Use Linux desktop they said.
It'll be fun they said.
So much to configure.
Such fun.

18 hours later and hibernation, Bluetooth, Sound and Nvidia Optimus still not working after countless modprobes and config changes.

Hello again, Windows. You make me feel safe.

I'll just stick to Linux on servers and nothing more.

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

This is more of a rant about myself and what a prick I am. Last week I left my brand new Kindle at a hotel, just forgot about it because my brain is mush.

I don't even bother calling the hotel for days thinking and knowing full well the staff would have taken it (this stupid thing is worth a week's worth of wages here). I decide to call anyway and ask. "Yes sir, Mr. Matt, your Kindle is safe and sound in our hotel's main safe in a soft case awaiting your pickup or we will be happy to courier it to you".

I drove back to Varna and the super nice hotel guy apologized he didn't have my number otherwise he would have called (I don't have a phone number in BG).

I hate being the cynical asshole-dick I've always been.

Fuck.

I'm getting drunk now.

My Perfect Day : Assumption

Woke up at 6. Went for morning walk or do yoga or some sort of stuff.

Came back at 7. Went for daily routine, like bathing and all.

Went to prepare breakfast at 7:45. Prepared some eggs and bread and coffee.

It is 8:15 now. Reading news papers or watching tv and doing breakfast.

At 9 check mails and prepare some stuff.

At 9: 30 went for office. Reached office 5 minute before 10, safe and sound.

Came back at 7 by evening. Did some rest. Prepare dine till 9. Take a bath. Complete the dine.

At 10:30 ready to sleep.

Actual Scenario :

Woke up at 8:30. No time for yoga or morning walk. No time for preparing breakfast as well. Went straight to bathroom. Came back in 20 minutes. Made a cup of coffee. No time for newspaper or tv.

Feeling lazy and tired already. At 9:10 went for office. Before reaching office stopped at fast food joints. buy some junk food. Eat them. Got traffic jam and reached office late.

Started working but feeling lazy. Boss asked twice about the project status and i am unable to think a single line of code.

However, days passed. Boss scolded me. I promised him to finish the work after reaching home.

Reached home at 7:30. Late for no reason. Went straight to bed. Sleeps a hour. But took 20 minutes to leave bed.

Started working on projects i did not complete in the office.

Time fly and it is already 1 in morning. No dinner. Tired as fuck but hungry as well. So made some eggs and eat. Wrapped the task but it is 3:30 in morning and i jumped to bed for sleep.

Loop.

I've tried to stay out of the fray regarding replacing long-standing terminology to use "safe" inclusive wording instead because it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me to just use the new wording. If the old wording wasn't hurting people (this is an argument that a of a lot of people use regarding this mass naming change movement) then the new wording shouldn't hurt anyone either...

that was just my 2 cents on the topic, until today!

Some dumb motherfuckers are trying to replace the word 'execute' with 'start'/'run'.

That's just some fucking ignorant plebian shit right there. The literal definition of execute is:

"The act or process to carry out fully or put completely into effect"

"to do what is provided or required by..."

"to perform what is required to give validity to..."

start and run don't grammatically encapsulate what execute does. And now I sound like a fucking grammar nazi because this shit is getting under my skin more than it should.

Execute's primary definition is grammatically correct for the context in which it is used.

Change Master/Slave for databases and I couldn't give a single solitary fuck about it. Primary/Secondary works just fine too. The grammatical context isn't blown away here.

But take away my execute and sudden I get all hot and bothered with the desire to punch a nun over how stupid this "offensive words" crusade is.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

In my day off I was eager to try overclocking in my pc and this is how it went:

- Fucked up overclocking parameters for cpu and ram speed.

- BIOS is broken, had to take out gpu to do a reset taking out the bios battery.

- BIOS is up again, default values loaded, bla bla

- Did not try to fuck off anymoar with overclocking, just kept playing star wars and went to sleep safe and sound like a baby.

- Gotta work now. docker does not start, closes itself after tried to start, docker panic, I panic, tried to uninstall, tried to update. nothing works

- Then I remember bios default values leaves virtualization off. enables it again, docker still not working. I panic again, restarted pc like 10 times between disabling/enabling hyper-v in windows.

- Docker dies. not gonna change my overclock options again. silly me 🤦‍♂️

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

Thanks @dfox

Arrived safe and sound.

Cheers from Portugal

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

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

A little story which happened my SECOND day on the floor after getting hired to do customer-facing phone support for my current job (can't mention the name, NDA). Customer from Detroit calls in:
Me: "Thank you for calling (company), my name is Guru, how can I assist you?"
C: "Uhhh, yeah. I need to get back into my ID. I can't backup my tablet or phone, and y'all are kinda holding my data host-" <Loud gunshots>
C: "oh! Shit!" <sound of running feet>
Me: "Everything OK sir?"
C: "Fuck! Naw! Hang on!" <more running, jumps a fence, skids to a stop>
C: "Ok, I'm safe, I'm safe... So what I gotta do to get y'all to let me back into my shit?"
*MUTE* Me: "First of all, what the fuck are you doing on the phone with me when you should be either A) calling the cops because, I dunno, just maybe some trouser stain is attempting to kill you, or, B) FIRING BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!"
*REAL* Me: "OK, first you gotta… (outlines step 1,2,3... etc)
C: "OK, that sounds easy enough. I'll try it when I get to the office, I'm on my way there now- shit. Hold on again..."
(talking to someone on the street): "what, him? That dude? Over there? That dude... In the shirt?What the fuck!? Are you sure? Hold on, sir! I'ma call you back..."
Last thing I hear before the line lets go is a large BOOM!

Sometimes it's best to just sit back and sip your coffee...

Hey guys, could use some opinions. So I live in a country with a pretty small economy. I've been working at a big company out here for about a year now. Initially my plan was to work here for a year then apply for grad school in the states, try and use that leverage for one of those big us dollar jobs and potentially one of those magic green cards I've been reading about. I work about the equivalent of 35k/yr in my current position. It may sound pretty ordinary to some of you guys, but here it's a pretty huge salary. It's pretty hard to walk away from it. It's now becoming difficult to make the decision of giving up such a high salary, to make the time and money investment in school. Running the risk of spending a year or 2 in school and then not being able to work in the states. Putting the money aside i know that there'll be greater oppurtunity for learning and growth in the states, so it may be worth it for the experience alone. What do you guys think ? Take the risk? Stay safe in my job? look at other countries maybe ? I'm all ears.

Lols. Safe and sound windows defender

I don't know why, but there is something about watching the files disappear and appear in the VS Code window when I switch and merge branches. Maybe it is because it reminds me my work is safe and sound. Unlike before my company used version control.

Anybody watch the "Electric Dreams" episode called "Safe and Sound"?
This makes me think this is where we will end up with tech companies altering searches/websites for the individual. Making people believe things that are not true by representing false narratives. The actions of these individuals will reinforce narratives presented to the masses. There is already people finding that search engines and social media can sway elections by several percentage points. It seems like someone could use that same tech to target someone and turn them into a <fill in the blank here>. Urging them to some action. The rest of the world is like "WTF just happened?".

This is not a world I want.