Python:

from module import *

At office we sometimes lose our internet connection, the strange part is that it's not fully gone, if you (for example) ping an ip directly, it's fine. But if you try to load any web pages, or do any other kind of internet usage, it won't.

We finally know why...

It's because another company in the same building is uploading some huge thing and using all of the available upload bandwidth (200 mb/s)

So that's nice... Let's put a limiter on that so they DON'T FUCKING KICK US OFFLINE WHEN THEY NEED TO UPLOAD SOME.... WHAT EVER THEY MAKE...

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Gdpr thing aside...

Does anybody read the new policy...

I just did for 2 apps (intel driver software and 9ga.. You know it)...

On the things that they collected on the side without you knowing include:
9ga:
Device memory, language, battery level, timezone, unique device identifiers, compass, accelorometer and microphone... Even service provider and signal strength

Intel:
Website you visit, how you use your computer(vague too vague) and computing environment.

Did anybody knew for sure before this that their apps are listening to them? That they just made a profile of you with all the data?

With all this they dont even need your ip they already know who you are and what you do on a daily basis...

There are 20 more but it will be waaay too much to write about. These 2 are way worse since 9ga doesnt use microphone for anything... And why a driver reads what websites i am going to?

Previously, I half-assedly theorized that, given a timeline on which I'd store state mutations, with each mutation being an action taken ingame by either the player or computer, I could feasibly construct a somewhat generative narrative engine.

Basis: the system reads the current state, builds [some structure] holding possible choices, and prompts the player to take an action from those choices. The action modifies the state, and the loop begins anew, save that now it's the system "prompting itself", so to speak.

Utterly barebones and abstract as it may be, it was useful to build this concept in my head as it gave me a way to reason about what I wanted to build. But there were two problems which I had to grapple with:
- What would [some structure] even be?
- How would the computer make choices based on an instance of [some structure]?

I found myself striking the philosopher pose for long hours on the toilet, deeply pondering these questions which I couldn't help but merge into one due to the shared incognita; silly brain wanted trees but I kept figuring out that's not going to work as the relationships between symbols are sometimes but not always hierarchical. Shhh, silly brain, it's not trees.

So what is the answer?
Well, can you guess it?

Graphs, of course it's fucking graphs. Specifically, a state transition graph. It was right in my face the whole time and I couldn't see it. Well, close enough.

It's ideal as the system in question is a finite state machine with strong emphasis on finite -- the whole point is narrowing down choices, which now that I think about it, can also come down to another graph. Let me explain.

A 'symbol' or rather SIGIL is an individual in-game effect. To this FSM, it's an instruction. Sigils are used to compose actions, which you can think of as an encapsulation of some function, or better yet, an *undoable transaction* which causes some alteration in the game world.

But to form a narrative from a sequence of such transactions, and to allow the system to respond to them coherently, relationships need to be established between sigils in a manner that can be reasoned about in code. You may not realize this yet but this is both a language processing and text generation problem, so fuck me.

However, we have a big advantage in that we are not dealing with *natural* language, that is to say, each sigil is a structure from which we can extract valuable information on the nature of the state transformation applied.

This allows us to find relationships between sigils programmatically: two words are related if some comparison between the underlying structure -- and the transformation it describes -- holds true. Therefore, if we take the sigils that compose the last transformation in the timeline, fetch relationships for said sigils according to a given criteria, then eliminate all immediate relationships that are not shared between all members of the group, we end up with a new one that can be utilized as starting point to construct a reply.

More elimination of possibilities would have to be performed as this reply is constructed [*], but the point is that because the context (timeline) is itself made of previous transforms, the system *could* make such a reply coherent, or at the very least internally consistent.

Well... in the world of half-assed theory. I don't know whether I'm stupid, insane, both, pad for alignment, or this is an actual breakthrough. Maybe none of the above.

Anyway, it's another way to mentally model the problem which is very useful. New challenge would be the text generation part, extremely high chance of gibberish within existing vision; need more potty-pondering.

[*]: I'll break it into bits OK.

0. Determine intention. That's right, the reply isn't actually _fully_ generated, it's just making variations on a template. So pick a template depending on who is taking a turn and replying to who (think companion relationship score bullshit)

1. Sort the new group according to the number of connections the constituent sigils had to the context from which they were extracted, higher first.

2. Pop from the sorted group (least connections). If there are other nodes left in the group, and it doesn't connect back to any of the other nodes (sigils) up to a certain distance, then discard it and repeat. Else keep going.

2. Unshift from the sorted group (most connections). If can traverse up to another sigil in the same group, then go for it. Else derive search criteria from current context (including intention), so as to look for another sigil to concatenate. Some form of weighting would be needed here, need to think about that.

3. Decide when to stop. Probably some chance, as in the more sigils you have, the lower the chance a new one will be added maybe. Need to think about this too.

4. Send transform, loop begins anew.

And that's it. So alright brb I'm going to take a dump on the Agora.