Navy story time again. Grab that coffee and fire up Kali, the theme is security.
So, when I got promoted to Lieutenant Jr. I had to attend a 1-year school inside my nostalgic Naval Academy... BUT! I was wiser, I was older... and I was bored. Like, really bored. What could go wrong? Well, all my fellow officers were bored too, so they started downloading/streaming/torrenting like crazy, and I had to wait for hours for the Kali updates to download, so...
mdk3 wlan0mon -d
I had this external wifi atheros card with two antennae and kicked all of them off the wifi. Some slightly smarter ones plugged cables on the net, and kept going, enjoying much faster speeds. I had to go to the bathroom, and once I returned they had unplugged the card. That kind of pissed me off, since they also thought it would be funny to hide it, along with the mouse.
But, oh boy, they had no idea what supreme asshole I can be when I am irked.
So, arpspoof it is. Turns out, there were no subnetworks, and the broadcast domain was ALL of the academy. That means I shut EVERYONE off, except me. Hardware was returned in 1 minute with the requested apologies, but fuck it, I kept the whole academy off the net for 6 hours. The sysadmin ran around like crazy, because nothing was working. Not even the servers.
I finally took pity on the guy (he had gotten the duties of sysadmin when the previous sysad died, so think about that) and he almost assaulted me when I told him. As it turned out, the guy never had any training or knowledge on security, so I had to show him a few things, and point him to where he could study about the rest. But still, some selective arp poison on select douchebags was in order...
Needless to say, people were VERY polite to me after that. And the net speed was up again, so I got bored. Again. So I started scanning the net.
To be continued...

Unix is user friendly. It’s just selective about who its friends are.

Laravel is the worst framework ever.

Everything has to be made convenient and easy. That sounds amazing, because developers want to save time, worry less about boilerplate code, right? No more constructors, no more dependency injection, fuck all the tedious OOP shit... RIGHT?

It does one thing well: Make PHP syntax uniform and concise through easily integrated libraries such as Collection and Carbon. But those are actually not really part of the framework... just commonly integrated and associated with Laravel.

The framework itself is completely derailed: You can define code in a callback in the routes file. You can define a controller in the routes file. You can define middleware as a parameter to the route, as a fluent method to the route, you can stack them up in a service provider. Validators can be made in controllers, Request objects, service providers, etc. You can send mail inline, through Mailable objects, through Notification objects, etc.

Everything is macroable, injectable, and definable in a million different places. Ultimate freedom!

Guess what happens when you give 50 developers of various seniority a swiss army knife?

One hammers in a screw with a nail file, the other clips the head from the screw using scissors, and you end up with an unworkable mess and blunt tools.

And don't get me started about Eloquent, the Active Record ORM. It's cute for the simple blog/article/author/comment queries, but starts choking when you want more selective and performant queries or more complex aggregates, and provides such an opaque apple-esque interface which lets people think everything is OK, when in reality it's forcing the SQL server to slowly commit suicide.

Windows obviously did a secret selective poll on what percentage of their users use dates and times.
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Does anyone else have periods where they just can't seem to get shit done? I'll have a few months of solid productivity, followed by a span of anywhere from a few days to a few weeks where I'm just completely useless, can't get motivated to write much code, or can't seem to be productive when I actually am motivated. Weird, right? Anyone else have similar issues?

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

As an interviewer, the toughest part is actually before the interviews, trying to convince recruiting teams that you are not looking for "anyone who works with computers".

Seriously, I've once heard a recruiter ask me "you want someone who knows the program language, right?", to what I answered "a couple, yes". The mouth breather looked at me astonished, askng "is there another?!?"
I'm not surprised that they shower me in piss-poor curriculums from anyone who had a Nintendo DS growing up.
Someone needs to come up with a way to hire more selective recruiters. But I guess we're back to square one when approaching this problem.

About being interviewed, the toughest part is when people do not know the salary that will be offered (usually those recruiter types) and evade the question as billionaires evade taxes.
I don't fucking care if your compensation "is so competitive it could have been an Olympian", I want to compare numbers. And if you do not have a number, I will assume the money is crap, period.

Learning from the smart people; in every workplace there are drones and leaders, each have their own selective intelligence. Pick the ones that are the most intelligent to learn from, and you'll be going along happily while learning at breakneck speed from the best.

We have a system at work with captcha....

I may have renamed a few thousand images and people have been getting pissed...

Of course I remember the shift in filename so I just correct them and they look at me like "how the fuck is that a 6" and im like "well I think it's a 6, the computer thinks it's a 6... Have you had your eyes tested recently"

Half the office are wearing new glasses, the other half have decided that Google has "gone too far" and that "I bet their algorithm has fucked this up"

I'll change it back in a few more days with a note in the changelog about how a "particularly aggressive AI got out of hand and was being too selective"

fcking dropbox. it seems that it doesn't work well with accounts which have over 300,000 files. In my case I have around 1,5 million files and total size is 500gb. Problem is that I am not able to sync them to my local machine. Every time I try to do that dropbox is stuck at "starting" and it's usage builds up till 3.5gb ram and then dropbox crashes.

What should I do if I want to sync everything in dropbox with my local machine in order to go through my old stuff and delete everything I don't need? I could do selective sync and go by chunks of 300k files, but it sounds like a pain in the ass since distribution of files across hundreds of folders is not even.

Maybe there is some better cloud service which deals better with large amounts of files? Maybe I could move all of my files from dropbox to that other cloud service and then sync it on my local machine properly?

It seems like every time I settle in to work on a side project, some random bullshit problem occurs with my stack and I waste all my energy debugging that instead of what I wanted to do. *sigh*

You know what's worse than having to come up with a new password every time you create an account? Forgetting your password every time you try to log in!

I swear, it's like my brain has a selective memory when it comes to passwords. I can remember every lyric to a song from 10 years ago, but I can't remember the password I created yesterday.

And don't even get me started on password manager software. You would think that having all of your passwords stored in one place would make things easier, but nope. I've forgotten my password for my password manager so many times that I'm starting to think I need a password manager for my password manager.

But seriously, why do we even need passwords in the first place? Why isn’t there an easier one stone kills all solution to all these password authentication nonsense?

I could remember when it was all letters, then forced to use letters + numbers…

then later forced to include symbols…

and then forced to make it lengthier…

and then solve puzzles after getting it right…

and after all the stress now we are forced to find nemo from a set of images.

I thought the misery would end there but nope. Now some platform forces 2FA like dude seriously?

For God’s sake we built self driving cars already! Why can’t one just exist without a password? Why do we always end up in a password cycle?

And please don’t say shit about oauth because if your password master (i.e: google) fucks you in the ass then all your oauth accounts are gone for good!

I'm currently having an existential crisis about the meaning of passwords in our modern society. Shit is crazy when I ponder about it I get worried.

Maybe I have selective tunnel vision... While I'm focused working the only thing I see on my desk is the monitor and keyboard...