Another day, another hit piece against gaming.

So, a 15-year old boy hanged himself and the media goes all „This was caused by this game“, even though NO FUCKING TRACES OF THE GAME WERE FOUND ON THE LAPTOP OF THE DECEASED!!!

And then of course my freaking parents go all lecturing me about how the internet twists the brain into not being adequate towards reality etc.

First off, CAN THE FUCKING COLLECTION OF COCKSUCKERS that is the fucking media just fucking get a grip on reality? It was literally said in the same sentence that the supposed game that caused that was not found in any form on the person's laptop. You would think an online game that you take months to play through would need at least some fucking download to run, right? Unless it was a freaking video chat bullshit that they call a „game“ just for the fucking spite of gamers.

Second, HOW FUCKING LONG WILL IT FUCKING TAKE FOR PEOPLE TO FUCKING ACCEPT THAT IT'S NOT THE TECH THAT MAKES PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES? How hard is it to fucking understand?

Third... How do people in their 60s freaking think they understand anything about modern gaming when they have no freaking way of interacting with it other than these hit pieces? They certainly give more fucks about what a hired bitch of a lying „journalist“, that cannot even talk properly, says. Oh, they care so much about the children. Have they never thought that people are killing themselves exactly because they feel nobody cares about them?

Fourth. How fucking long do parents like mine deny the reality that just as long as they see me as an incomplete copy of my sisters I will be suicidal? Let me guess... It's video games causing me to be oh, so inadequate when I've not played any of them for quite some time...

Fifth... How am I out of touch with reality when these people have never known how I „work“, so to speak, as a person, and they've been the ones basically dictating all my life? Let me see why I'm unhappy...

I know I complain a lot. Sorry for that. But I just cannot stand people like them. People that lie all the time and project that on you while depriving you of any means of defending yourself in a debate...

Someone at Google: how do we make Android build times quicker?

Someone else at Google: we could make a new button next to Run and call it 'Instant Run' and give it an awesome lighting bolt icon!

First someone: what will it do differently?

Second someone: nothing 😎

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

A client called today because their email wasn't arriving at the receipants inbox but bouncing back with a 'poor MTA rating' error.

Checked about every blacklist I know and our server was definitely not blacklisted. Must be the receipants host which for some reason was blacklisting his specific email address.

Told the client that it wasn't a problem on our side and that he had to request a whitelist himself (we'd do it but it wasn't a specific server problem so we're not going to spend time on that).

Fair enough, he'd do that.

Calls back. "Well, the other party says that your server definitely has a poor rating, it's on your side!!"

Alright, this is getting annoying. Gave him a few blacklist checking sites links and told him to run his domain AND our server IP through it. Indeed came back completely clean.

"But the other party said it's poor rating on your side so I'd think tha........"

YEAH WHY DON'T YOU SHOVE THAT OTHER PARTY UP YOUR FUCKING ASS. I'VE SHOWN YOU PROOF THAT IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ON OUR FUCKING SIDE, EXPLAINED IT TO YOU AND SO ON. MAYBE, FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND, TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THAT THE OTHER PARTY IS FUCKING LYING?!?!?

FUCK OFF.

So I'm working on a computer vision project that grabs video from my webcam and detects faces in each frame. Earlier yesterday morning I was capping out at 30 frames per second, which is what I believe to be the max for my webcam. As the day became night and I was wrapping up my work on a portion of the project, I noticed that my newly compiled version was only getting around 8 frames per second. Confused, I looked into my frame grabbing + face detection code.

"Maybe I can only detect faces in a certain region of the image, based on where the face was in the previous image?" No, still 8fps. Hmm.

"How about I lower the resolution of the image, that would definitely help!" I tried that, but no speed boost came either. What??

I start to dig deeper. Maybe I'm not linking my libraries correctly, and it's using an older library I compiled. So I recompile that. Nothing.

"Am I low on resources?" I close out of all my other apps. Nothing.
Okay, wtf. Now I just comment out the face detection code entirely, and only grab webcam frames.

8fps. ?????

Suddenly, I get an idea. I get out of my desk, walk over to the doorway of my room, and flip the light on. I sit back down, and run my code.

30fps.

The stupid webcam switches to "night mode" when it detects low light, which restricts its ability to output frames at high speed and caps at 8fps. Damn, I felt like a fool 😂

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

When your code doesn't compile in one go but compiles on second run 😂😂😂😂😂

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

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+++

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

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

Just double buffered the Windows console. What you are seeing here is two buffers: one which is empty, and one which has the text "Hello world!", and a pause of 1 second between buffer swapping.

This enables accelerated rendering in the Windows command line (By rendering to an off-screen buffer then simply swapping the active buffer), making things like advanced terminal applications in the Windows console possible.

And the best part- this is the first compilation of the project. Not a single run-time error. What a fucking satisfying accomplishment, honestly.

November brings .Net 5, for anyone who cares about that, and after listening to my husband watch Ignite "reveal" advertising container, and all the enterprise virtue signaling therein, I am now to the point where the only thing I can think is "Fuck you Microsoft, and Fuck .Net 5."

During a 30 minute speech, the director of the dotnet platform commits the following flagrant faux pas:

1. Introduces tons of visual studio easy buttons for shit we already do, no mention of VS code support.
2. Shows tools that anyone other than the most insular enterprise mouth-breather have been using for no less than 6 years
3. Gives absolutely no credit to the Open Source community projects backing the features he's showing
4. Shows nothing but mono-cloud integration, makes no mention of any other cloud targets for new features
5. Acts like "deploy your app the cloud from IDE" is something anyone should be doing in 2020
6. Showed an API repl that is pathetic compared to httpie when it was in alpha
7. Showed blazor loading from cache and said "Look at how instantaneous it is" (if you ignore the 5mb of cached payload it took to run the hello world demo)
8. Shows Project Tye, presenting it as a new groundbreaking xyz, fails to mention helm already exists

What's absent is what is most offensive:

- acknowledgment of community contribution
- no linux/mac tools, entirely windows-centric (which jives with my prediction of second-class citizenship for the people who contributed to .net core the most)
- cross-cloud capabilities
- bash/zsh (again with the untermensch relegation)

Fucking microsoft back to their old bullshit.

"Mature codebase"
"Our entire team are senior devs"
"Almost everyone that worked on the project is still here and available, so nothing's lost! We can ask whatever we need to."

You would think this would mean the code was clean and easy to read, and you could ask the person who wrote it for help. But. no. It's kinda the opposite.

Here's an example:
I'm trying to write a mailer, and I have no freaking clue how to get it working. I talked with two of the more senior devs, and both assured me it was very straightforward, and then walked me through the quite complicated mailer structure and got lost. The first pretended not to, but glazed over a few holes in his tour, and said I could figure the rest out. The second one ended up admitting that he's totally unfamiliar with it -- his last commit on a mailer was from about 8 years ago -- and doesn't know how to get it working anymore.

So, I'm on my own.

I wrote a super basic mailer for debugging (no idea if/how it actually sends a mail, but I think I can construct one?). But whenever I call the mailer, it gets run twice? Somehow? Apparently I need to start a bunch of daemons to get that part of the system to work. Which is cool because they don't work fresh out of the repo. Got some further help, and now my ostensibly working code throws errors for an undefined var that i'm not even using, and to make it easier: without a backtrace. joy! There's so much inheritence and extending and including going on that it's going to take me hours to track this down. ugh.

I'm keeping my paystub in front of me for some desparately needed motivation.

Get assigned ticket.
Finish the most of the feature. Finish most of the specs.
Push.

Second dev wants to own accounting half of the ticket.
Rip out half my changes, rewrite specs.
Push.

Code review asks for minor changes.
Finish them.
Push.

Product creep creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.

Product creep creep-creeps the scope.
Finish the feature again.
Push.

New release happens.
Merge in master; fix conflicts. Run specs; random unrelated specs fail, some fail intermittently. Rabbit holes of complicated, unexplored, obviously-flawed code.
Fuck that. Push.

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Hey look, npm broke my project again. Surprise!

Code and dependencies on my local machine, all untouched for a couple of weeks, no longer works. I've no idea how it even managed that.

Oh, and `npm update` crashes.

eventually solved by upgrading npm and running `npm update --depth 500` because some arbitrary child dependencies changed without updating the parent packages, ofc. on my local machine. without me having run `npm update` for about a month.

because of course that makes sense.
Second time in two months, too.

isn't npm great?

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

Today our manager agreed on buying a second hand server for the development team to play around with and run personal experiments.

We found a dual cpu (6 core 2.8 GHz) system with 24 gigs of ram.

Let the fun begin!

I'm in my second call from hell today. Passed off first to a teammate to run a meeting. First one started 10 hours ago, this started 5 hours ago. Neither are related. Neither show signs of resolving.

Other teammate is on the same call that started 2 days ago.

Who the hell pissed Murphy off?

Got my new (second hand) game pad to run on Linux in just one minute!

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Started showing my brother some deep learning tutorials and I have him reading a book.

I really need for him to realize how smart he is. He was never academically inclined. I always told my mother that it had to do with the same dislike of school that I always had and how a couple of really shitty teachers could run one's motivation to the ground.

I always found him brilliant. Had a good standing with common sense amd logical thinking. He was interested in math for a while(same as me) but school made him hate it. He managed to pass all the state exams needed to graduate from H.S and was able to succesfully pass the military ASVAB with a very good grade.

But after H.S he went down the drain with what he wanted to do.

I love my brother and really want him to find out just how smart I think he is and this would probably be one of my biggest experiments with him. Maybe, just maybe if I get him to realize that he can understand these advanced concepts without a teacher his(fear?) Of school might go away enough for him to give it a second go. Fuck man I don't even need for him to go and get a B.S in comp sci, an associate degree would be just fine. It can be on anything, I just want him to do something.

Sometimes I feel as if this was my fault. At one point he told me that he feels shadowed by my grades. And my family was always proud of what I did in H.S and at uni. I feel(sometimes) that I should have paid more attention to him as he was going to school, help out a little more and encourage him more.

He feels as if he is meant for a dead end miserable working life, and I really can't bear the idea of him wasting himself away to something like that.

I really hope this shit works man...i really need for this to work, he doesn't even need to like it, just realize that it is possible.

I've optimised so many things in my time I can't remember most of them.

Most recently, something had to be the equivalent off `"literal" LIKE column` with a million rows to compare. It would take around a second average each literal to lookup for a service that needs to be high load and low latency. This isn't an easy case to optimise, many people would consider it impossible.

It took my a couple of hours to reverse engineer the data and implement a few hundred line implementation that would look it up in 1ms average with the worst possible case being very rare and not too distant from this.

In another case there was a lookup of arbitrary time spans that most people would not bother to cache because the input parameters are too short lived and variable to make a difference. I replaced the 50000+ line application acting as a middle man between the application and database with 500 lines of code that did the look up faster and was able to implement a reasonable caching strategy. This dropped resource consumption by a minimum of factor of ten at least. Misses were cheaper and it was able to cache most cases. It also involved modifying the client library in C to stop it unnecessarily wrapping primitives in objects to the high level language which was causing it to consume excessive amounts of memory when processing huge data streams.

Another system would download a huge data set for every point of sale constantly, then parse and apply it. It had to reflect changes quickly but would download the whole dataset each time containing hundreds of thousands of rows. I whipped up a system so that a single server (barring redundancy) would download it in a loop, parse it using C which was much faster than the traditional interpreted language, then use a custom data differential format, TCP data streaming protocol, binary serialisation and LZMA compression to pipe it down to points of sale. This protocol also used versioning for catchup and differential combination for additional reduction in size. It went from being 30 seconds to a few minutes behind to using able to keep up to with in a second of changes. It was also using so much bandwidth that it would reach the limit on ADSL connections then get throttled. I looked at the traffic stats after and it dropped from dozens of terabytes a month to around a gigabyte or so a month for several hundred machines. The drop in the graphs you'd think all the machines had been turned off as that's what it looked like. It could now happily run over GPRS or 56K.

I was working on a project with a lot of data and noticed these huge tables and horrible queries. The tables were all the results of queries. Someone wrote terrible SQL then to optimise it ran it in the background with all possible variable values then store the results of joins and aggregates into new tables. On top of those tables they wrote more SQL. I wrote some new queries and query generation that wiped out thousands of lines of code immediately and operated on the original tables taking things down from 30GB and rapidly climbing to a couple GB.

Another time a piece of mathematics had to generate all possible permutations and the existing solution was factorial. I worked out how to optimise it to run n*n which believe it or not made the world of difference. Went from hardly handling anything to handling anything thrown at it. It was nice trying to get people to "freeze the system now".

I build my own frontend systems (admittedly rushed) that do what angular/react/vue aim for but with higher (maximum) performance including an in memory data base to back the UI that had layered event driven indexes and could handle referential integrity (overlay on the database only revealing items with valid integrity) or reordering and reposition events very rapidly using a custom AVL tree. You could layer indexes over it (data inheritance) that could be partial and dynamic.

So many times have I optimised things on automatic just cleaning up code normally. Hundreds, thousands of optimisations. It's what makes my clock tick.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

After solving a lot of problems in codeforces and participating in ACM to make my code the most optimised..
* In my first real job. *
Client: Your program run so fast!! I can't feel if it's doing something or not. Please make a delay of 1 second in your program! 😇
Me: 🙂🙂🙂🙂

Anyone else having connection problems after the recent Windows 10 update? We've been slammed at work with them. If you do, here's an easy fix:
0. Go to Command Prompt (Run as Administrator)
1. First command:
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
(One of them will probably fail, that's fine.)
2. Second command:
netsh winsock reset
3. Restart the computer.

Well, for starters there was a cron to restart the webserver every morning.

The product was 10+ years old and written in PHP 5.3 at the time.

Another cron was running every 15 minutes, to "correct" data in the DB. Just regular data, not from an import or something.
Gotta have one of those self-healing systems I guess.

Yet another cron (there where lots) did run everyday from 02:00 to 4ish to generate the newest xlsx report. Almost took out the entire thing every time. MySQL 100%. CPU? Yes. RAM? You bet.

Lucky I wasn't too much involved at the time. But man, that thing was the definition of legacy.

Fun fact: every request was performed twice! First request gave the already logged-in client an unique access-token. Second request then processed the request with the (just issued) access-token; which was then discarded. Security I guess.

I don't know why it was build this way. It just was. I didn't ask. I didn't wanted to know. Some things are better left undisturbed. Just don't anger the machine. I became superstitious for a while. I think, in the end, it help a bit: It feels like communicating with an alien monster but all you have is a trumpet and chewing gum. Gentle does it.

Oh and "Sencha Extjs 3" almost gave me PTSD lol (it's an ancient JS framework). Followed by SOAPs WSDL cache. And a million other things.

Am I a machochistic fuck?
This sunday I had the glorious idea to fix a not-so-recent Wordpress website for a friend.
Imagine an upgrade from 3.3.2 to 4.9.8! (and PHP 5.5.old to 7.2.new

Oh boy. I thought it was impossible, because the site uses a free theme from 2012 and had some other plugins installed.
But what kind of developer am I, if I give up so easily?

I forced XAMPP to run PHP 5.6.stoneage in order to let me debug this thing. After some fixing in different files, I was able to get the admin panel back, disabled some plugins and then overwrote the installation with WP 4.9.8. After firing up the admin panel I had to fix 20 differend PHP files in the plugins.

Finally! After the plugins were updated, all worked again.
Except for the backend part of this free crappy theme. It uses an old version of JQuery UI widgets with custom mods.
I've done enough for today so I let it be like this. I'm not in the mood to load a second JQuery version.

!Rant

Best motivation for startups...

Usain Bolt has won 9 gold medals in last 3 Olympics and he has run less than 2 mins on the track. That's economy of effort.

Usain Bolt ran for less than 115 secs in total in his 3 Olympics and made $119 million dollars! That's more than $1 million for each second he ran!

But for those 2 mins he trained for 20+ years!

That's investment.👍

>>> Stadia thread <<<
Stadia is a new Cloud Gaming platform that runs on GCP and details were announced some minutes ago.

For maximum performance you would need at least 35mb/s, while about 10mb/s are enough for 720p l, Stereo gameplay.

Maximum performance provides 4k, HDR and 5.1 Surround Sound and comes in at 9,99$ / month for Stadia Pro. As far as announcements go, there are no lower performance tiers available.

Stadia Pro will get you unlimited access to your Games (I believe this is Bring-Your-Own-License, but I might be wrong), while Stadia Basic allows unlimited access to one specific game. For that you probably buy the game directly of Stadia, which then includes any fees in it's price.

Stadia will be usable on all devices that run Chrome and on the Chromecast Ultra. Android will get it's own app, first available on the Google Pixel 3, to be expanded later on, iOS was not mentioned.

Google developed a custom Stadia controller that works out of the box, including an Google Assistant and a DVR button. However, all other controllers should supported too, but I don't believe that's the case for playing on the Chromecast Ultra.

Starting now, you can get the Stadia Founders Edition, that allows you to be one of the firsts on the platform, includes a Controller, a Chromecast Ultra, 3 months of Stadia Pro, 3 additional months of Pro you can gift to your buddy and some Destiny Bundle with the first and second game, including all add-ons, plus the Destiny 2 Season pass.
The founders edition can be pre-ordered right now for about 129$.

Stadia launches 'later' this year, founders edition buyers will be the first to get public access on launch.

Today was just marvelous. Locked up my car with keys inside and with engine on.

I was driving back home from work. I drove to a parking near home, which is really long, narrow and impossible to turn around. So I decided to get out of a car, for like, 30 secs and go check, if there were any unoccupied parking places. Parking brake; I stepped out of the car and closed the door. Click.
Brilliant.
I knew, that I needed to change contacts in the driver door, that sometimes were triggering central car lock, but I didn't expecting such outcome.
So, I am outside.
Engine is on.
Parking brake.
My backpack and phone were inside.
Luckily, one neighbor wanted to drive somewhere, so I explained, why he can't donit, why my car is here and asked to watch my car for 5 mins while I will run home.
So I ran home in home to find a second pair of keys.
After some time, LUCKILY, I found them, went back and unlocked my car...

Moral: don't delay things.. Small fixes to prolong life of some object will eventually fail in very, very uncomfortable manner.

I'm glad I found spare keys and there were no need to break my own car window... And I DO care about my car and do lot of things by myself.

Ok I give up. I concede. I can't take one more second of trying to get ANY window manager to run under Arch with an Nvidia GPU.

Back to Debian it is...

I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.

It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.

There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.

I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.

The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)

To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok

To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server.

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

—————

tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

How come it is so hard to find good developers. Have been doing interviews for a couple of weeks now (for a senior PHP developer role).

First round is me talking about the function and company, asking questions about candidates experience, wishes and we usually end in some tech conversations. Most of the resumes I got are pretty fucking good. I mean, experience with low-level languages, experience with the problems we need to solve here, contributions to open-source, experience in R and MathLab etc etc. On paper they look perfect.

For the second round I give them an assessment which they can do at home on their own machine in their own time. It's not a hard one, just some mathmatical problems they need to solve. A quick google GIVES the answer (no joke!!). But that's OK, I look at their code cleanliness, proper use of commenting so I can determine if they are solo-developers or fit good in a team and if they abstract repeated functions and make sure that they take their work seriously, you know the drill.

It pisses me off that I get BROKEN FUCKING CODE WHICH DOES NOT EVEN RUN and that I get code back which I look at and makes me vomit instantly, I mean, DO YOU EVEN TAKE YOUR PROFESSION SERIOUS? How dare you to ask for 50k the year, a lease-car, extra bonusses AND YOUR FUCKING CODE SPITS OUT COMPLETLY WRONG ANSWERS OR DOES NOT EVEN RUN WHAT THE FUCK DUDE GO BACK TO FROM WHICH EVER HOLE YOU CRAWLED OUT AND STOP WASTING OTHER PEOPLES TIME WITH YOUR FUCKING INCOMPENTENCE...

Have a couple I want to air today.

First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...

Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).

Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.

The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.

One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.

To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:

switchport access vlan add XYZ

My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.

Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...

Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled.

!dev && rant

There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.

Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.

Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"

OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!

It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"

Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!

Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"

Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?

Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?

No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!

Giant, month-and-a-half-long-ticket.
After learning six or so complicated areas of the system and updating them all to work with the new changes, make them all play nicely, etc. I finally got everything working. 95% spec coverage, though no ui tests because I haven't gotten selenium working. whatever, everything's done and works.

Second dev bases her ticket off of mine and continues working. Work elsewhere continues and there's an official release, so we both merge in master. I run tests, everything passes, and go back to working on other tickets.

She finishes her ticket.
We do end-to-end testing, and everything works perfectly. Time for a demo!

She merges in master again, and pushes her branch to two staging servers. (idk why two.)

Demo starts.
We connect to the staging servers, and... none of the UI changes exist; they aren't running the correct code!

So she runs it locally for a demo instead. Two features in my ticket no longer work. She throws me under the bus. She throws me under the bus again by criticising a rake task I scrapped because she wanted to do it. Then again because I didn't update my branch to master and push it before the demo, despite having no reason to. and despite the demo being of her branch.

Then she continues to show off and brag about how she's like the "legend" (senior dev) she envies. QAbuys it.

I'm having an emotion, and it's called anger.

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

You lousy fucking test class of an ass wipe,

TLDR; it fails and it passes all at the same time.

So during a deployment, one of the pre-deployment test classes fails, not something anyone has worked on so figured I run it manually to see what’s going on, but no the shit of a thing passed second time around.

Now because we can’t deploy without 100% of the test classes passing so I have to organise another deployment which it fails again. Fuck this,

Unprotects master

Git checkout master
Git merge dev
Git push master -f

Protects master

Skrew this!

Well would you look at that, it works now 😰

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

Aggressively eliminate from your life everything that causes the slightest mental distress. Replace everything that has to it even a hint of undesirable emotions.

I once read about a girl who left work to buy a plane ticket to Australia to get away from her abusive boyfriend, and started her life from scratch. Being in an abusive relationship myself, I envied her.

One million seconds is eleven days. One billion seconds is 31 years. If you have just one second to spend with a person, you won't run out of the population for 248 whole years. There is no such thing as an irreplaceable person, no matter if they're your father, mother, best friend, wife, or husband.

Pain and trauma won't really go away, but they won't get bigger. You, however, can. One day you will be dying, and realizing at that moment that you didn't live the life you wanted to live, while knowing it's too late now, is the scariest thing that can happen to a human being. As you fade away, the sense of time will slip, and whatever you're feeling will stretch to eternity. Make it an eternity of calm happiness, and not an eternity of doubt and sorrow.

Make sure that when this moment comes, you're ready and comfortable with the life you lived. At least be confident it was YOUR life, and not someone else's.

This goes to everyone, both mentally/physically ill and healthy, and to both neurotypical and on the spectrum.

Day 2 in ComSci class (following my last rant)
"Okay, so! All of the schoolwork and homework will be done on paper and pen, submit and I will grade it. Only once, no second chance"

Okay. Okay. This went over my head. What are you gonna do? OCR the code into the compiler, compile it and run to see if we fucked up to give us an F? What are you, god? Here's a brilliant idea, teach them Assembly! Guaranteed error to give us Fs! FUCK YOU

Just had a junior/mid dev who worked in our company for around 3 months quit because in his words "he is unable to win any argument".

I saw his comments in MR's and other seniors were just being meticulous. Had he compromised a little or atleast got to knew the devs in person and took this offline most of his problems would have been resolved. Never scheduled any meetings before implementing stuff, he just followed his gut and then shot himself in the foot plenty of times.

Personally I think it wasnt even a skill issue but a communication issue. We have a relaxed culture where u can work in the office or fully remotely so the guy came in on his first day, picked up his laptop and we never saw him. Tried to invite him for an afterwork beer or some activities, he never accepted.

If he had met the devs in person he would have seen that:

1. One guy has OCD and he never agrees with anyone but if theres a timeline hes able to make compromises and hes actually chill
2. Second guy is also a perfectionist but has mentor capabilities and you can always go to him about anything and he helps to mediate with the first guy. You can run everything through this guy and he will never give you shit
3. Third guy in the team is just a junior hotshot whos a bit insecure and disagrees in comments just because he can. But he can be dealt with very quickly with showing a little backbone.

Like seriously these are just people that you can deal very easily when u know their personalities. Instead he saw everyone in company as these 2D robots that he wasnt able to win his arguments against.

Communication shouldnt happen only in standups and MR comment section. U have to learn to deal with people otherwise u will burn urself out like this guy and quit.

Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.

Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".

So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.

The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...

not right now.

so after several hours of irritated detective work, I've finally found out what is the thing that periodically, every about 10-15 seconds, starts two PowerShell processes which run for about a second or two and during that time take about 20% of my CPU capacity...

They're being launched from a commandline, to do GetPackages with name of OmenLightStudio, and the result is then piped into find.exe to find InstallLocation part.

...for whatever reason.
and this is done every 10 seconds by... *drumroll*
HP SYSTEM OPTIMIZER.

GOD. FUCKING. DAMMIT. YOU. MORONS.

...now only to find how the fuck do I uninstall that, since it's some plugin-ish kind of stuff for Omen Studio, and I can't find uninstall for it anywhere in the system nor Omen Studio itself...

A few weeks ago, I was kept up until the wee hours of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell the Monty Hall problem works. After finally getting it (I'm slow, okay?), I decided to write a program to run simulations of it.

First incarnation of program took user input. User enters what door they choose (1, 2, or 3), then is told what door Monty opens, then given the decision of staying with the door they originally chose or switching, then informed how that worked out for them.

Second incarnation of program ran on a loop. At the start of each loop, a random door is picked for the user guess. Then the door Monty opens is calculated from the remaining doors (excludes user guess and prize door). Then user switches doors (choosing the door that was not their original door or the door Monty opened). At the end of each loop, if the door they switched to was the prize door, it would increment a win counter, else increment a loss counter. After running the loop 1000000000 times, it printed to console `You always switched doors, resulting in ${wins} wins and ${losses} losses`.

THEN I decided to write a variation to run a while loop on the outside of the loop to increase the number of total doors until the point where the decision to switch doors hurt more often than it helped. At this point, I decided to incorporate file I/O and write to a file rather than a console. And that was neat!

And then I decided it would be cool to go back to the three door variation, printing on each loop the original door, the door Monty opened, the door that was switched too, the result of the switch (win or lose) and what the prize door was.

But for the life of me, I couldn't seem to get the file to write properly. It would, like, always crash my terminal. I tried open + append, I tried append. I tried createWriteStream. Still just failure.

And then I changed it to an appendFileSync and happened to look at one of the files that I was writing to. "Huh, over a gig seems a lot."

"Well, how much are you writing each loop? Did you forget to keep in mind how many bytes that would be?"

TLDR: If you're going to write a program that's going to write data to a file on a loop, you might want to figure out how much it's going to end up writing .... before trying to run it. And running a loop 1000000000 times may be a little excessive.

*face palm*

This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.

Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.

Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.

But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.

Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.

Reasons?

"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"

FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.

Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.

Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.

I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.

Multi-Screen problem: So I need to run a VR headset with a laptop, and the laptop has only one hdmi connection. I don't have any extra hdmi adapters, so I cannot connect my second screen while working with the headset, which sucks...
but...
then it hit me...
there is an app called spacedesk which allows you to use your phone as an additional screen. I have a docking station for my phone so I can connect hmdi to it. On the first try the resolution was shit since it uses the default phone resolution. But the phone has Samsung Dex, which allows you to run everything full screen on your connected screen, so I can run the app within Samsung Dex and therefore will get full resolution.

And this works. It's kinda stupid and maybe a bit complicated, but it works. God, I love technology :D:D:D

This is the adapter to adapter to adapter to adapter meme in action, just wireless. Lol. I'm proud of this xD

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Adventures with house IT

I'm currently experimenting with PowerShell but my scripts won't run even though I've got every local permission. The error message indicates it's a GPO problem.
"No problem" le me thinks and calls IT hotline.
After 2 incompetent and unprofessional technicians i've still got no solution. I'm waiting for the second tech to call back because he "needed some time to get to know PowerShell" (he is a trained and certified SysAdmin).
During my call he couldn't decide if it was a GPO problem or not.
And this is just one story of their incompetence...

I am a mechanical engineer first and my companies go to sysadmin second. So software developing isnt really my main field of expertise buuttt:

WHY IS SLOOPY SOFTWARE WRITING A VIABLE EXCUSE?

Story:
Yesterday i started to migrate some stuff from our old Win 2008 Server to the new 2016. Turns out there are some MS SQL Express Servers running. Quick check for what they are turns out that they are activly used. So far so good. For other reasons we have a new MSSQL 2017 Core Licence. So i thought, hey it would be nice to just move those 2012, 2008 and 2014 Express Servers to a real one that can use the entire machines capabilities.
After some try & error with exporting one of the softwares (where i had to elevate one the user rights to sysadmin for reasons) the entire system stopped working. I didnt deleted anything or changed anything! Well, i elevated user rights. After 2 hours of support call it turns out that the software stopped working cause i gave the database user sysadmin rights. I dont know enough about MSSQL to judge wether that is logical or not, but it sounds super illogical and i suspect sloopy software writing on the manufacturers part. One way or another, the excuse from the telephone support was "yeah, our software is a very fragile child"
Okay.
After i told all that my coworkers two of them were also "yeah, that is just how the [company] software is, you have to be careful with it"

Apparently it broke in the past for other minor stuff.
As an engineer i cannot build bridges that collapse when you use the left and the right lane at the same time. For an architect it isnt okay to build an house where the front door explodes when you open a window. It is not okay for a power tool to go out in a fireball when you accidently drill plastic with it. But for some weird reasons its socially acceptable for programs to be sloopy, buggy and only working under specific conditions. Since when is it okay for a car only to work when you know specific steps to make it run? Like, throwing your spare key in the gas tank, the kick the left wheel exactly three times and finally tapping the steering wheel 5 times left, 4 times right. What? That would be ridiculous? But that is exactly how that software works. You have to follow a specific step guide to make it work, EVERY TIME.

I. JUST. DONT. GET. IT

So my boss run 2 different companies, the one that hired me and the one that I work for like 40% of the time (through the first one).

This second company is now having a client that's asking for educational qualification for both my boss and me (?)

I mean, even if I didn't study, why would you need that? The product is up and running and works, so wtf do you want?

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

So I'm writing this code, that does 2 important things, that cannot be seperated. I run the code, thing1 is correctly executed, thing2 not. No fucking idea, why this happens. Execute again, same result. Debugg the wohle thing, now everything works fine.
WHAT?
I check the code, there are no background tasks, no paralell processing, nothing that should go wrong.
Asking a Senior developer for help, he also has no fucking idea. He tells me to try to wait one second between the two things. Looking for a delay() or wait() function in my programming language but there is none. Ok, building my own delay, writing a "do 1000 times" loop, calculate some shit in it. Execute the code, it works perfectly.

Nobody has a fucking idea, why this is happening and why this solution is working, but now the code is productive and it works fine.

I think JavaScript is great actually

Though I don't like the community

But that's not saying much, aside from maybe c++ people (who I don't actually understand so maybe that's what's going on there) I don't seem to like any communities

Mostly because they're wrong and fight over irrelevant things and don't realize they're wrong so they just keep going wrong and it makes me cringe

But javascript is nice because it's intuitive, and if it isn't intuitive to you right now just look into the thing and it'll be a second language to you later... Isn't that a skill issue?
Easy to start hard to master, perfect difficulty curve. Exploits that sunk cost fallacy. It isn't overwhelming either you only run into the edge cases slowly over time.

But there can be a point made that an easily accessible anything is just always going to turn into a cesspool because unskilled people keep contributing and thinking themselves experts, so it over time reduces quality of secondary tooling =[

I've always wanted to make games, I went into university doing mechanical engineering and while at the start I enjoyed it, getting closer to the end I had a hate for engineering, as this hate grew I ended up trying to learn programming in my spare time, actually I spent my spare doing lots of things which basically gave off the impression I wouldn't be happy with engineering.

After I graduated I decided to do my BCIS and I loved every minute of it, I was fortunate to get a lecturer in my second semester that was an experienced game devloper, someone I look up to and someone who pushed me to my absolute limits, even with the sleepless nights I was still happy with programming, the logical thinking that goes into programming and also the near instant feedback is what I really love.

But as it comes down to it, I've gotten closer to my dream of becoming a game developer, it may only be as a hobby for now but I'm really grateful I have gotten into programming.

So I guess with coding has changed my life for the better, since I know I'd never be happy as an engineer, and even with all the issues I run into I still enjoy it in the end.

Let's see how long this lasts lol

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

In the 90s most people had touched grass, but few touched a computer.

In the 2090s most people will have touched a computer, but not grass.

But at least we'll have fully sentient dildos armed with laser guns to mildly stimulate our mandatory attached cyber-clits, or alternatively annihilate thought criminals.

In other news my prime generator has exhaustively been checked against, all primes from 5 to 1 million. I used miller-rabin with k=40 to confirm the results.

The set the generator creates is the join of the quasi-lucas carmichael numbers, the carmichael numbers, and the primes. So after I generated a number I just had to treat those numbers as 'pollutants' and filter them out, which was dead simple.

Whats left after filtering, is strictly the primes.

I also tested it randomly on 50-55 bit primes, and it always returned true, but that range hasn't been fully tested so far because it takes 9-12 seconds per number at that point.

I was expecting maybe a few failures by my generator. So what I did was I wrote a function, genMillerTest(), and all it does is take some number n, returns the next prime after it (using my functions nextPrime() and isPrime()), and then tests it against miller-rabin. If miller returns false, then I add the result to a list. And then I check *those* results by hand (because miller can occasionally return false positives, though I'm not familiar enough with the math to know how often).

Well, imagine my surprise when I had zero false positives.

Which means either my code is generating the same exact set as miller (under some very large value of n), or the chance of miller (at k=40 tests) returning a false positive is vanishingly small.

My next steps should be to parallelize the checking process, and set up my other desktop to run those tests continuously.
Concurrently I should work on figuring out why my slowest primality tests (theres six of them, though I think I can eliminate two) are so slow and if I can better estimate or derive a pattern that allows faster results by better initialization of the variables used by these tests.

I already wrote some cases to output which tests most frequently succeeded (if any of them pass, then the number isn't prime), and therefore could cut short the primality test of a number. I rewrote the function to put those tests in order from most likely to least likely.

I'm also thinking that there may be some clues for faster computation in other bases, or perhaps in binary, or inspecting the patterns of values in the natural logs of non-primes versus primes. Or even looking into the *execution* time of numbers that successfully pass as prime versus ones that don't. Theres a bevy of possible approaches.

The entire process for the first 1_000_000 numbers, ran 1621.28 seconds, or just shy of a tenth of a second per test but I'm sure thats biased toward the head of the list.

If theres any other approach or ideas I may be overlooking, I wouldn't know where to begin.

I miss the simple times when you could have a runny nose and still go out for a run..or at least walk outside and nobody gave you a second look.. :(

Weeks ago, a change went into production. For some reason, we can't implement our own changes or create new databases in production, we have to have a whole different department do it. This would be great except for one thing:

THEY CAN'T THINK FOR THEMSELVES. I've had to tell them how to run scripts I wrote. I've had to tell them how to fix problems that arise.

Back to that script ran three weeks ago or so. It didn't add permissions to allow me, the system and application developer to see the stored procedure, much less run it. Application can't run it. Thankfully the application works without it.

Fast forward to tonight. My change that I'm attempting to implement is the creation of the stored procedure, because nothing could see it, I assumed it didn't exist... reasonable, right? Database folks tells me it exists. They then tell me they can't give me nor the application permissions because it doesn't ask for it in the change plan.

Excuse me.... WHAT FUCKING WORLD DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO CREATE SOMETHING AND HIDE IT FROM THE CREATOR LET ALONE THE APPLICATION SO IT CAN'T USE IT?! FUCKING THINK. WHY WOULD I WASTE MY FUCKING TIME TO TALK TO YOU OFFSHORE PIECES OF SHIT AT 10PM WHEN I'D RATHER PLAY VIDEO GAMES.

I'm so fucking done with enterprises. Someone with reasonable job security at a startup, please hire me. You will probably pay me more fucking money than this company does anyway.

Now on to my second change of the night. Thankfully I don't have to rely on anyone outside of me... so I won't be wasting my fucking time.

Awhile ago I was working with an National Instruments RFID analyzer scope.. the item cost $100,000. And the vendor that sold it my company had the boldness to have Windows 7 run all the licensed software equipment on the device.

The product however did work quite well. One day I came into the office and IT "UPGRADED" TO Windows 10 OVERNIGHT.
Effectively turning the equipment into the world's most expensive brick. Luckily for me, it was my last day in that position.. got a salaried position in engineering.

A couple months later an intern was assigned to fix it.. the licenses were messed up.. he eventually got it working again. Microsoft almost cost my company $100K without a second glance.

It all worked out in the end. :)

Phone meeting with the makers of a program the company uses regularly:

Me: "so I believe you received the list of problems we have run into recently, can you walk us through how to make the changes necessary to fix them?"

them: "we see none of these errors"

me: "that's impossible, we had all of them yesterday, they crashed a few servers"

*checks version number on program, it's different*

me: "hold on one second"

*checks computer log, they were logged in this morning before I came in*

I figured out they received the list, fixed it, and then turned to us and said we didn't know what we were talking about because none of the errors were there, because they wanted to look superior.

Fuck those guys.

Well, today I felt like the witch from the sleeping hollow movie.

I was working on a code that logins to a page and download files to a folder, according to the user.

Well, I tried to use the webservices from the page (like it should be) but the links were broken, and I lost a entire working day on trying the API 😮

The second day I tried with Selenium. Everything was going ok, but I wanted to run it without opening the browser and I found a “Headless Chrome”. At the end of the day, I found several blogs saying that Headless Chrome can’t download files 😱 second working day lost

Today I read about “PhantomJS”. I tried the code in C# with OpenQA.Selenium.PhantomJS BUUUUUUT it was missing 😡 I also tried with Python, but I had the same problem.

Finally, I found a blog with a solution for C# with Headless Chrome 😄

TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.

Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.

Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.

Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.

Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.

Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.

Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.

Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!

Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

Second week sick I see how my life slowed down and how meaningless everything around is, everyone is rushing about some bullshit, name it new amazing job opportunity, black Friday great deal, super duper product idea or some most important bug on production that we need to fix asap.

All that can’t wait a week when I’m healthy?
Seriously, people lost their minds in today’s world to some bullshit.

I’m to old and to depressed to care about such idiotic things. Living my life as I want and on my own peace, don’t care everyone is running, I’m slowly walking and I like it.

It’s better to walk straight than run around like an idiot.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

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

Something I already had from square 1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And... It did!

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

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

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

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

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One trick on of the idiot seniors use to show that they have worked hard. Uglifying the formatting using the default editor lint in first commit.In the second commit they run the linter which changes most of the lines.This is while raising review for only a range of commits.
They should be removed from senior positions and thrown out of the company.

Xcode is pissing me off:

- Suddenly it starts force quitting every 2 minutes
- Every second time it doesn't know everything and only can autocomplete words that were already in the document
- Playground pages: Good idea, works horribly.
- when I use modules from CocoaPods the first time, I need to restart Xcode and the computer 5 times till I don't run into build errors
- it likes to just throw random errors everywhere and leaving you unable to build anything
- it only copies new files every second or third time into the project folder.

I'm really pissed. I just wanted to code...

Ok so was dating this girl who n has a 8 year old I was with her for 4 year her son calls me dad... Long fucked up shit story short. She cheated fucked me over all that cool I stayed for the kid... A few months later I catch her in my son's bed with another dude.. ya I know right my apartment my everything!!!! How could she right.... but as most men knows Once Upon and gets caught doing something they turn into something completely unrecognizable in ridiculous. If I do whatever she says and wants to still let me in her son's life!! And as soon as I left my apartment to her she moved some dude in with his two kids and stole everything that I had.. so I had to get coppers involved to try to get some stuff... I mean I was free balling to work with no socks .. no towels nothing... you can only imagine how badly I wanted to go into my apartment and destroy this dude.... But for my son's sake I bit my lip and took it... she got a hold of my spare car keys both spare key tab and keys... shortly after I left they run my truck of all my HVAC technician tools... Then to make it worse some months later she emptied out my truck again... and you can only imagine how upset I was about everything because I love that kid and I don't want him to have to go through anything.... Someway somehow her and her new boyfriend got some guys off GitHub I mean I'm getting torn up out here ... GPS trackers .. people following me... and everytime I leave my truck or leave anything that gets broken into and stolen... it was so bad that they even made me lose my job at three different stores that I was working not because of my performance but every time I would walk outside of work my truck wouldn't start or it would be completely ransacked. Someone plz HELPPPPP and yes that's like the 4th GPS tracker that I've taken out of my second vehicle now because of this crap it is literally almost ruined my life

So I wanted a newer Linux OS for doing certain things at work. I went for Kubuntu 21.04 as it would have reasonably newer software and had the tools I needed for managing exfat partitions. I installed it on a second drive and everything went smoothly. I booted to the OS and it said it needed to do updates. Okay, lets do that. I started them and walked away.

I came back later and it had finished. I rebooted the machine because I needed to run windows. It came up to a prompt and a grub command line. WTF. I am like oh fuck, it didn't just fuck me out of my windows install. So I rebooted into the BIOS. I looked and it now had switched the drive I installed Linux on as the boot drive. That is weird. So I switched the M.2 drive to boot. It went right into Windows.

Kubuntu 21.04 installed on second drive as intended, switched the boot drive to the second drive, and then fucked itself on first update. And people wonder why non-techies don't run Linux. Its a pile of shit only a masochist would love. Because we are the only ones who can possibly sort out shit like this.

I know its probably a webpage away from fixing, but I needed to work in windows and could not be fucked to fix it. Its a distraction to actually getting my work done. Just disappointed in the entire ecosystem.

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

Im ok with working for your startup for 2 years for peanuts. Im ok filling in 5 other types of jobs on the way while u still fucking micromanage everything, rendering all designers useless and making them leave after a few months. Im ok telling u its ok when u say u know how hard it is to keep going cause im such a positive team player. Im ok buying my own computer cause u r too cheap to buy a device that can run fucking Safari. Im ok working day and night for years carrying your company on a promise that when u sell i wont be forgotten. Im even ok with new people making way more than me from the new investment for which i worked my ass off for years, almost burning myself out. But if you sell the company for big money and get rich without even telling me, I WILL FUCK YOU UP.

p.s. true story, second employee, got taken advantage of heavily. still working there acting like im not in the know, waiting for next move.

I'm studying atm and I survived Haskell, SKI, ... now, in the second semester we started with Python (yeay ♡) and Java (that's fine).

One of the first exercises is about installing Jython ('cause it's good, right? /sarcasm off), using the lecturer's module and write some code for it. It's about painting some shitty graphics *gasp*...

I use PyCharm (not really necessary for these crappy exercises) and programming on Windows and/or Linux.

Downloaded Jython, installed it, set it as interpreter - works fine (win10, pycharm).
Some students got weird errors using linux - for me it's the same but meh Idc.

Today I tried using Jython on my notebook, too (win10, pycharm). Downloaded it from the Jython Project website. Can't update pip, can't run modules - error is about fckin charsets...

Some other student figured out - wrong version of Jython. The newer version has some bug fixes.
2.7.1 is the one and only - the download section of their website offers 2.7.0 as latest release...

So - how to know there is a version 2.7.1?
#1 version control website = Wikipedia

So... there is a blog, guy's writing about this release - this installer is hosted at maven central. Yeay. Obvious. Thanks.

Can't describe such stupidity - maybe it's the user again 😂

So I salvaged some computer that was about to be thrown out by IT because it works perfectly fine and would be a waste to lose.

The (current) problem is, there is no built-in wi-fi adapter so I had to order a usb adapter to plug into the machine.
Fortunately enough it supports Linux but cones with a cd with the _source_ of the driver in it and we are supposed to build it. Now what's the problem with that?

First problem: building needs all sorts of build tools, starting from gcc and make. Since it's a fresh install, though, I _cannot_ install those normally because -- you guessed it -- I don't have a WiFi connection, which is why I needed the bloody adapter in the first place, so I spent hours trying to fetch the binaries from the apt register using another computer and bringing them over via USB.

Once that was (more or less) successful, the next problem came around; Second problem: the instructions clearly state to run make, but there is no fucking makefile anywhere so that obviously fails spectacularly. What _is_ there are some bash scripts so I try running those.

Now, just when I think it's finally done (one of the scripts has been running for a while and seems to work) the compiler dies with an error: the fucking driver won't build for the current kernel version. And not just that, but it is clear nobody is using basic things like include guards because gcc kept screaming at me about the same macros being defined over and over due to header file re-inclusion. Like, seriously? Come on!

Long story short the fucking adapter is going back to the seller, let's see if the next one I order more civilized.

My teacher wants me to run HelloWorld Application made in Android Studio ._.
First of all, its f**king huge in size
Second, we thought that only Chrome was notorious for being ram hungry.

ERRRR MAAAAH GAAAWD CRINGE!!

!(dev|rant)

I just got an old refurb for the garage to run my camera capture stuff, as the raspberry pi wasn't cutting it. I thought for a split second about leaving the legit version of Windows 10 that came with it on it, and trying to do some in-home streaming over steam, but I found out very quickly that an old corporate refurb is not going to cut it for game streaming. And with all the complete nonsense you have to abide to make Windows usable(ie: disabling stuff you don't want), it's not going to be any use to me in Windows if it can't stream.

Also, for some reason, Windows just wouldn't use the built-in NIC at all. It reported the cable was unplugged, and just absolutely would not work. So, Debian it is, and lo and behold! The NIC works like a champ now. The camera capture works brilliantly too, so now I can turn off my desktop at night.

Linux just works. Windows, more and more all the time, is just more trouble than it's worth.

We have all run the same code although it didn't work the first time. And it never worked the second.😂😂

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

So, for my final year project I'm tasked with creating a mobile app for iOS and Android.

A YouTuber I watch avidly decides to go with Xamarin for his next app. Cool, I think: I'll go with Xamarin for my app too (I'd like to test run the app on PCs just for fun).

Looks for Xamarin tutorials, nice, found one! Goes into VS, creates a new project. I add "Hello World" to the centre of the screen.

*F5* Build started... 5 minutes later I come back and it failed. No reason why it failed, all parentheses closed, semicolon at the end of my only line of code.

Watches YouTuber's new video, he has the same problem ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ. He adds a button, builds, build fails. Tries a second time, build succeeds. And this goes on for a couple of minutes while he's troubleshooting the problem.

Oh well. Time for hell I guess.

Second time in in 30 days I’ve had to run sfc for Windows to boot correctly.

Hey, know that joke where people say it runs yesterday but for some reason it doesn't run the next day? The same thing happens to me here with Hecker (a Hacker News 'client' written in Go that I am currently working on)... Oh wait a second it works again!

Btw, if you care about this, then the error seems to be a JSON error, which means that one of the submissions the program scrape has wrong JSON format, and its error is an invalid character error. Bruh.

I’ve been ill and injured a lot over the last 8 months or so, and i also quit smoking 2 months ago so I’ve put on a bit of extra padding.

I need to loose weight as I’m getting married in August and I want my suit to fit.

Anyway I’ve started eating a little bit healthier, and I’m gradually getting back into exercise (taking it slowly as don’t want to re-injur myself, and need to get my body used to it again)

This has presented 2 problems, the first is that after a run I smell like a tramps ball bag, and the second is I’m impatient and can’t do the sort of training that I used to do.

But, onwards and upwards, and even with no exercise I can still run 2 miles non stop in less than 20 minutes, not going to win any awards but not too bad all things considered.

I have one Windows and one Apple M1 computer. Our project runs old docker containers and can't upgrade easily. I decided to run the x86 versions of containers on there and use them from my network. Corporate Windows has port blocking so I decided to install linux to a usb drive. I loaded a live install distro and installed it to a second USB drive.
The internal nvme laptop drive somehow had its partition table wiped along the way. I can see files on there in a partition restore tool but alas it isn't becoming bootable again from uefi after doing partition table restore. 😭

!long rant
Trying to work from home is always a pain, since we need to use company laptops (no ifs, ands or buts about it).
Yesterday I took the laptop in to check for updates that just wouldn't run while at home (my first mistake), and I couldn't get past the "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login" screen, laptop keyboard didn't seem to be registering clicks, and an external keyboard wasn't either (and I forgot about the on-screen keyboard). A couple of restarts later with no further changes to the situation, the laptop then didn't get past the BIOS screen.
So I called support (my second mistake) and logged an incident.
Couple of hours later someone comes to my desk and asks about the issue, so I describe it, show them (by now the laptop was once again getting past BIOS screen), and leave them to it. Since these laptops are just used as preconfigured VPN and RDP gateways, I said it would be okay if he just wanted to reinstall the OS (my third mistake).
Several hours later, after staying late last night waiting for it to finish, I loaded my profile, installed updates, shut down, grabbed my stuff and left, without checking VPN or RDP over WiFi (my fourth mistake).
Turns out that some of the buttons on the keyboard just no longer work, but now USB keyboards do work, and I can just use OSK to login while out. I figured this would be my only issue with things, and that it was acceptable.
This morning I attempt to use the laptop, and forgot about OSK and the faulty delete button, so spent a few minutes on that. Try to connect to WiFi and find it can't connect, because of course, it doesn't remember the WiFi password, so I root around for the code in some drawer, enter it, and it works. VPN tries to connect and... get told to insert my smart card, which is already inserted, because the driver is wrong!
So I'm sitting here writing a post, not quite believing that I'm considering cancelling my plans for the day to go into the office because of a bloody driver issue now...

Does anybody use raspberry pi as Kubernetes node? I kinda have an experience of my pis do not have enough memory with 1Gb. The system would run about 5 minutes, and each second more memory would be allocated. After that, every node shut itself down. Is there anything I can do about that?

So far I've been pretty lucky... except for the code some of my professors at uni used in their assignments. A couple of them had this horrid habit of giving you a horribly-written, out-of-date (we're talking these chuckle heads used the same code for years on end and wondered why it didn't work on new versions of Java), messy source file with "fill in the blanks" sections like it was some kind of Java Mad Libs book. One of them had an entire jarchive of data structures we were required to use that he'd written in the '90s and NEVER UPDATED. Another one had a script he'd written for his own specialized assembly macro preprocessor that he'd been using without update for who even knows how long. Now, we were using one of those goofy virtual machines with its own simplified assembly language, and we were on the fourth version of the program. This guy'd written his macro processor in Java for the second version, never updated his Java source, only provided a barely-working .bat script for running it, even though the department's official preference was a *nix environment, and implemented this horrid "pretty-printer" that had a regrettable little habit of eating code. You heard that right. You'd run build.bat and it'd expand your macros then send it over to the pretty-printer which would very infrequently just replace the existing program file with an empty file. When we brought it to his attention, he goes "...huh. never happened to me." and proceeded to use the very same set of programs for the next three semesters, even when the assembly simulator was updated again. I heard wails of anguish from the poor sad souls that came after me as their macro processor created program files with deprecated operations, their pretty printer printed out beautiful, perfectly-organized empty files, and the professor responded to every second of a student begging for an updated version with "...huh. never happened to me." I never saw a single bug reported to either of those professors even acknowledged, let alone fixed. Some of the Java Mad Libs were the same ones they'd started using when they first switched the curriculum from Ada to Java. Thankfully after my first year I escaped into the bliss of the next three years, which were full of *nix and C and beauty.

My first experience with a computer was when I was about 7-8 years approx. I came back from school and dad told me he got me enrolled with a teacher who lived around 5 kms away. Me and my dad walked in the warm summer afternoon (one of my most fond memories tbh), cut through a meadow that had freshly cut grass and reached his place. He lived in the third floor, and there was a stray dog that used to stay in the second. The stench was horrible, but over time I got used to it.
He opened the door and showed me how to boot up a computer, then asked me to open LOGO (it ran on MS-DOS at the time). Taught me the fd 40 rt 90 stuff and I loved it - he noticed and asked me to go to town. I started drawing on the screen and remember being delighted at how it ran what I asked it to run.
We then did some theory, and every grade I finished my syllabus in like 2-3 days. Too bad we didn't have coding until I was like 14, but that's another story and deserves another post :)

Sorry for the long post, got carried away

My first project was a batch/visual basic script that could do a few things. Open and close CD trays, show a fake virus pop-up, log off, and some other misc stuff.

My second script was a 1 line batch script with vbs generated from itself. It would fuck up your system, put itself in startup, try and replace Explorer.exe with itself, show stuff on screen, reboot it, put itself in strange places so it could be run of the user did something like access Windows features. Never used it but it was fun to make

In my first few months of my first dev job, I written this fragile piece of code in, trigger warning, PHP that sent out email reports to my clients. It was a two men team, and we have no clue about TDD or how to do unit testing for such code. We would just run that piece of code manually do send out dummy emails to ensure things were working.

One day the code broke. I was told by my boss to fix it. Spent the entire day trying to fix but couldn't get anything done. Finally at around 7pm my boss came by and asked why is it I couldn't get it fixed. He helped me troubleshoot and fixed it. And subsequently told me "c'mon man you're better than this."

It turns out that he changed a part of a code that was supposed return an array of strings to an array of objects, adding a second attribute that wasn't even in use.

So what that meant is that he changed a piece of working code, to include a property he didn't need, committed and push to production without even manually testing it. AND TALKED SHIT TO ME.

That was the day I learned git blame and began my journey on TDD.

Currently the only 3rd party tokenization VSCode supports is a massive pile of RegEx. There's a whole discussion about how procedural tokenization could be supported without running extension code in the UI thread. The central argument against delegating this to an external worker is that if the reply doesn't arrive fast enough it might interfere with characters typed later.

1. Any computer that can run VSCode can execute somewhere in the order of a _billion_ instructions per second. To a program, the delay between keystrokes is an eternity. The only way to run out of time here is if either the dev isn't aware that the request is time sensitive, or the framework communicates to the OS that the task isn't urgent and an arbitrary amount of work is scheduled before it.

2. Chromium is the pinnacle of cybersecurity and its primary job is to sandbox untrusted user code. You don't need another thread to do it.

3. This use case fits squarely in the original design objectives of Webassembly.

This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?

Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.

And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.

Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.

Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.

You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".

The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.

Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.

Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.

Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.

Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.

That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.

In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.

But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.

Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.

How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.

If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.

On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.

On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.

Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.

And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.

What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?

Unable to run internet on company provide Mac book ..fucking. stupid....Tried to remove proxy but not working..Even wifi getting connected and for a second it runs the internet.

How to get rid off this proxy shit

Had a new assignment(in liberty basic) in my computer studies course:

Ask user for the name of their favourite cartoon character. Then have the name move across the terminal screen with a once second delay.

So I spent about 30 minutes trying to find some sort of delay function in liberty basic. Finally I stopped using a for loop and instead move that code into a subroutine and tried to use the timer to run it every second.

Didn’t work.

So I finally gave in and asked the teacher. He explains for loops to me(after thoroughly investigating my keyboard(which is the same as his) for the cap locks key) and then use a incrementing for loop to 500000 as the delay. Next he told me that it felt like a second and he left.

Later he checked up on me making sure I understood.

When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.

After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.

My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.

Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.

I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it.

*Long post*
Fuck Firebase.

I am working on a Instagram clone. So far it was going good until I came to the follow/unfollow part. Specifically where users post will only be visible to the friends who are following him/her.

Initially I thought I could use Firebase rules for that. Turns out you can not use the rules for filtering because of cascading properties of firebase rules.

Second one was the traditional approach in which you can check the author of the post and if the author is in my friend list then display it. But this seems idiotic approach because in the long run users will have to download thousands of posts just to check them. I know I can use the order by but this is also a cumbersome approach nonetheless.

Does anybody has any idea on how to do it. I'm stuck here.

< The IT guy Fixes it all. A brief story about an old couple I knew >

So... I know a very old man, that keeps a great (young) appearence despite his over 80 yo. He has been a friend of my family also and my neighbour.
He lived with his slightly younger wife. They had suns/ daughters, grandsuns and even a few grand-grand suns. Despite their family keep making visits regularly, most of the time, their main company were the neighbours. And me and my younger brother were like a second grandsuns to them, and we saw them the same way.

Every time there was somethng to fix. A radio, a tv, an old ring telephone. They would call me to fix it.

At a certain age, my parents moved out to a different street, me and my brother started spending more time away from our village, so this very lovable cuple, keept calling to my place like we were still available 24/7.

The most funny request was when the old man calls meand says something like is:
OldMan: - Hello, André! everything is good with you?
Me: - Hi. I'm great! I'm spending a lot of time away now, but despite that, all is good.
OldMan - Nice to hear you! You are still studdying Computers? I think I need you to do me a favor, if you find some time.
Me - If it's nothing too difficult, or time consuming, maybe I can. What is it?

And then he breaks it.
OldMan - I have an electronic heater, but I can 't make it run. But maybe you can fix it. You know all about this electronic stuff...
(after laughing a litle bit)
Me : Well! That is a litle bit out of my league.

BTW. A curious info. The old women couldn't recognize a single letter before her 70's. She basically didn't knew how to use a phone, but then she started a senior class to learned to read, write and basic algebra. And this would become a life saving gift to her.

One time that she injuried herself in the back caused by an hard fall at her place, she was able to drag herself to the phone, and instead of calling the Urgence Team, she called me .
Luckly I was at home, and could get help in time.

C++ is the building blocks for many high-level programming languages, and since 1984 its first appearance in the markets the C++ core committee developers have introduced its 4 new versions which are C++03 (ISO/IEC 14882:2003 second edition), C++11 (third edition), C++14 (fourth edition) and C++17 is the fifth edition. With each new version, developers introduced new features, libraries and APIs in it.

C++ introduced as the extension of C programming language which made C++ as a compiled programming language, which means the developer required a C++ compiler to translate the C++ code to its equivalent machine or byte language, so the Operating system of the computer can execute the program.

There are various C++ compilers in the market and most of them are open source and free to use, however conventionally when we say C++ compiler, we basically talk about GCC which stands for GNU Compiler Collection.

What is GCC?

GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection, and it is a collection of programming compilers which induce C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, and some versions of Java. The first version of GCC introduced in 1987 and it was also known as GNU C compiler which became the standard compiler for C programming language, in that same year GCC also provided Compiler support for the C++ programming language.

Now GCC has various versions and each version give specific support for C++ versions, by now if we look at all the versions of GCC, we have a stable GCC for every version of C++, but there are some exceptions with C++11.

C++11:

C++11 introduced as the 2nd update version of C++, it suffixes 11 because it released in 2011 or because on August 12, 2011, ISO gives official approval to it. Formally C++11 known as C++0X because developers were expecting the new update released in 2010, but with its release in 2011, the core committee developer of C++ changed its name by C++0X to C++11.

C++ 11 replaced the old version of C++03, and it also brings many new features for the C++ developers. The main aim of designing C++11 to stabilize and maintain the backward compatibility of new C++ version with the C+98 and C programming language and that’s become the main reason why core committee developers only introduced new features in the old standard library rather than extending the core language.

 

GCC does not give Full Support to C++11:

GCC version GCC 4.8.1 purpose the first feature-complete implementation of the C++11 standard, however, the 4.8 and 4.7 does not give the full support for the C++11. The current version of GCC provides the major support for all the standard features of C++11 but if you are using the GCC 4.8 or 4.7 versions then your GCC only provide you with the experimental support for the C++11.

To use the Experimental support of GCC you need to enable it first before you compile or run you C++ 11 version code.

use code std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 to enable the experimental support for C++11.

Hire are a few tips to up productivity on development which has worked for me:

1) Use a system of at least 16gb ram when writing codes that requires compilation to run.

2) Test your code at most 3 times within an hour. This will combat the bad habit of practically checking changes on every new block you write.

3) Use internet modem in place of mobile hotspot and keep mobile data switched off. This will combat interruptions from your IM contacts and temptations to check your WA status update when working.

4) Implementation before optimisation... This is really important. It's tempting to rewrite a whole block even when other task are pending. If it works just leave it as is and move on to the next bull to kill, you can come back later to optimise.

5) Understand that no language is the best. Sometimes folks claim that PHP is faster than python. Okay I say but let's place a bet and I'll write a python code 10 times faster than your PHP on holiday. Focus more on your skill-set than the language else you'd find yourself switching frameworks more than necessary.

6) Check for existing code before writing an implementation from scratch... I bet you 50 bucks to your 10 someone already wrote that.

7) If it fails the first and then the second time... Don't try the third, check on StackOverflow for similar challenge.

8) When working with testers always ask for reproducible steps... Don't just start fixing bugs because sometimes their explanation looks like a bug when other times it's not and you can end up fixing what's never there.

9) If you're a tester always ask for explanations from the dev before calling a bug... It will save both your time and everybody's.

10) Don't be adamant to switching IDE... VSCode is much productive than Notepad++. Just give it a try an see for yourself.

My 10 cents.

Bullshittery continues. This time around, absolutely innocent, clamav is root cause. For once not incompetent idiot, but piece of software. IDK if that makes me happy or upset.

So our email server that I configured and took care of died. RIP. Damn, better put it back together ASAP. So Im under pressure, while still pissed at everything that I ranted before (actually my last 2 rants were throttled, and in total all of that happened past 60 minutes but devrant rate limiting) I start auditing logs. You imagine, we kindda need it NOW, and it's second time last month clamav is pulling stunts and MTA refuses (properly) to work without antivirus. So pressurized, I look at logs, what the fuck went wrong.

clamav deamonize() failed - cannot allocate memory

Hmm. Intresting, but sounds like bullshit. I know server is quite micro becouse they wanted to save on costs as much as possible, but it has well over half a gig free ram just before it crashes (like 800MB) with that message. Is it allocating almost gig in one call or what? Looked carefully at trusty htop while it was starting, and indeed, suddenly it just dies with quite a bit of ram free, almost as much as it weights already. And I remember booting it up when I was configuring it, and it had fair bit of headroom.

Google, help me friend... Okay, great, so apparently at some point clamav loads virus DB into ram (dafuq?), and than forks, which causes spike of 2x the ram usage, and than immidietely frees it up.

Great, that sounds like great design decision... At least I know, I can just slap on SWAP file, restart it and call it a day.

It worked, swap file is almost empty (used 15megs, 900 megs free ram, whatever).

That leaves me wandering, who figured out to load DB to ram? That means pretty much that clamav will eat a little bit more ram each vir db update, and that milisecond "double ram" spike will confuse innocent people who just wanted to run clamav and it worked last *long period of time* and now crashes without warning without any changes to configuration.

Maybe there is logical explanation, I want to know it.

While fucking my hot blonde gf this morning the Fucking DUREX condom BROKE and i creampied her. Here are the reasons why its not my fault:

1--Im not retarded

- 4 years of fcking my hot blonde gf with no protection and nothing ever happened cos im !retarded. Its a bigger risk to fuck with condom than without, how is this fucking normal???

2--I use condom the right way

- i was holding the tip so air comes out, just like it was explained on the box, but while rolling it down i was still holding the tip to make sure the air doesnt come back up

3--She was wet

- she wasnt dry. My hot blonde gfs pussy was so wet from how horny she was so its impossible that it got torn due to dryness

4--First verification

- it wasnt torn or ripped. It was normal. Everything looked absolutely fine

5--Second verification

- when i put it inside my hot blonde gf and fk her i pull it out in the first 10 seconds just to make sure it isnt torn--it was good and nothing was ripped so i slowly put it back inside

6--Condom is not thin

- i took the regular durex one (fuck this fucking dead fraud company I'll piss and shit on their grave) so it wasnt the thin bullshit one

7--Dont got a big black dick

- its normal. Average. Not small nor big. So latex elasticity isn't my problem

8--50-50%

- every FUcking time when i fked my hot blonde gf with a condom i always stressed if it'll break or not. This is not the first time it broke. FUCK the product that is THIS MUCH unreliable, unsafe and fragile! I'll fuck the whole durex company up. Im not the only one who had this problem. DUREX IS THE BIGGEST OVERRATED SCAM COMPANY SPENDING BILLIONS ON MARKETING FOR A LOW QUALITY SHIT PRODUCT THAT DOESNT EVEN WORK

9--Package didnt expire

- i bought a new box in the store on 8th march for womens day (modern women value having gifted with condoms more than flowers). It wasnt bought in a shit china quality shop. I fked her in the car at night and also creampied her but the condom did NOT break. Then i fked her this morning in bed with condom from the SAME BOX, and now it DID break. Are you Fucking kidding me???

10--Emergency contraception

- i died from high adrenaline of running so fast to the store to buy her contraception. Had to run to 4 fucking stores cause all of them don't work before 7:30am. Finally found one in the 4th store and she drank Escapelle within 20 minutes of incident, as soon as it was physically possible

11--And now what

- now what. What do i do. I did everything i could. Nothing is my fault. My hot blonde gf wanted me to creampied her it was her idea so shes at fault partially. She will get tested in 15 days while this contraception lasts. Dont know what else to try. This bullshit never happened before

Symfony 4:

I created a firewall with a user provider and everything was great for a year and a half.
I needed a second firewall with a different user provider for my REST API.

Being stateless, the rest api firewall didn't need the refreshUser method so I didn't bother doing anything inside but returning user (without noticing how my original class was built or the official documentation which apparently says I need to throw an exception if this isn't the right user provider for the user in the session).

I was having a problem with my main firewall after that point because I assumed it would only use the relevant user provider, but even though my API firewall only applied to a specific host/pattern, the user provider for that firewall was still being used. If it had run the supports method first, it wouldn't have done that even with my initial mistake. Frankly, I don't know why there is a supports method if it's not being utilized for this purpose...I saw supports() is used for the rememberme functionality, but seems inconsistent not to use it everywhere.

Not only should Symfony be updated to check the supports() method, but I also think it should only loop through user providers for the current applicable firewalls. Since we define a user provider per firewall, I think that would be the natural way for it to work. Otherwise why even define a user provider on the firewall if it's just going to try to use them all anyway?

Furthermore, in the case of a stateless firewall, requiring the refreshUser method via the interface seems strange.

So, ya boi was making a google action and struggling with account linking. Everytime I tested, it just instantly crashed. 3 days of asking slack forums and searching online.

I was so desperate that I made a second account and made it an editor on my skill. Tried to test and there we go.

Google actions don't run account linking when the owner tests it. Well played google, well played

Visual Studio's Test Explorer is a piece of shit.

Maybe the user wants to repeat the last test run without rebuilding? No can do. Maybe the user didn't add or remove any tests, but just needs to rebuild without running test discovery again? Nah. Maybe the user just needs to discover tests from THE ONLY ASSEMBLY WHICH WAS REBUILT? Too frickin' bad.

A 120-second turnaround (30 to build, 90 to discover) just to _start_ a test run is bloody atrocious. Especially when VS decides to run test discovery twice in a row for no given reason.

*sigh*...

I'd use ReSharper's runner, but unfortunately it isn't capable of running xUnit v2 tests when you've designated a custom XUnitTestFramework.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one

Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).

Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.

OK, so, I see PY files shared on GitHub. All I know is, it is code for certain apps or pages. I download SEVERAL DIFFERENT PROGRAMS trying to get PY to open. Some didn't work, others were in Console and not Form. I asked for help on the Forum, how to open it, they do the same BS; gave me a Console app that just stays black for less than a second, and closes. I ask for a Form version. They made the excuse that it wasn't a program like I was thinking. They rudely tell me to be polite, but something like this IS GOING TO HAPPEN if they can't get their crap working. Eventually, after I TOLD THEM I WAS FURIOUS, THEY HIDE MY QUESTION FOR 10 MINUTES. When I replied, I DID NOT CUSS, I REPLACED LETTERS WITH ASTERISKS AND SYMBOLS, AND STILL GOT SUSPENDED, FOR A MONTH, AFTER TELLING THEM I WAS FURIOUS.

On the other hand, I was using Audacity. I upgraded and a plugin stops working. I thought they messed something up, so I wait using the outdated version for the fix for a few months, and so a few months later I update again, at this point I was a little upset; 2nd update and it still doesn't work. After the 3rd time, I thought they just didn't want to take the time and fix it, as people probably would have reported it by then. So I rant on Audacity's Forum saying they didn't fix an error, showed them screenshots in all versions I got and the 3 newest ones show an error. THEY TOLD ME WHAT WAS WRONG! I was trying to run a 32-Bit plugin on a 64-Bit version! I downloaded a 32-Bit version of the newest Audacity, and the plugin worked fine.

Python could've done what Audacity did, but, "No-o-o, we enjoy banning Winston when he is peed off!" And just so, the Suspension ends a day after my Birthday.

I might just ask when I'm back on, "How to remove my user off this Forum", so they can say "I can't", and flag it as malware because I almost no longer want they're help, and CAN'T GET AWAY FROM IT.

Freak you in the butt, Python.

PS - If anyone knows how to use Python files in Windows 10 or know a free, non-demo program that will more-advancedly edit, save, open PY files in a Form, please, give me the name or link to the software, program or app in the comments.

Before anyone says anything, this page says "Rant", so don't ban this or I'm deleting my account. If this isn't a "Rant" site, please tell me, and/or rename this site.

That is the reason I came here, just to get my frustration out.

TIL RVM and I are on different assumptions. I'm talking about RVM allowing unbound variables in its scripts.
I don't because I literally have run "rm -rf /" on my Mac because of an unbound variable in the past. So, when I write a shell script, the second line is always "set -eu."
And because RVM allows unbound variables, this line crashes RVM.
Then for some stupidity on my part, I looked into GitHub for its codebase first to get even more clueless about the issue before finally googling to see if anyone had experienced the same problem 🤦

Second run of recordings, let's go boys. Take out the Tascams.