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Am i the only one that hates Google reCAPTCHA from the body down to the soul ?
- Click the Car
- The Blue Car
- The Truck
- The Truck Bus
- The Bus Truck
- With Blue Light
- Select the Bicycles
- Skip the house
- Find the sign
- With the blue bat
- Purple pink hat
- Click Traffic light
- We mean all Traffic lights
- Select Stores
- With Zebra Crossing
- ...
WTF!!! Just kill me already.11 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
Coding has changed the way I think. Everywhere I go, I think of algorithms and efficiency.
When I'm in elevator, I think about what algorithm is running in the background.
When I'm at red light, I think about the algorithm that traffic lights are running.
I notice bugs in websites and apps and try to figure out what the dev might have done.
I find problems in UI design and get annoyed.
I spend more time coding a solution to a problem rather than directly solving the problem. I get a kick out of it.
When I see something uses more resources than necessary, it seriously pisses me off.
Coding has taught me to think and has positively changed the way I live.2 -
I would like to take a moment and recognize LiLi as the possibly most outlandish design for any software ever without looking horribly ugly. I mean just fucking look at it, it heavily relies on transparency, it uses traffic lights, it uses weird glowing bars, you cannot resize it, you cannot minimize it, it has this random mash of colors in the logo, it heavily relies on gradients, the border edges are very rounded and aliased, you have no idea where the boundaries of the fucking thing is.
Overall, its fucking great guys. I have no idea where the inspiration came from, but possibly the windows aero and a mishmash of other things?
21 -
My mum - "Something to do with traffic lights"
Because I told her I was designing an Ethernet traffic generator device.1 -
Traffic lights optimizer. Imagine big AI being plugged to all city's traffic lights and changing all durations in order to adjust all of them, if we add smart cars connected to it we might remove traffics at all. It is way ahead in future but would be cool.4
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How lawyers fuck up technology!
I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:
Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.
Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.
However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.
I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.
Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!
What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!
(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)12 -
Sitting at traffic lights on my way home from work thinking about the programming behind how often the windscreen wipers are triggered, how to store the values of each wiper setting in a meaningful data type, and how to handle the event of changing wiper settings eg. to ensure the wipers aren't triggered immediately when increasing the frequency.
Wish my mind could rest when I'm outwith work but I experience this sort of thing worse after drinking alcohol. Must have a problem.5 -
Programming has given me an insight into the inner workings of the system that defines every aspect of the modern world. I will never ever be able to look the same way at a game, website, elevator, microwave, the synced traffic lights in a city or really anything that resembles mathematical structure and was built after 1990. Seeing how my friends appreciate all these for their function I often feel like I'm missing out, but I guess they feel the same when the machines don't act as expected.2
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!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.
I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.
I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.
When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.
So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.
It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.
Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.
It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.
Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.
So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.
Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.
I feel relief now.2 -
Since we're sharing traffic lights... Today I was running towards a green lad with a boner all day.
Talk about poor design choices, right...
11 -
OMG!!! Stop with the image captchas, Shopify and other sites that do this! Good grief! Is this my life now? Budgeting extra time with my clients just to log into websites? That last login took a full 5 minutes of clicking on traffic lights, buses, cars, crosswalks, and parking meters. I swear, when the Singularity apocalypse happens, we'll be attacked by traffic lights, buses, cars, crosswalks, and parking meters.2
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Maybe I could write a simulation using an ai to control traffic lights to assasinate crude disgusting wastes of space with as many brain cells as they have toes13
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I just noticed that whenever I get a captcha to prove I'm human, it's always images from the street.. cars, crosswalks, traffic lights, trucks, bikes, tractors etc etc...
I just want to know... Who's ML model I've been helping to train for the last i don't know how many years?!? 😤
I should've realized something smelled funny the moment i understood that a bot is asking me to prove my humanity to it, by doing something that a bot should be able to do by now.6 -
Related to queueing theory...
Suburban traffic at a stop lights has developed a tendency to include invisible cars.
You can see where these invisible cars are by the gap between the front bumper of one car the back bumper of the next. Sometimes there is an invisible motorcycle, sometimes there is an invisible semi-tractor trailer. It is becoming an epidemic.
The dumbasses in traffic who do this are usually texting behind the wheel while stopped and they are not always Buffy the ding dong cheerleader nor Sally the Soccer Mom... Suits too... It seems to have gotten worse with pot becoming legal I just realized...
But to the point, you can tell these people would never be able to comprehend software engineering... they have no idea that for every invisible car in front of every dumbass driver like them, there is a real car way back that has to sit through two lights. (side effects of bugs and inefficient hash tables) Worse, these dumbasses do this in the left lane so it keeps a host of others from being able to get past their big fat ass into the turn lane.
Simple queueing theory escapes these people.
Computers will someday take their jobs.
Sometimes it motivates me to code faster... "There goes your job beotch! Get used to mac and cheese..."
But once in a while I am in a position to be able to be stopped at a light, and note that next to me is one of those "gapsters" and then pull my car (or motorcycle some days) into that invisible car's spot. The gapster gets so mad sometimes... >:-> so much satisfaction I almost feel guilty...
Queueing theory rules... LOL -
Didn't know what this was, dad caught it this morning in the backyard... Apparently for the first time.
Been watching Pokemon Journeys lately so my first thought was "you caught a new Pokemon" and also "can you name that Pokemon?"
You take a guess here but I did a Google reverse image search and it got it 100%, even with the cage. So I was like wow...
I've used it rarely for other pictures before and my memory says it never came close.
Or maybe that's what all those captchas have been used for.... Though usually they are all for cars, roads and traffic lights....
14 -
This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.
I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.
So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'
I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.
After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.
Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.
The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.
Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.
Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.
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