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Search - "terrifying"
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I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.
The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...
I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.
Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.
Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.
That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.35 -
I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.
(tl;dr at the bottom.)
I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.
For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.
tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.
There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.
And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.
The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.26 -
Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.
7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.
Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.
Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.
"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"
You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.
You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.
You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.
One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.
It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.
Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.
And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.
I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.26 -
Reading some of the wk50 rants makes my blood run cold. brrrrr. They're terrifying.
While my story goes just like this.
Didn't know our manager(let's call him R) messaged us in our group chat that he won't make it to office for that day.
My account replied "Let's have moment of silence for those who left us. R, you will be missed. :'( Thank you for everything.".
I didn't notice the message until lunch time and my co-devs (with much back-slapping and laughing) told me I'm a gem. -_-
I just went to get some coffee, forgot to lock my unit and came back a murderer.
AND It was only my 2nd month on the job.6 -
So this just happened with my ISP, i have no words...
The fact you have my password in front of you in plain text is fucking terrifying and i know you do because i used to work for an ISP.9 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*65 -
🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...
One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.
I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.
A gets there... Fucking finally.
Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).
*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.
Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...
🤔🤔
We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.
His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)
There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.
A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.
I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.11 -
Last day of vacation, decided to check my work email.... The list of things they've broken is.... terrifying, I don't want to go back... ever...3
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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 😊rant deploying straight to prod prod prod prod dev server? dev on prod you chicken migration on prod wk149 git? who's a git? you're a git! scariest deploy ever game development1 -
Just a common day.
I received a message on Telegram, a guy wanted a Minecraft plugin for his server.
It was a small plugin, he accepted my first offer of 15€.
After some hours, it was complete. I was pressing "Export" on my IntelliJ but a terrifying message arrived.
"Dude I forgot to say that, can you make it using C++? I heard EXEs are faster".
Fuck dumb clients especially Minecraft server owners!7 -
Did you think there's a pmrant, where PM rants about us and dream about short deadlines, tamed developers and... I don't know, PM stuffs?!
Terrifying...5 -
I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.
Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.
I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.
No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.
The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."
Fuck Everyone.
Time to find a new contract.11 -
Number one thing I never expected, when moving networking equipment...
Some idiot wired a 230v socket in a mildly terrifying and dangerous way... Yes, that is 400v and all my equipment has now let out the magic white smoke...
Fuck some electricians!24 -
Just tested my GPU code vs my non-GPU code.
Its a simple game of life implementation. My test is on a 80 x 40 grid running for 100,000 cycles.
The normal code took 117 seconds.
The CUDA code took 2 seconds.
Holy fuck this is terrifying.3 -
Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.
If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.
Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.
Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.
I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.
But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.
This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.10 -
I just got this in the mail. Must have bought the MEAP and forgot about it!
Super cool....
But mostly completely terrifying.
It’s like the book of everything I don’t know.7 -
"A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail"
I'll leave the title as it was, but people were hunted down just for having been once logged by a tracking pixel inside a messaging app.
Simply terrifying, I hold that off for a while, since it sounded like the usual fakes, but it seems its not, as more and more keep confirming it.
"The government eventually exonerated 11,480 of the wrongly accused, but some had already spent months in prison, and reportedly some even committed suicide."
"Elif finished dressing her youngest and watched police search her family's home before they took her into custody — for using a messaging app the government deems seditious.
She knew the arrest was coming. She'd already lost her job, because traces of the app known as Bylock were found on her phone"
"The regime relies on logs from the country's ISPs to identify users of Bylock, fingerprinting them on the basis of their communications with Bylock's servers. These communications can be triggered without using Bylock, though: Bylock's tracking pixel was used for analytics for pop-up ads and in at least eight apps."
https://m.slashdot.org/story/336657
http://cbc.ca/beta/news/...
https://boingboing.net/2018/01/...7 -
How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?
My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.
He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.
I want him to learn JavaScript.
He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.
Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?
He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.
What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.
Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.18 -
Just wanted to deaign a typography for each popular programming language. Ideally the font matches the language itself. Initial ideas are: a playful candy font for JavaScript cuz it's so easy and fun to use, n a gothic C++ cuz it's like this epic, powerful (maybe sometimes terrifying) language.
Wouldn't it be cool if there's a set of these? Any professional designers here (cuz I'm just a hobbyist)? Or any thoughts? What should your favorite language look like?9 -
My personal AWS account just got suspended and it was the most terrifying thing ever.
It's back up now and reactivated once I paid up. Just a bounced payment on an old account caused it but for any of you out there who have this fear this what happens:
1. Amazon email you with reminders every few days.
2. The emails change to give a shut off date.
3. Your account is then locked after that date.
4. If you want imminent attention you have to pay $49 to talk to them.
Bonus tip : go to their billing page on your account, this isn't locked and allows you to pay up without paying the support fee.
Good luck!4 -
This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.
YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.
But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?
YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.
A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.
It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.
TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general16 -
Turns out cpp isn't the terrifying monster it used to be! I must be doing something wrong, it's actually working.4
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Hi
I'm an active user here so I know most of you.
I created a throwaway because I consider this a sensitive subject to me, and don't want people here to think I'm crazy.
I have some form of ocd but I don't know exactly which subtype it is.
It's not really something that makes my life impossible, but it makes me feel awful from time to time.
the way it works is that I imagine accidents happening to me or people I love, and I get triggered more if they are potentially caused by a mistake from me and they feel very vivid in my mind.
It's awful and terrifying.
Being close to anything that could cause harm is a trigger:
heights without any type of fall protection, knives, elevators, escalators, being on a plane
Being close to/in said objects/situations can start a clip in my mind as if I was watching a final destination movie.
This is a stronger obsession if it happens because of my fault, like tripping with my kid in my arms, or fumbling a knife while I cook.
Sometimes I react by curling and doing a painful expression and twitching a bit, even in public.
it's terribly painful.
i look like a crazy person, although considering what I'm writing, i probably am. It's just that I feel very scared of strangers in public noticing what I'm doing and finding out I'm crazy.
sometimes I get scared of the possibility of me being an actual psycho like the ones you see on crime shows.
as far as i know i think im normal in terms of compassion, empathy to others and never had any interest in harming others.
it's just part of the ocd, being hypervigilant of me, obsessing over me causing harm either accidentally or deliberately.
I'm also very scared of puking in public, or even worse, in front of friends.
Specially true if you're eating but you're seated in a spot where there's no way out except if everybody gets up.
I start by becoming self conscious of the possibility of puking, and sometimes I twitch a bit too, while trying to not look too crazy and joping that the next bite doesn't cause me to projectile vomit over people.
I hate this shit.15 -
Trying to buy a house in another state. First time moving out of state, first time trying to buy a house. Making first offer this weekend. Which is terrifying, and exciting. But it’s also lonely because my other half is in the other state looking at houses and I’m stuck here working and taking care of the cats.
Had a poor mental health day yesterday. Got a call today that my mama (gran on my mum’s side) took a tumble and has been in hospital and they don’t think she’ll pull through. I don’t have many memories of her, but the memories I do have are happy ones. She was always full of life and love and kindness.
💔6 -
So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...
While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".
So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.
It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?
No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.
You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).
To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).
It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.
For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.
That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.
I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.
When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.
He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.
There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.
I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.
My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.
Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...
Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...10 -
Hard drive head crashed and corrupted my entire android app source code which took my 5 months to build. I was depressed for 2 days and then started working for it again and updated the app on the store in 3 months. It was a terrifying yet amazing experience. Definitely don't want to go through that again.
Now I keep backups on the cloud. Lesson learnt.7 -
What I learned from devrant:
There is someone, somewhere, that will upvote the stupidest shit.
Which I find both terrifying and humorous. This is not a criticism nor a putdown. I find people fascinating. I also realize that my definition of "stupidest shit" is very subjective. This is definitely the most "fun" forum I have been on in a long time.4 -
What is more terrifying than procrastinating on devRant?
Right, procrastination on devRant with ++ features :/1 -
squashed a spider this evening just to have it erupt with hundreds of tiny baby spiders.
what a terrifying real world visualization of my week.2 -
This is the most terrifying & horribly beautiful code ever.
:(){ :|:& };:
*please don't try running it if you don't know what you are doing.5 -
I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.
I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}
He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.
And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...
I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.4 -
Fuck, give it maybe a decade more and we'll have the deepfakes drama, but on a whole another level, haven't seen as much development in countering all those technologies yet either (the only recent one has been iirc trying to feed a neural network with fake video, to try to spot small details, but that hasn't seen much success, even with deepfakes)
most terrifying application would be to imitate e.g. a president and send that to another country as a threat and vice versa or to fake video footage as evidence, admittedly both very low chance, but still a possibility, seeing how e.g. some court cases have been based almost exclusively around video footage or how north-korea treats any outside media.
https://youtube.com/watch/...4 -
2020 seems to be the year of the "dev who has never seen scale."
TypeA -> "Here's a reasoned explanation for a change I think we should make. Here is the current deficiency analysis, here is the desired resolution, here is the course of action and all calculations leading to the resolution + data. This will have x,y,z beneficial result according to our operational metrics."
TypeD -> "Those were words. Why do you need that? Change is bad, learning is worse. This will just slow me down, development speed is all that matters; there is no chance that a poorly considered/factored/checked design could ever require a ground up rewrite or fuck us utterly in the long term. Why do you make my life harder? We could x -> y -> zBUTI haven't done the math and I really don't see the benefit in x, so z is pointless. What even is scale?"
The consequences of the war caused by the ever-widening gap between engineers and developers is low key terrifying.12 -
Two largest rollercoasters in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, are called "The Grand Lukii's Meat Factory Number One" and "The Grand Lukii's Meat Factory Number Two". I rode the second one. It was terrifying.
Yes, they named it "the meat factory", because the grand Lukii's meat factory is an actual company that sponsoring them. Can't find any second meaning, none at all.1 -
In a gay bar. Pretty drunk.
It's funny how "I'm drunk and cannot be held responsible" doesn't seem to be terrifying2 -
My rubber ducky is a terrifying alien species from the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1B, but also a swear jar.3
-
team lead/senior telling you that you're probably going to break prod and have to patch it for the next couple of weeks when working on one of the first migration epics on legacy monolith, but we'll get good data from it doesn't make it any less terrifying5
-
Wow! This is a truly terrifying, yet fictional scenario. Malware by npm: https://hackernoon.com/im-harvestin...6
-
Fuck it's terrifying when your in the beginnings of starting your own business...
So much shit to do and so much paperwork to file .-.
(Starting a business selling food goods like flavoured salts and oils amongst personal recipes and in a constant state of silent screaming :-3)1 -
You know the configuration sucks if it's a one file, 10 K lines nginx reverse proxy configuration.
But what really really really sucks....
If the person who wrote it was a google craptastic copy pasta ninja.
For fucks sake, if you don't know what you are doing, just stop.
I've had this in so many rants, it's terrifying how many devs seem to be completely unaware of what they're doing Oo
This time, fuckwad ignored the basic principle of NGINX configuration: set the HTTP version for the proxy.
It's by default HTTP 1.0 - as HTTP 1.1 requires a Host Header _which you must set if not already present_.
The fuckwad had all kinds of scary optimizations enabled. Literally a bukkaka (not a typo) of <way too high value> and <too obscure configuration value that cannot apply here>.
But the most trivial thing, enabling HTTP 1.1 and keepalive. Nope.
Not in it.
It's funny how fast NGINX can be without the bukkaka of configuration values but HTTP keepalive enabled.
*me sits in the silent corner of the plushy pink room with soft walls*1 -
I can’t control my thoughts.
When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.
It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.
The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.
Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.
My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.
I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started7 -
The sound of my back and shoulders (left shoulder mostly) cracking as I do a half downward dog stretch after sitting in the worst possible posture all day is both terrifying and satisfying......2
-
Log 1:
Day 10 of crunch time. I have entered a sleepless zen state. Lord willing, I will be able to get 7 hours of sleep Saturday night. The building is terrifying at night, as there are a lot of noises. Security guards are nice, but curious to see me all alone. Must not show weakness in case they think numbers will give them an advantage over me.
Supplies are low. Only one type of energy drink left in the machine, and coffee gone for the night. My phone is out of fast data so Pandora is spotty at best. I have battery to get me through the night at least.
Tomorrow and Saturday decide the fate of the project. My team lead has not slept in at least 2 days. I feel guilty napping when I do, but she is driven like Ahab so I will let her obsession carry her.
If I am alive tomorrow I will report in.1 -
Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194
There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?
Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.
The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.2 -
First, I want to say don't look this company up if you've never heard of them. I really don't want to be a reason to drive more traffic to this company, because I really don't trust them.
So someone gifted me some coffee called Javy Microdose Coffee.
The reviews online are obvious plants and there was a hard social media promo going on for the last few months, so I'm already not interested in even trying it.
The packaging and colors scare the shit out of me, and the bottle itself doesn't seem to have a break seal on it. Besides that the bottle itself reminds me of the bottles of poison that were around when I was a kid.
My questions; has anyone on here ever consumed this terrifying bottle of liquid? Is it worth it? -
Once I maintained one of the most used and fucked up codebases on the market with almost 1M+ daily users. (cannot say more, sorry).
It's written in PHP and is absolutely terrifying,
the first time I saw some lines of code I was about to scream and cry.
- spaghetti code
- no indentation
- random SQL query unoptimized
- unused vars
- Code is split among several files with no logical reasoning
- Mixed procedural and oop programming
- Unsanitised user input (yes, you got it right)
No test environment, no backup database, every commit goes straight to production.
It's a real disaster but the company prefers to keep it as it is without refactoring or anything else.
Just to make it clear:
It's not hatred against PHP, it's against the code's current status and the older programmers which used to work on it.5 -
Worst: Realizing there were crippling and horrible bugs in software that got shipped to customers. Also realizing that we truly don't know the amount of technical debt that contributed to these bugs. My most terrifying comment from a colleague: That software was written on a weekend and the dev was getting 3 hours a sleep a night. One of the bugs I found I was fighting for almost a year to even find what was causing the bug.
Best: Finding those bugs and eradicating them. Having confidence that the bugs we know about are truly dead and gone. Til we meet again...next...3 -
I understand the muggles on Facebook saying it was Apple and Amazon that were hacked, but here on devrant where people know WTF is up, I'm still not seeing people say where the hack actually took place, and what makes the news truly terrifying: SMC.4
-
I've finally read "Reflections on trusting trust". I'd probably do it earlier if I knew it's this short. It's also terrifying. 10/10.
https://cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/...3 -
!really a rant
To all the devRanters that are getting hit by Irma: wish you the best of luck and stay safe over there!
The news I'm receiving here in Italy are quite terrifying.
Stay safe and get back to ranting when everything has stabilized. We need you! -
Almost out of highschool, looking at the requirements for programming jobs is terrifying. I can't afford college but almost every job needs a bachelor's. Hoping for a company that sees the value of training from the base level5
-
So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.
Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.1 -
So I've learned how to code a little over 2 years ago. I have been at my current job as a full stack developer for just less than 2 years. For my job I work with multiple fortune 500 companies and it is unbelievable the incompetence that almost all the devs that I work with have. I have only been doing this for 2 years and some of the devs I work with will spend months on a ticket that I can do in a few hours. At times I think they just have it figured and do very little work and just chill most of the time and get paid 6 figures to do it.
I just don't understand how these guys have all this experience and they are still bad engineers. They just don't know how to engineer properly. It's so frustrating.
Maybe it's just the people I work with but I have seen on the inside of a lot large corporations and it's terrifying.
Here's to one day opening the doors of my own company and not allowing incompetence to come through the door2 -
Real question, not troll. There is debate about it and I really can't figure it out.
Besides having the title software "engineer," is there really such a thing as a software engineer?
In the US, to be an engineer you have to be regularly tested by a regulated governing body, apprentice under another engineer for years, and be certified on a state level. Whereupon you are personally liable for your designs being FREE from errors.
For one thing, nobody can write bug free code, and the idea of being personally responsible for each bug is terrifying.
And two, I've seen news of people calling themselves software engineers in the USA and Canada and getting a cease and desist or sued for it, despite any level of qualification.
I'm sure there are engineers, especially electrical, computer engineers who also program.
But... ?
I don't know, I can't say either way.
That's why I'm asking.9 -
The human engineers are now about 1 or 2 steps away from creating strong AI. We now have decent drawing AI, decent voice actor AI and a confident bullshit AI. All components are already there. Actual human reasoning is in essence confident bullshitter getting cross-checked a few times. Throw a few confident bullshitter AIs together, make them check each other's outputs, and you have basically human reasoning.
It is terrifying because of the coming implications for our society 🤡 At the same time, I am proud of the engineers who worked hard on the technical advancements for the AI and made amazing progress. I know how it feels to work tirelessly on a complicated technical task 💻🌙4 -
Being a woman is terrifying. You walk down the street and realize that EVERY single man is strong enough to physically overpower you, should he want to do to you the thing you don't want. Even given that this heinous act has legal repercussions in some countries, what's done is done, and you'll have to live with the trauma forever.13
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Oh China, you still continue to amuse me... in that special way where i somehow both expect it and am hilariously, breifly shocked... then it's somber, confirming what we know is real/continues to be a societal and cognitive decline trend with no apparent rock bottom, without all-out demise as a near certainty... nor a hail mary play.
... but hey, what better way to digest the real-time info, indicative of something that should be terrifying, but is all too expected, than this unique type of format?
Seriously though, even if it worked amazingly, why would anyone be using it outside in public? Does it require several hours a day? If not, and it was a worthwhile result for you... wouldn't you just make it part of your morning and/or evening routine...even if it had nothing to do with aesthetics, that cant be sanitary... unless you also carry it in a water-tight container or disinfectant and typically bring/use your toothbrush and toothpaste mid-day or at unusual intervals.
I have sooo many more questions about this... and none are relative to who designed/mass produced this, nor the quality of the silicone. As it was developed/produced by the silicone factory ive done great, professional, no bs, business with for about a decade... which is why i waited years to publicly ridicule this contraption.
Fyi- their primary product lines are things like bongs and dab containers; im on the fence of it that makes this better or worse.
Creepy personal truth... i reeeeally wanna know how much that woman got paid... and do to my skill set (ie. Im near utter certainty that i could find her and ask her... likely easily abd definitely without being caught doing anything suspicious. Pro tip: publicly declaring things like this makes it a bit easier to not end up doing it... obvious premeditation adding significantly more to any sentencing.22 -
Common question I hear at work a lot. These self driving cars, picture the situation. It's driving 100mph+ going straight towards a pack of children(could be anyone but this sounds a bit more terrifying). The car can only turn into a brick wall, killing the driver and passengers, OR straight into the children.
What do you program it to do in these situations???6 -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
You know what's terrifying? When you hear a contracts person say "we already know what we're going to bid, so we don't need engineering inputs."
-
!dev
Vampire homegirl and I got into bit of a pickle last time we went out marauding around the City of the Dead. We collected payment for a hit on a merchant, but a large portion of the money was discounted, as unbeknown to us, there was a witness to our bloody crime.
Soon enough, we were being hunted down by a rival sect, encroaching on our territory. Their High Priest sent some dogs our way, and we felt right into their ambush, at a crossroads within the southern alleways. I took down three of those sons of bitches, with two crossbow bolts stuck on my back, before finally being knocked down by a shield slammed to my face.
Got both my fucking legs mauled with a flail and almost put out of commission. Luckily, my vampiric companion was there to save my skin. She fought a desperate duel against the last one of our foes left standing: an inquisitor, sent to either capture, or more likely, kill us both.
This fucker was tougher than any adversary either of us had ever fought against. Fully clad in silver armor, wearing an enchanted crimson cloak, her face hidden behind a terrifying iron mask. My companion stood her ground, but throughout the fight, she was constantly on the defensive, hesitant to close too much distance against the enemy.
Our foe launched one devilishly mighty blow, that my partner in crime fortunately managed to block. However, her blade was pulverized by the sheer weight of the inquisitor's strike, nearly shattering her ribcage. In a last ditch effort to survive the encounter, she lunged at her opponent with what remained of her sword, and stabbed the hunter right in her fucking eye, to then sink her fangs into the ecclesiastical bitch's neck.
Having temporarily incapacitated the inquisitor, we made our escape. My companion carried me back to our safehouse, where we would plan our next move... but our masters were one step ahead of us.
At our hideout, we were intercepted by them, at the behest of the Matriarch. We were to be smuggled out of the city inside a funeral carriage, to then be safely transported back to our sacred order's sanctuary.
Uppon arriving, we were confronted and reprimanded for our failures, past and present. I was forcefully separated from my esteemed nocturnal friend, as way our masters put it, our growing affections were cause for concern. Longing to be reunited, we schemed for weeks through our mutual acquaintances in the monastery, delivering small coded messages.
Through our cunning subterfuge, we finally managed to meet in an ancient grotto underneath a cedrus tree, on a hill overlooking the sanctuary. I was ready to plan a daring escape, but to my suprise, she had her mind made up to a wildly different course of action. We were to play by their rules -- go through with their dark cleansing rituals, meant to re-educate us before admitting us back into the order as fully-fledged acolytes.
And so, in the penumbra of that age-old grotto, a pact was made.
I am now riding south on a black stallion, falchion in hand, and a trail of witches' blood in my wake. I carry with me orders from the Matriarch herself: purify the nearby catacombs and prove my devotion to the utter blackness of our faith. Should I not return, my companion will be up next.
Failure is not an option. As I evade the twisted creatures that guard the entrance, and descend the staircase down into the tomb, I wonder what kind of horrors await me inside...
OH GOD FUCKING SHIT I JUST STEPPED ON A TRAP
** TO BE CONTINUED ** -
My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball] -
You know what's terrifying..? Colleagues randomly starting a physical fight..
Exception in thread "main" at line 1: you don't talk about
cannot find symbol: RmlnaHQgQ2x1Yg==
at you.do.not.talk.about.RmlnaHQgQ2x1Yg== (fc.java:2)
at someone.yells.stop.goes limp.taps out.the.fight.isOver(fc.java:3)
at only.two.guys.to.a.Fight(fc:java:4)
at one.fight.at.a.time.Fellas(fc.java:5)
at no.shirts.no.Shoes(fc.java:6)
at fights.will.go.on.as.long.as.they.have.To(fc.java:7)
caused by: if this is your first night at RmlnaHQgQ2x1Yg== .. you have to fight.1 -
"Don't google this" 4 devs:
(Quine technology for the service of the evil)
Don't google "ken thompson hack"
I'll have nightmares
Ps: i you are sure youve seen this before, it had a typo, n i couldn't modify it -
Sometimes....
There are easy things.
Like networking / routing / vlans / subnetting / loadbalancing and simple DNS (as in name <-> IP resolution, not the "other" stuff).
And somehow... People manage to turn it into something so complicated and insane that you cannot even use technical terms to describe it.
Simply because a lot of it was so mutilated that using the technical term to describe what it should do will become the total opposite of what it _actually_ does.
It's somehow terrifying... But might explain my migraine.
We played "Taboo word" for 3 hours straight, all technical terms were forbidden and I think I _might_ know now how it all works.
And I guess we'll have to restructure, rename and rework the whole network loadbalancing setup from bottom to top because
"This is sparta".
I wish I could explain it better.... But how? It's ... Interesting....
When you can't even explain stuff to someone else because you would need to invent and explain new words.1 -
Does anyone else get terrifying headaches at the end of a work week? By work I mean any type of computer related work?8
-
Hearing the "don't turn your galaxy note 7 on during the flight, idiots" disclaimer before takeoff is just endlessly hilarious. And terrifying.
-
Damn, .NET devs are really and I mean really bad at writing documentation. It is either over-engineered (anything from Microsoft) to the point you can't find shit. Or it is almost non existent and you have to study the repo and read classes, etc. (ANY .net core nuget for writing CLI apps, heck I would argue almost any nuget in general)
4 pages on github WIKI + examples that cover 20% of use cases are not a bloody documentation mate!!!
I used to be linux + any of Python/Go/JS/Ruby/Elixir guy and almost never had problems with poor documentation.
Now living in Microsoft world with .net and powershell is terrifying.3 -
“The Fraud Police is this imaginary, terrifying force of experts and real grown-ups who don’t exist and who come knocking on your door at 3 am, when you least expect it, saying 'Fraud Police! We’ve been watching you and we have evidence that you have no idea what you are doing.'” ~Amanda Palmer
-
“And go into the terrifying minds of Human Resources” lol
I’m posting this in response to a question on here recently about how long people stay at their jobs
Personally I miss 5 year or more jobs
But behind the scenes it doesn’t say loyalty to the current workforce if employees are expected to take liters abuse and suck dick
Least I got to skip that heh
https://m.youtube.com/watch/...2