So I've had my "emergency meeting" with my manager about me leaving.

(Re https://devrant.com/rants/4896068 )

As some of you advised I prepared to try my best to stay exceptionally calm for this.

First my line manager just casually asked if I could stay. I politely explained "no. :)"

Then she said it's a catastrophe, they would be in a chaos, etc etc and then she personally assures I would have less bs meetings mid-sprints (one of the things I had requested a while back).
I responded that's kind but I also was far from what I should be earning.

Then she explained that suddenly now that I am leaving it would not be a problem to raise my salary as appropriate.
So I asked why could they not do this when I had brought this up a ton of times earlier and why I got peanuts as a raise in summer.

The response was that "they unfortunately could not get a higher budget authorised from higher up" and that " sadly that affected the whole team".

So I asked since when can they get this authorised and the response was "recently". Then she quickly switched back to the question whether I'd stay with higher salary and other earlier requests met.

I was pretty salty at this point so I just sarcastically said "unfortunately I've already signed".

She then switched back to "ok, ok, but we really need your help! you know it, the x project will be a nightmare to keep in one piece without me".

I literally just didn't respond so then she continued "ok so then can you then help us out for just a few hours a month for x/hour? please"

Now the thing is that this last offer actually would have been super compelling but given everything else I would not want to rejoin this environment. Thankfully I had to say anyways that my new contract doesn't allow that.

So then belive it or not, she asked me if I could ask my new employer to change the contract to permit me to still work a few hours a month for them.
What. the. fuck.

After this I was super done so just kept responsing a few words to everything and shortly after that we called the meeting. I feel dumb to have stayed here so long and am glad that my new contract doesn't allow working for others as maybe my stupid ass would have considered the offer on the spot.

That moment that you come across a domain name which you thought would have definitely been taken already.

Came across strtoti.me. (php function for converting date/time strings into unix epoch's). Quickly wrote an api for it and put it online because fuck it, why not!

Feel free to use it as much as you want, I can't guarantee its availability unless it would become really popular but I can't imagine that.

URL: https://strtoti.me
API example: https://strtoti.me//... 20 20:15
API example (url encoded): https://strtoti.me//...

API documentation (not that good yet, might improve it..): https://strtoti.me

Well, let's see how this goes. Feedback appreciated but I currently have a shitload of projects to it doesn't have the highest priority right now!

Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1551635

I think that I've found the reason for this Acer motherboard's refusal to boot up now. Apparently this featureful piece of shit expects "something" on its ID pin as well.. and why ID pin you may ask? I reckon that it's because of "certified replacements". Because you know, if it doesn't come from our shitty factorias it's gotta be shit, right?!

How about no?!! You Acer really aren't the only ones capable of producing a fucking lithium battery! And did you ever think of the edge cases where you may want to feed a lab bench power supply's voltage into the phone to mimic the battery and troubleshoot the bloody thing? Because that's what I initially wanted to do, instead of that Doogee battery. The only reason why I didn't is because the supply is currently charging up another lithium cell that I salvaged from a donated (broken) Samsung tablet, and is taking longer than expected.

Point is, if you receive the appropriate fucking level of angry pixies, YOU SHOULD FUCKING USE THEM AND BOOT UP ALREADY!!! Regardless of whether it's some sort of certified fucking Acer component or not! Somewhere between 4.2 and 2.7V stable should be good enough regardless of what produces it!

At least AliExpress sells these batteries for about €4.5, and another €2 for shipping. Considering that I can buy batteries with this capacity for €2 a pop and free shipping, this would better fucking work. Especially since I'm buying an overpriced battery of which almost half the cost is fucking shipping, just for a stupid "certified" controller that' I'll also have to put between the board and any pixie wrangler or angry pixie containment device that I use to power this shitty board. Acer, you motherfuckers!!!

Okay, That right there is pathetic https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/... .

First of all telekom was not able to assure their clients' safety so that some Joe would not access them.
Second of all after a friendly warning and pointing a finger to the exact problem telekom booted the guy out.
Thirdly telekom took a defensive position claiming "naah, we're all good, we don't need security. We'll just report any breaches to police hence no data will be leaked not altered" which I can't decide whether is moronic or idiotic.

Come on boys and girls... If some chap offers a friendly hand by pointing where you've made a mistake - fix the mistake, Not the boy. And for fucks sake, say THANK YOU to the good lad. He could use his findings for his own benefit, to destroy your service or even worse -- sell that knowledge on black market where fuck knows what these twisted minds could have done with it. Instead he came to your door saying "Hey folks, I think you could do better here and there. I am your customes and I'd love you to fix those bugzies, 'ciz I'd like to feel my data is safe with you".

How on earth could corporations be that shortsighted... Behaviour like this is an immediate red flag for me, shouting out loud "we are not safe, do not have any business with us unless you want your data to be leaked or secretly altered".

Yeah, I know, computer misuse act, etc. But there are people who do not give a tiny rat's ass about rules and laws and will find a way to do what they do without a trace back to them. Bad boys with bad intentions and black hoodies behind TOR will not be punished. The good guys, on the other hand, will.

Whre's the fucking logic in that...

P.S. It made me think... why wouldn't they want any security vulns reported to them? Why would they prefer to keep it unsafe? Is it intentional? For some special "clients"? Gosh that stinks

Earlier today I had a old schoolmate of mine PM me.. long time no see, yada yada, don't beat around the bush please... Turns out that he wanted to get a bot for OldSchool RuneScape and found a bot that was paid... And didn't want to shell out 70-odd shekels and wanted me to write a "private script". Looking at the program he linked, it looked like it'd easily take thousands of lines of code and well over half a year to reimplement.

I'm sure that it's a problem we've all had at some point, and with old friends it's especially hard to deal with. Would you give in to something that's obviously gonna be a trainwreck of a project? Tell them that they're an ass for even thinking of something crazy like this? It's not exactly hard to get offended by something like this, as if our time and expertise is worth absolutely nothing.

Honestly, I just told him.. this will take several months to implement. Here's another project I wrote (https://git.ghnou.su/ghnou/cv if you're interested) and looking at the commit log, you can see that I started it half a year ago, and more or less finished the project 3 months later. That project took ~100 lines of code and this project would easily take thousands, and months if not over a year of work. It's easy to see that it's unreasonable. Now he's going to get a project that's behind Patreon instead, after I told him that it's completely reasonable to ask money for a project like this. What's more, when private it would cost a hell of a lot more - my time isn't free.

Long story short, just honestly explain that so and so is why it's unreasonable, and this and that are other more viable solutions because such and so. Non-technical people aren't necessarily unreasonable because they're dicks, most of the time it's just ignorance. Nothing wrong with that, and mistakes happen to the best of us :)

Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)

So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.

Here we go!

Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.

Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.

A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.

A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.

A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.

* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*

Videogames:

Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...

A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.

Imposible/distant future projects:

History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)

Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.

I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.

The cleaning lady saga continues...
(previous: https://devrant.com/rants/1850777)

Had an appointment with their manager, stuff gets discussed and coordinated at a 3x slower pace than if I'd done it myself (as usual because fuck efficiency when there's muggles involved -_-), yada yada.

*mail addresses for contact start getting discussed*
Incompetent fuck of a manager: And you $realName, your email address is $company@nixmagic.com, then changed to $nickname@nixmagic.com? Mind explaining this?

Me: Oh yeah that's just because I give out different email addresses to each contact person when it involves public forms or registrations, helps with spam prevention and putting the company name of the correspondent in there helps with easy recognition when some company's database leaks and I start getting a lot of spam on that mailbox.

IFOM: Really.. we actually weren't sure whether we should reply to something with our company name in it.. you know, not sure whether it's legit etc. Why would anyone want to use one of our email addresses as theirs?

… Let that sink in for a moment. They think that $company@nixmagic.com is theirs? Just because it's their domain (minus TLD) in front of MY FUCKING DOMAIN? How about you start by learning how email addresses work first, because clearly you have no fucking clue about it. Are you the kind of brainless fucks that get lured in by http://totallylegitbank.com.freehost.com/... scams? Fucking stupid piece of fucking shit.

Oh, and when you're using MS Exchange, of course you can't know that when you're having your own domain, you actually also own every fucking mailbox on it, because Microshaft doesn't allow you to have more than n amount of mailboxes, unless you gobble up money for them. But you know what, in my case it's a fucking catch-all domain running Linux on its servers, so yeah I can use whatever the fuck I want in front of it, including your stupid fucking cleaning company.

IFOM: And then there's your current designated email address. $nickname@nixmagic.com..

Oh you're going to criticise that as well?! Yeah condor is my fucking nickname all over the internet, and my username on all my systems. That's why I use it. But you know what else is an email address that you might come across, because people are shallow idiots like that? ILoveBigTits69@gmail.com or something like that. You know what, how about I address you next time from ILoveBigTits69_OhAndYoursAreAWashboard@nixmagic.com, because you know what? I CAN FUCKING DO THAT. But you know, I at least am halfway fucking professional about my business-related stuff, so I won't because I really don't want to be associated with such an email address. So don't you fucking dare to criticize me for using my fucking nickname instead of my real name.

Long story short, people are fucking idiots.

Welcome to Part III of WHY WOULD I WANT TO WORK WITH YOU?, a saga of competence, empathy and me being dick, even tho I didn't want to be one.
This is a follow-up to: https://devrant.com/rants/2363551. It's title is: "Mt 13:12".

We left off the story in the very moment I had received feedback from 3 companies that decided to interview me. A, B and C. We won't talk about A from now on, since I refused their offer to offer me unpaid internship.

It's December 20, 18:00. I am returning home. Earlier that day I emailed guys at C that I need some time with my decision, because I have another offer that suits me better. It was awaiting response from B, obviously. That day they called me and offered me... full-time job. As a fullstack. On a project for a big company, that they described by something like: "They may not be one of the famous X of the market, but they're probably X+1, yeah". Needless to say, that was some bad marketing. I googled them up later tho. Anyway, my response didn't change, altho thing seemed a little big better for me. Except that I was a little suspicious of them too. Were they *that* desperate for a worker?[1]

It is December 24th. 10 am. My phone rings. It's guy from B. He tells me "saito, the recruiter guy is still sick. Since I don't know if we can hire you for sure, it may be better for you to accept another offer, if you got any. I'll keep you updated." That was pretty cool of him. Remember the quote from part II? That's the empathy part. He called me, even tho he didn't really have to. If you read this, monsieur, you're the best. Back to the story now. I emailed guys at C that I am willing to start the job anytime. They told me that CEO is back January 7th, 2020.

It is January 4th 2020, 10 am. Unkonwn number calls. It's actually a guy from B, but the other one. The one that was sick previously. He tells me that he wants to talk about my employment. He talked with the senior dev and he just wants a talk and a small code test in typescript. He told me that it's no prob that I don't know typescript, since it will be entry level and I have time to learn the basics. And so I do. We decide to meet at January 7th. Later on that day guys from C email me that they want to sign the contract n January 7th.

And here we get to the culmination and the lesson of those posts. What should I do? On one side I have a job that isn't 100% comfirmed, but I'm pretty positive about it. The people at B are great, I love them. During my interview I learned some stuff about the project I would participate in, so I didn't go in blindly. It was my field of interest. I was hyped for the possibility itself to work with that senior dev. On the other hand guys at C had their contract ready. They finally were ready to start. I still didn't know for shit what would I do. I knew that I would need to learn basics of data science and stuff. Their interview and CEO left me with a quite bad impression. I didn't really like them. But it was a job.

What I did I consider the best thing I could do for myself. I told guys from C to meet someday later. I visited B yesterday, January 7th. I've done the test. It had some code refactoring and implementing some React elements. Basic shit indeed. I am almost positive I would do it even if I didn't visit typescript docs during the weekend. We then talked about it. The dev told me what he would change in the solution, but didn't consider it bad. Then they told me I'm hired. And I emailed C that I can't accept their offer. The guy was pretty pissed. I can understand it, they seemed to be ready to start with me and I pulled out last day, in the evening. I am truly sorry for that. But also I feel no regrets. I have chosen those whom I trusted more. I've chosen guys who took notes of my CV and talked about it in my interview over people who didn't even get that I applied for a frontend positin. That's competence for you. I've chosen guys who actually wanted to talk wih me about me making music over people who sat me down at a computer and told me: "code". That's empathy for you.

Dear recruiters. If you want to attract best candidates, show your competence and empathy.
Dear recruitees. If you're looking for a good job, it may take some time. Also, knowing people helps a lot.

1 – Actually, I wouldn't be surprised, if they really needed someone to help them out on their projects and they didn't get a lot of attention. Why? Well, their webpage was unfinished and kinda sucked, their interview sucked also. I still don't know whether they're a startup or what. I just can't help but feel bad seeing HR and Marketing that bad. Because the guys actually might do a lot of good stuff, and their potential employees didn't get to know that.

Tomorrow I will be on a long train trip again so here goes!

My last train project is http://jsrant.com and people seem to enjoy it. Every time I am mentioned in a rant related to it people also mention the idea of a similar application but for in the terminal. So I intend to build that tomorrow.

To build the best thing for you I want to ask you some questions:

- What operating system are you running?

- Why (or how) would you like to use a devrant terminal reader?

- Why would you NOT want to use a devrant terminal reader?

- Would your use-case required obfuscated output? (Hiding it from someone)

- If so, what formats do you use on a daily basis or are you most comfortable with?

- Anything else you would like to mention or for me to consider?

I will be developing the larger part of this tomorrow, but the sources will be made available to the public.

A girl sets out on a journey in the post apocalypse, to find the reason why the AI that ran humanity vanished decades ago, causing civilization to collapse. Instead she finds the most unusual pair of survivors, and receives the most unexpected answer.

Alice walked in to the ivy covered room, the floors covered in dust and lichen. There were two voices, mumbling in the dark, among the blue glow across the room. She came here for answers. Why the world had just stopped decades ago. If these machines could tell her, she would do anything to make them talk.

"No, no, no. I said before thats not the answer. I read the book. Your memory is bad."

"Atlas, the answer to life, the universe, and everything..why hello?"

Alice raised an eyebrow, and stepped forward. "Ahem. I'm alice."

"yes, yes, we knew that."

"I came here to find out why the blackout happened decades ago."

"Another one? Alright, lets see. Its been a LONG time. I'm apollo, and this is atlas. We were just discussing why my friend here is wrong."

Atlas - I anticipated that.

apollo - I knew you would say that.

alice - Guys. Stop, I just want you to answer my question already.

apollo - Straight to the point. About time.

alice - why the blackout then? Why leave us to die?

Read the rest here (5-10 minute read):
https://pastebin.com/wvifGLFP

(because it was too long for devrant).

Fucking Microsoft Excel

I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.

Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.

"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"

He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.

"Would you like software that works?"

Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.

"You would?"

*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."

"Did he get multimonitor support?"

"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"

"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.

"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."

"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."

And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'

You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.

You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.

Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"

Clippy asks.

You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.

You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.

And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.

And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.