banana as an example for something with a peel while explaining layers of objects." (Shit example, just a "wtf" in logic leaping)

end rant. if it doesn't make sense, sry not sry. if someone gets it. phew

Andy Hunt was a great devRant podcast guest. His advice on successfully implementing agile and client psychology already has helped me.
Who do you think would make a great guest and optionally why? Maybe @trogus and @dfox could tally our ideas and try to book them as future guests.

Binge watching anime, reading psychology books

Ive just uninstalled an app after receiving a push notification wishing me happy (dunno what anymore). Guys push notification are very valuable, u can"t use them for anything.
Gosh some devlopers need to have some marketing skill and user psychology awareness

Finally got my hands on this gem. Going to try reverse psychology with my manager and HR now

Not a rant, but anyone else here expanding their knowledge of other sciences?
Im currently in a psychology, physics and cognition phase/fad

Currently building a random psychology website. Why? Psych major, final year. Will I be using lesscss? { nah } ... fancy js? { nah }

It will be a simple fucking doc style website. With markdown files and minimal styling. I need to become a better backend dev either way.

Quote from Psychology Today's Article Entitled "How Technology Paves the Way for Passive-Aggressive Behaviour"

"Indeed, the same technology that makes real-time contact and around-the-clock communication possible has, in many cases, drastically lessened the amount of time that human beings spend actually interacting."

To which I say: There *IS* a God...

Startet programming when I was 6 on my dad's 286 in Qbasic and learnt other languages as I grew up. It was always this, hacking or psychology for me. In the end the ex told me she was pregnant while I was doing my thesis.
So then I knew I had to be a dev.

Keep coding and making mistakes. Further more reading code and books. Often the books are related to other topics (math, logic, psychology, economics, ....) to keep my brain alive and get other insights of ways how to think or solve a problem.

I just did my first semester presentation! Github project had faulty internal links. Had to fix, and still make it in time. It went great! Powerful, I dare say. I give thanks to the Internet.

Javascript's the first computer language I ever saw. I was 13. We had one hour a month of 56k internet on that pentium 1 windows 98 old tower - that is when my mum was paying the bill, soooo sometime. So one day, I was bored, and dived into the C:/ drive, and somehow opened a .js file in the cache. I learned other languages, skipped the comp-sci to do psychology, but always sorta came back to it. Imho, no other languages (expect maybe C or PHP at the time) so obviously represent democratization of computers. So sure, they are messy because they are the fruit of a broad consensus, not from a specific corporation or academia.

The psychology of under pressure for developers.

do you all think that apps that communicate or play with human psychology get more promising users?

What do you think about psychometric tests? I doubt a test can define the type of person you are nor your characteristics. I think it's ambigous, unprecise and extremely subjective. Today I was rejected from a job offer because "the psychometric department didn't give their vote of approval". This is the first time I get rejected for that reason, in the past nobody complained about the results of my tests. I don't know if psychometry is useful, but this company is looking for someone different, or maybe psychometry is, in fact, subjective and any fool can interpret your results however he feels like: "Oh, so he likes kittens over puppies, he's a potential serial killer, let's reject him"

.........i never even had a dream that having knowledge of human psychology and applying that knowledge to influence people can make you stand out in life...

I've had a hard time getting on board with Google using the "Yes, and..." approach in design sprints. IMHO, it's tough to apply a stream-of-consciousness from improvisational theater to building software. Two completely different arenas.

Personally, I've always applied the "No, because..." approach, designing pessimistically/programming defensively, while still being innovative, creative & empathetic. I get the psychology of public criticism making teammates butthurt & stymieing future contributions...but that's maturity.

Notification anxiety - what's braking next in production

What do you think about coffee? is it just a psychology need? or it really boosts you to code? question for those who drink coffee