Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

So apparently using utf8 with LaTeX isn't enough to get € symbol working, I have to include two more packages for that (two, because one handles the character, and the other one makes it look "not weird"). How hard can it be to just use a single utf8 font, and have it work with whatever utf8 character you type in? And apparently there are at least 3 packages specifically for euro symbol - a certain XKCD comic comes to mind...

Wow, what a fucking mess this sunday was.
My boss wrote me an email that one route of a RESTful API we wrote for a customer was not working anymore and puking back a status 500 with some error mentioning invalid UTF-8 characters.
Not one single person has had touched nor changed the code on production in some 6 months, so what the fuck could it be?

Phpunit did not give any errors (running only locally), the code had no syntax errors and the DB dump did not contain any invalid bytes (tested with a hex editor).

WHAT THE FUCK?!

OK so I started to comment out lines (all tested directly on production of course) until the error vanished.

Guess what was the culprit?
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In the code (PHP) we used strftime(...) to get nice time strings. Of course we set the correct locale on the server, thus having months and days formatted in German.
So, in Geman there is this one mysterious month called "März" which contains an umlaut character.
Calling strftime generated the date with März in it, but the server locale was de_CH.iso-8859-1 and not fucking de_CH.utf8, so the "ä" was returned as 0xE4 instead of 0xC3A4 (valid UTF-8), which json_encode(...) did not want to swallow but instead threw an exception.

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

!!oracle

I'm trying to install a minecraft modpack to play with a friend, and I'm super psyced about it. According to the modpack instructions, the first step is to download the java8 jre. Not sure if I actually need it or not, but it can download while I'm doing everything else, so I dutifully go to the download page and find the appropriate version. The download link does point to the file, but redirects to a login page instead. Apparently I need an oracle account to download anything on their site. stupid.

So I make an account. It requires my life story, or at least full name and address and phone number. stupid. So my name is now "fuck off" and I live in Hell, Michigan. My email is also "gofuckyourself" because I'm feeling spiteful. Also, for some reason every character takes about 3/4ths of a second to type, so it's very slow going. Passwords also cannot contain spaces, which makes me think they're doing some stupid "security" shenanigans like custom reversible encryption with some 5th grade math. or they're just stupid. Whatever, I make the stupid account.

Afterwards, I try to log in, but apparently my browser-saved credentials are wrong? I try a few more times, try enabling all of the javascripts, etc. No beans. Okay, maybe I can't use it until I verify the email? That actually makes some sense. Fine, I go check the throwaway inbox. No verification email. It's been like five minutes, but it's oracle so they probably just failed at it like everything else, so I try to have them resend the email. I find the resend link, and try it. Every time I enter my email address, though, it either gives me a validation error or a server error. I try a few mores times, and give up. I try to log in again; no dice. Giving up, I go do something else for awhile.

On a whim later, I check for the verification email again. Apparently it just takes bloody forever, but it did show up. Except instead of the first name "Fuck" I entered, I'm now "Andrew", apparently. okay.... whatever. I click the verify button anyway, and to my surprise it actually works, and says that I'm now allowed to use my account. Yay!

So, I go back to the login page (from the download link) and enter my credentials. A new error appears! I cannot use redirects, apparently, and "must type in the page address I want to visit manually." huh? okay, i go to the page directly, and see the same bloody error because of course i do because oracle fucking sucks. So I close the page, go back to the download list, click the link, wait for the login page redirect (which is so totally not allowed, apparently, except it works and manual navigation does not. yay backwards!), and try to log in.

Instead of being presented with an error because of the redirect, it lets me (try to) log in. But despite using prefilled creds (and also copy/pasting), it tells me they're invalid. I open a new tab container, clear the cache (just to be thorough), and repeat the above steps. This time it redirects me to a single signon server page (their concept of oauth), and presents me with a system error telling me to contact "the Administrator." -.- Any second attempts, refreshes, etc. just display the same error.

Further attempts to log in from the download page fail with the same invalid credentials error as before.

Fucking oracle and their reverse Midas touch.

Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.

The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!

The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.

A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!

Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.

This one was no exception.

This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.

Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!

And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?

An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!

After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.

As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).

And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)

Using vim instead of an IDE has helped me increase my typing speed but I also think that I understand more this way.

Without auto complete (although you could get this via plugins) you have to type every single character which helps you understand the things you type

Fuck regex and everyone who has ever endorsed the use of and/or is affiliated with regex.
It's unreadable, impractical, overly complex and complicated and it adds unnecessary clutter to your code, and your thought process.
It's 00:50 am and I just spent 3 hours debugging a regex only to realise forgot a single "?" in a 75+ character long string and I want to go to bed.

Apple's marketing department are just dictionary junkies.

Have you guys read some of the latest Apple quotes for their products? You know, the ones where you visit the page and there's some large bold text summarising the product? Here's a few:

HomePod: "The new sound of home."
If you talk over my Spotify music YOU WILL BECOME THE NEW SOUND OF MY SHED.

iPhone X: "Say hello to the future."
E.Musk put a Tesla in space. Also the future can crash with a single character.

MacOS: "Your Mac. Elevated."
If you fly away I WILL use you as birthday balloon.

iPad Pro: "Anything you can do, you can do better."
SOONER OR LATER *Comment what you would put here*

But I mean hey. It sells right.
Reading it back maybe I'm just blind hating.

Seriously, fuck that incompetent ISP of mine.

Stores passwords in fucking plaintext. Does VoIP calling in plaintext! Passwords are sent over postal mail! Passwords are at least not sent in plain via email anymore when you want to reset them. The password reset form, "cannot contain `", "cannot contain "", "cannot contain '", "must contain a special character" because why the fuck not mess with people's password manager's password generation function over our own incompetence, right?! And showing all those errors for a single password? Eh, no. Let's just show one error that applies to whatever password you've given at that time. JUST ONE, because "reasons"! And to top it all off, when I finally made myself a nice password with some padding to remove unwanted chars and put that in my password store and on the website. THE BLOODY THING CAN'T EVEN FUCKING LOGIN?!

Now I ain't no ISP, but being a sysadmin clearly isn't a requirement when you're going to apply for work at an ISP, THAT DOES NOTHING BUT FUCKING SYSADMIN STUFF!!! Incompetent pieces of SHIT!!!

Online applications are so much worse than the classic snail mail ones, because some companies just don't seem to give a single fuck about the quality of their application application (hehe).

This results in such joyous things like:

• "Allowed file types: doc, docx, pdf, jpg, zip"
• "Max filesize 3mb"
• "One of your files does not meet the requirements" (doesn't tell you which)
• "Upload timed out, please try again"
• 403 forbidden
• "Your account does not have the necessary permissions to upload more than 4 files at once"
• clicking the submit button leads to a 404
• "Please explain why you want to work for us." 500 character limit
• Google forms

that moment when a (non dev) colleague, understands how a single character (in the entry point) can break the whole website

next time i'll explain him why websites like devrant exist..

Got rebuked by the Java teacher today at the University for using proper long names for variables in the code. She though I was just wasting time being lazy in the lab. "If something can be achieved by a single character, why type that long variable again and again?". *Everyone in class laughs*

Then, there was an error in my code [turned out to be long long int in Java is weird], and I had no clue what was going wrong [I'm a week old in Java]. So, I had initially called her to help. She made me change all private methods and attributes to public. When asked "why?", got trolled again.

Now, I know it's okay, and not that I really care about what my classmates think of me, but getting this kind of treatment really sucks. And if this is how future software developers are crafted today, maintainability is surely going to be an issue tomorrow.

Maybe staying in this stupid country was my worst career choice. I should have tried harder and gone abroad.

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

My head is melting. Does anyone have a colleague who constantly complains about missing specs, documentation, project organization, bad processes and procedures? Everything needs to be planned. Not a single small code change can be done without reviewed details. 10min job becomes a week-long session of whining and dabbling.

You give the guy a small task and at the end of the day nothing is done. Just page after page of written documents and lists in Word and online notebooks. Version numbers, meaningless measurement results, latencies etc. And all you asked was "could you just fucking fix this one thing and quickly compile and check it". But no. There must be a review and at least 10 people need to be called into conference. Someone needs to approve everything just so that he can later move to blame to others. "Yeah I know it's not working but I showed you the code and you reviewed it!". Yes, you did, but other people have work of their own so sometimes you need to tie your own shoelaces.

And sometimes finally there's some work done. All indentations are shit. There’re code changes everywhere just because the guy didn't like the previous smaller, compact and logical code. The code doesn't even compile properly anymore. And if you complain, the reason is "there's no proper reviewed and stamped process description, so I cannot know if a variable is supposed to be 10 characters long. Besides 200 character long variable names are much more descriptive". For fucks sake.

Some coders should've gone to work in some tax office basement.

Well today I found out that is perfectly fine to not communicate or look at your phone and be unresponsive while pair programming. They can't even write a single line of code on their own. I'm having to dictate them things by character. How can this be seen as a cultural difference. How the hell are they still employed and the most important question. Why do I need to accomodate to them and find ways to motivate them?
They should be doing what they are paid to do.

To the cunts who use single character aliases for their SQL queries table joins... Suck my throbbing dick till you choke on it and die....

That's all... back to work

Last year, one of our assignments for school was to implement a caesar cipher in Java. There is that one guy, that doesn't understand the concept of dynamic variables, so he HARDCODED every single possibility for every character. More than 1000 lines for something this simple. Yes, we are studying informatics. Yes, he passed last year

Dear Tailwindcss,

Fuck you.

Fuck you and your messy as fuck html files.

Fuck your shitty pseudo 90s 'Let's dump all our shit in a single html file'.

Fuck your claims of being responsive, most of your widths and heights are done in FUCKING PIXELS.

Fuck your claims of being flexible, adding a 10% width class took 20 minutes of scrolling through your shitty docs.

And the worst part is, the poor devs 4 years from now are gonna be stuck maintaining this goddamn shit because shitty enterprise companies desperately trying to stay relevant are treating this shit like the Holy God of Frontend styling, the solution to CSS once and for all

FUCKING IDIOTS CSS ISN'T BROKEN, THIS GARBAGE IS!!!! WE DON'T NEED A SHITTY SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM THAT DOESN'T EXIST

Tailwind can go fuck itself with it's 200 character html lines

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
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My arse.
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I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

So today at the beginning of the class, our teacher asked us to write a function that translates a given string to "leet speak" (basically having to replace every character to another).

Some used python dictionnaries, some used arrays...

And the two people arround me wrote a program with a condition for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER.

It kind of made me wanna die or kill them 😥

Man, people have the weirdest fetishes for using the most unreadable acrobatic shell garbage you have ever seen.

Some StackOverflow answers are hilarious, like the question could be something like "how do I capture regex groups and put them in a variable array?".

The answer would be some multiline command using every goddamn character possible, no indentation, no spaces to make sense of the pieces.

Regex in unix is an unholy mess. You have sed (with its modes), awk, grep (and grep -P), egrep.
I'll take js regex anytime of the day.

And everytime you need to do one simple single goddamn thing, each time it's a different broken ass syntax.

The resulting command that you end up picking is something that you'll probably forget in the next hour.

I like a good challenge, but readability is important too.

Or maybe I have very rudimentary shell skills.

Big win today. Set up a custom motion capture pipeline for Unity using my Vive/controllers today. Quote a bit of scripting but I went from nothing to complete animation reel for our character model in a single day.

Successful day for once. I can sleep well tonight.

Not work, but was very pissed off anyways.

So, today my C# lecturer was teaching about escape sequences in strings. Specifically, he's showing how to escape the single quotes character ( ' ) since we're learning about how to send SQL queries as well.
He started writing on the whiteboard the following and said that this was how to escape the single quotes character in a string:
\' "abc123" \'
Me and one of my classmates looked at this and started to ask questions, since this is definitely not how you do it. Somehow, the lecturer could not understand us. We tried to explain it the best we could, starting from verbally, then writing on the whiteboard, then even showing code on a laptop. For some unknown reason the lecturer still couldn't understand where he was wrong and both of us just gave up after 15 minutes of trying to explain it.
Mind you, most of the class had little to none prior programming experience, me and said classmate are one of the few that actually programmed before, so all my other classmates were just very confused as to what is right and what is wrong.
Now I'm really questioning my lecturer's abilities....

Ok so I was fetching some JSON data from a SQL database server and loading it on the front-end. Every single data is being loaded onto the table except for a single data column, which is empty.

Hmmm... So I go and check my code... everything looks fine.
Then I console.log the JSON (using .stringify() of course), all the values from the table are present in the printed out JSON.

Ok, now I am really pissed.

Long story short...
I had misplaced a single 'i' in the SQL statement, I had included the 'í' (the i-acute) character instead. And since I was using an alias in the query statement, no error was shown.

Fuck pep8 in general. Fuck harder anything to do with line limits. Fuck with a rusty spatula those who tie it into their git precommits or CI tests.

What's that, it's 2018 and even the shittiest walmart-tier computers have 1080p OR BETTER at a 16:9 aspect ratio?

"lol, 80 character line limit."

Eat a bucket of rancid dicks.

Oh, and since we're forcing you to be so economical with your characters, we're going to force four space tabs. Yknow, rather than simple single tab characters, which could mean everyone can set their preferred level of spacing without bloating the code with whitespace.

Because, yknow, it's entirely reasonable to chew up 1/8 of a line because you're editing a function inside a class definition. God Almighty forbid you try to do a for loop inside that function! Fuck you!

"Oh but you can't have two editors or terminals open side by side without that limit!"

BULL FUCKING SHIT. Here's my shitty 1280x1024 display on my shitty computer with two Sublime editors open side by side. You'll notice the break is at 100 characters. You'll notice I don't have to scroll horizontally to do two things at once. You'll notice I even have room for COMMENTS!

If your code standards require you to make your code *less* readable and *less* clear and take up *more* space to accomplish the same tasks, YOUR CODE STANDARDS SUCK!

Enough with this stupid meme. We're not in the 80s anymore and it's high time to start fucking acting like it.

I fucking HATE people at stackoverflow that "edit" every single character or spacing issue they see that are not relevant. FUCKING STOP. why do you have to fucking touch it? for imaginary Internet points? WTF

ok so first post, i would like to say whoever the fuck decided <!----!> was gonna be comments in html, i fucking hate you. not only is it the most ugly comments system out of any language i know, but its so unusable to type out, i'd rather call <script> just to be able to put it in // half the time (if i ever use comments, i rarely do) python its one single character, js its 2 which yeah is kinda annoying but atleast its 2 of the same so i dont have to reach across the fucking keyboard, here comes html the language most devs need nowadays to promote a project at least saying reach across your entire keyboard to fucking write a comment.

This is so annoying, I had 9 diff. jobs the past 2 years and this is my 10th and if this doesn't change I might reconsider my options again.

I came to work at a company that pays me like a Junior and treats me as an intern. My 20yo "boss" who acts as a project owner/lead dev doesn't want to learn anything new and sees any improvement as a waste of money. The problem is he thinks hes a great programmer but he doesn't know shit. Im mainly working on the Laravel installation because "I claimed I know Laravel". And its absolute garbage. They haven't used a single Laravel features besides routes and everything else is vanilla PHP. They write for loops that loop through $_REQUEST to remove a single character. Write 100 deep nested ifs and they abuse Elasticsearch to the point ES crashes because the program is using 1000 deep multidimensional arrays. Its only a webshop...

Everytime I try to make a suggestion like making the master branch protected, doing code reviews etc etc I get shut down because they are autistic and don't want anything to change.

This weekend I was working on a fun hobby project with a friend of mine. While he was modeling items for the game I started with a dungeon generator.

This morning I got stuck at a bug which took me more than 12 hours and 4 developers to fix. In the end I found the issue. I was checking

If y > arraySize && somethingElse
DoSomething();

It had to be:
If y < arraySize && somethingElse
DoSomething();

After I changed that everything worked without issues... Day well spent...

Because of an SINGLE MOTHERFUCKING CHARACTER I've been stuck for 3 days on my code. I live on a love/hate history with dev'ing.

//First rant

So I've been working trying to get a file exporter for a binary file format mostly reverse engineered - 2001 Super Monkey Ball 2 (GameCube) if anyone's interested.

Everything works fine, goals show up in the right places, wormholes work as intended, etc. That is everything, except every single level you create will be invisible, or crash (Depending on which version of Dolphin emu you use).

This happens whenever trying to specify object names for 3D objects. I checked, all the many offsets seem correct, Object names are correct. Tried both null terminated strings and fixed 80 character strings - nothing.

Some other guy also made an exporter that works, however the code is an absolute mess - basically unreadable. It also lacks some newer parts of the file spec, which is the main reason as to why I'm rewriting it.

And as I'm working with an almost entirely unheard of file format, there are few people to go to for help. The 2 I know who are also familiar with the LZ file format have no idea either...

Sigh.

TL;DR Calendar services sucks.

Imagine yourself as startup. You don't want to spend fortune on paying $5 per user per month for Google Services. Also you don't want to pay that to Microsoft for O365. You want to run it itself because you already have droplet running with your other services (ERP for example. Funny story too btw.) Ok, decision has been made, let install something.

I have pretty good experience with OwnCloud from past as Cloud file sharing service. Calendar is not bad for single user purpose (understand it as personal calendar, no invitations to others, sharing is maximum I tried) What can possibly go wrong when I deploy that and use its Calendar?

Well, lot. OwnCloud itself runs well (no rant here) but Calendar is such pain in ass. Trouble is with CalDav under hood and its fragmented standards. So, you want to send invitation to your team for recurrent meeting. Nothing weird. It sends as one invitation to each one, good. Now you realize you have a conflict, so you need to change time of one occurence. Move it, send update. And here comes shitstorm. It is not able to bisect one occurence from series. So it splits it to separate events and send invitation for every single one. 30 INVITATIONS IN 2 SECONDS! Holy sh*t! You want to revert that. Nope, won't do. So you accept your destiny and manually erase every single one with memo in head about planning recurring events.

Another funny issue is when SwiftMailer library (which is responsive for sending e-mails from OwnCloud) goes to spamming mayhem. It is pretty easy to do. When e-mail doesn't comply to RFC, it is rejected, right? So if because of some error CalDav client passes non-compliant e-mail (space as last character is non-compliant btw) and SwiftMailer tries to send it to multiple recepients (one of them is broken, rest is fine), it results in repetitive sending same invitation over and over in 30 minute interval. Sweet.

So now I am sitting in front of browser, looking for alternatives. Not much to choose from. I guess I'll try SOGO. It looks nice. For now.

I mistyped cap (from Capistrano) so often that I made an alias for it. Now bash history is full of... Crap. Literally.

My boss seen it once.... Luckily, he's already seen so many of my shenanigans that he didn't even care...

So yeah, I made an alias that changed one single character so I don't need to learn how to type.

crap staging deploy

The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?

Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.

I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..

This is the 3rd weekend so far since I decided I wanted to write a blog post. I didn't write a single character so far! God!

Does anyone else get annoyed when your outside of a editor and you press the apostrophe/quote or parenthesis key only to outputs a single character and not a pair?

Drives me insane

Bruhhh why you use random single character in your variable names in javascript src code? Do you have uglifier installed in your brain?

Using single character variable names.

Code for Matrix Rain Using HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Matrix Rain</title>
<style>
* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
body {background: black;}
canvas {display: block;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<canvas id="c"></canvas>
</body>
<script>

var c = document.getElementById("c");
var ctx = c.getContext("2d");

//making the canvas full screen
c.height = window.innerHeight;
c.width = window.innerWidth;

//english characters
var english = "1001010101110101010101010010101000101011101111010101010110101010101010101110000101";
//converting the string into an array of single characters
english = english.split("");

var font_size = 15;
var columns = c.width/font_size; //number of columns for the rain
//an array of drops - one per column
var drops = [];
//x below is the x coordinate
//1 = y co-ordinate of the drop(same for every drop initially)
for(var x = 0; x < columns; x++)
drops[x] = 1;

//drawing the characters
function draw()
{
//Black BG for the canvas
//translucent BG to show trail
ctx.fillStyle = "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05)";
ctx.fillRect(0, 0, c.width, c.height);

ctx.fillStyle = "#0F0"; //green text
ctx.font = font_size + "px arial";
//looping over drops
for(var i = 0; i < drops.length; i++)
{
//a random chinese character to print
var text = english[Math.floor(Math.random()*english.length)];
//x = i*font_size, y = value of drops[i]*font_size
ctx.fillText(text, i*font_size, drops[i]*font_size);

//sending the drop back to the top randomly after it has crossed the screen
//adding a randomness to the reset to make the drops scattered on the Y axis
if(drops[i]*font_size > c.height && Math.random() > 0.975)
drops[i] = 0;

//incrementing Y coordinate
drops[i]++;
}
}

setInterval(draw, 33);
</script>
<body>
</html>

Ever experienced that moment when you spend hours debugging a complex issue, only to realize it was caused by a single missing semicolon? It's like searching for a needle in a haystack, only to find out the needle was hiding in plain sight! I guess we should add 'semicolon detective' to our resumes. Who knew such a tiny character could wreak such havoc? Let's all take a moment to appreciate the power of the semicolon and the bittersweet triumph of finding it missing!

I picked a module of my nodejs app which uses MongoDB to pieces until I had no more idea what could be wrong. It should work. There could be nothing wrong. Then I thought: "What if I try to find() from the wrong collection?" Yes. Fucking YES! I've lost about 2 hours of my life because I've written the collection name in singular rather then plural. Just a fucking single character. Just a fucking "s"! Why don't you output an error? Why? Fuck you! Why don't you do that?

Goddamnit, I've been rumaging around a CMS -generated site (not wordpress) for a friend in devtools.(to suggest improvements) I don't have much experience with CMS, but why is there so much fucking useless nested markup everywhere that has to go down the line. A simple paragraph has at least 6x nesting, a nav is "centered" by having a millionenty billionety divs on each side, there was even a span element for a single character inside a <p>.

What a fucking mess.

In every single group project at my university, there is always that one guy that doesn't do shit:

Last year, we were a group of four students developing a website. One guy had never seen HTML before and was just filling the website with lorem ipsum and break-tags. One student didn't work a lot on the project, but developed a few bugs. The last guy, did not even spend 1 second working on the project.

A few days remaining before the projects deadline, and all we had left was to write a report on how we did acceptance testing. I was sure he would not get the same grade as the rest of us since I emailed the course coordinator, saying that this guy hadn't been contributing with shit.

However, just before the deadline, this guy starts making massive amounts of commits to the repo were he changed like one single character in our report, or just edited single words. The course coordinator probably just checked to see that everyone had committed to the repo, because everyone got the same grades!

!dev !tech

it's 2 am, nd just out of curiosity i put on earphones and tried to dance on a romantic couple song . interestingly, my life has been so single and restrictive that I can't even imagine holding hands of someone , nd that feels a bit sad.

after being burdened with the family ethics, relgions, family fights and financial crisis for so long, i feel i have lost a personality that i should have had.

1. i have lost the sense of random naughtiness and unnecessary bravery/arrogance. from what i know, the best way to reach your path is to remain focused on it. unnecessary acts of curiousity or nuisance leads to fights, frauds or worse.
however, people enjoy life by doing unnecessary banter, gossips, nuisance and having fun with unknown things, people and surroundings.
i guess this makes people a likeable/interesting character in social scenarios as me being an alert dog trying to focus on resching the party place, have a safe party and come home at time becomes a less interesting character than the guy entertaining everyone by his stupid talks in the car.

2. i have lost sense of compassion or showing love , expressing love or doing things out of love and not just for transaction.
From what i heard, people in relationship are clumsy to the max level. messages every 5 seconds, random acts of flirting, teasing, playing hard to get, what not.
i ... am simple. if i like someone, they are gonna know in 5 seconds (which is followed by a lifetime of awkwardness, so i have stopped even letting this thing to be known). physically nd financially i have enough resources and plans to be a good person to be with : i can be helpful in situations, am always up for doing anything interesting and have reputable personna. but expressing via those sugary baby talks is not my ☕

3. I haven't gained any passion for anything. i see people having deep thoughts on their passions for poetry, music, dance , guitar, travel, political alignment, causes, or whatnot.
i am not that much passionate towards anything because life doesn't give everyone the chance to choose passions.
i sat with my father in a flea market selling stuff. that wasn't passion, that was a necessity. for me, money>>study>>>anything
i am only passionate about having food on my plate and a roof over my head

-------

so all these things makes jack a boring person. i jave been chasing money so much that i question everyday of its worth it, as it's currently just being used to battle with the financial crisis while having a little bit in savjngs to enjoy life. but am so much worn out by this pressure of earning money that I don't even know how to enjoy life or have someone to enjoy life with , so its even more pointless to increase that limit.

i do try to explore the things i like : dance, singing, traveling, working out but not at the level that those attributes define me

#awkward_loney_life

So I've tried to unsubscribe myself from a newsletter for the past two weeks ...

It's a service I used exactly once and apparently I got signed up for their newsletter somehow.

When I got the first mail two weeks ago, I clicked that unsubscribe button in the footer to get to their unsubscribe landingpage and hit that confirmation button.

It said something like "... within 24 hours ..." and I was okay with that, but I kept getting a newsletter / offer / whatever every single day for the following two weeks.

Today I figured out, why the unsubscription seemingly had no effect.

I used a GMail alias for that website, so my address contained a + character.
Apparently they just put that mail address into some unsubscribe link template without urlencoding it, so that + turned into a space and they attempted to unsubscribe some mail address with a space instead of a + ...

Remember kids, always urlencode stuff in URLs!

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Had a weird issue today, opened an old SQL script that I had and every single character was separated by NUL character.

Needed to dust off the regex skills to find the inverse of all the characters I wanted to keep so as to replace everything leftover with nothing...

Still have no idea how that could have happened.

Thread topic: religion, philosophy, matrix

Summary: skip if you don't like these topics, stay if you want to find out why the conclusion has relevance to programming

.
.
.

Ok.

Let me get this straight:

There are 4 founders of the BAYC NFTs.

1 has a fasist/nazi pseudo name
1 has a racist pseudo name
1 has a satanic pseudo name
1 has a pedophile pseudo name

Their logo is a copy of Nazi Waffen Totenkopf emblem, which was the German division force of the Nazi concentration camps

And they became billionaires.

Ok

.
.
.

Sam bankman the founder of FTX crypto shit robbed people for 32 BILLION dollars. And hes not in jail because he donated most of that money to democratic political party, leaving himself 1 billion dollars as allowance. Now that he bought political power, politicians protect him. So he's having fun in the bahamas and penthauses, having generational wealth and enriching his fraud parents.

Ok

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.
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Balenciaga. They posted photos of female children holding fluffy toys with BDSM sexual bondage. Books on the table, with excerpt of Michael Borremans, who draws "art" of naked children covered in blood and being sacrificed in rituals. Then a book of "The Cremaster Cycle", which is a demented image that symbolizes "the murder and resurrection of Abiff". Hiram Abiff was the central character during Masonic initiation rituals as the culmination of a three-part process. Etc

Balenciaga is a multi million dollar "brand".

Ok.

.
.
.

What i learned through all my years of existing on this planet is, being good and doing good, does not pay off. I still live in the matrix. I am still a slave. I am still playing the game of earn to survive. Even while doing software engineering. And I don't know 1 single wealthy person who has obtained all that wealth by doing something good.

This has further lead me to realization: God doesn't help you get rich or wealthy. God doesn't give a fuck if you're rich or poor. He aint gonna help you. But do you know who will? That's right - evil forces will help you get wealthy. Funny how that works?

Because I am christian and believe in God, pray to God and did good all my life - I haven't received anything good in return, my life has not improved, in fact it has devolved and became worse.

Therefore, I came to a conclusion: I will switch teams. I'll let the evil demonic forces take over and guide me to wealth. I'm ready to scam, defraud, develop ponzis and step on corpses and people to get out of the matrix. Perhaps this is how and why good people turn into villains?

Now you understand.

I dont ask to be on the top. I just want to Not play the Matrix game. Which is the game where you have to earn to survive. I want to get into any store and buy whatever i want, without worrying how much does it cost or asking for a discount. People dumber than me do it. But i cant? That means there has to be a loophole in the matrix. An escape plan is possible. I tried escaping since 2018 and failed. For 4, almost 5 years. Because i was trying to escape through good forces. I'll now try to escape using demonic forces and perhaps I'll end up like BAYC founders, FTX founder, Balenciaga brand and many others similar to them. Ending up even half of their success or a fraction - I'll be more than happy. I am not happy living in poverty. Im getting sick of it. I'm getting sick to be underpaid $600/month for doing a job as hard as software engineering, even with a CS degree. Life is not meant to be slaved away till 65+ years old. I can't even afford to buy a car with this slave salary.

So forgive me God. Im just tired of life. Im tired of being a slave. Im tired of watching my parents become older, weaker and still working. I'll shut down all of my morals and I am ready to rob people in Web3 using all of my programming knowledge that has been undervalued.

"A little boy asked God for a new bike for his birthday, but he knows God doesn't work that way. So he stole a bike and prayed to God for forgiveness"

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

Working on a xslt just to change a single character in an invoice. The system I use does not have the euros sign...
Because fuck manually editing the pdf every month.
Fun.

My code editor has been frozen for 3 minutes because I entered a single character. My computer is a 16core 5.2ghz marvel of engineering. Visual Studio is a plague on humanity full-stop. Working with Unreal Engine gives me no choice but to use this piece of trash IDE that has only been going downhill since 2013. Cancel the project. Don't start over. Give up. Let Jetbrains make the IDEs.

when you find a single invisible character in each of your sql files in visual studio that causes a sql implosion saying

invalid syntax near ''

Sublime Text 3 and other tools didn't help. required manually finding this time, in 20 files..... with an overdue project.

I wanted to burn visual studio to the ground

Do you guy know that there is a lot of short query name like "f" in web development?

We are discourage from using single character variable name and the query key is too short. Is there any specific reason for using short query name?