Holy fucking shit. I just went to my first Java class at uni (3 1/2 hour long one at that) and I havent felt so damn irritated in a while.

Some background:
So first, I only had about an hour of sleep last night and a full day of work before this class so I was more cranky than normal.
Theres only 7 students in the class, 6 others plus me. I am the only one with any resemblence of programming experience. The teacher also claims to be a linux developer.
This is a three part course series. Java 1, 2, and 3. All taught by the same teacher.

The fuckery:
-teacher spends 48 minutes talking about text editors. Not even IDEs. Just talking in depth as fuck about notepad (notepad. Not notepad++ )and atom and textpad. Those three only though, nothing on vim or emacs or ACTUAL IDEs. 48 minutes.
- I briefly mentioned learning node.js on the side and am now the "javascript girl" to my teacher. I'm probably less experienced with js than any other thing i ever practised or studied.
-professor saw linux on laptop and asked what distro. When I said arch he said "oh no you shouldnt be using that Its not really for beginners" ... Uhh what makes you think I'm a beginner to linux? Or does he not think I should be using arch while learning java? Either way its really ridiculous and irritates me that he would discourage anyone from using any software/OS/anything, regardless of what it is or skill level.
-teacher moved a bunch of content out of the course because theyre either "concepts that are never implemented anymore" or "arent critical to know to master the language". These particular topics that were removed? Multi-dimensional arrays, scopes, and exception handling. EXCEPTION HANDLING.
-he writes a hello world program and displays it on the board, proof of it working and everything. He tells the class to write the same program, compile and run it. Never did I guess we would spend the remaining hour and ten minutes of class struggling with fucking hello world programs. Especially when the correct code is on the fucking projector.

And I get it guys, everyone starts somewhere. People have to learn from square one. But these kids have no fucking interest in this. One of them literally admitted to pursuing this degree for the "lavish life" that comes with the salary. Others just picked programming because they didnt know what else to choose to get into the school. It fucking saddens me. I hope that one or some of them end up caring and finding a passion in this field, otherwise I feel fucking sorry for them having to spaghetti code their way through life to get a paycheck cause they couldnt be bothered to put in the effort. I feel even more sorry for any devs they work with in the future too.

The other annoying bit is that I can't test out of this class!! so it looks like for either 7 hours a week ill be bored out of my fucking mind with these beginner concepts or ill be helping others fix really stupid shit in their code (like putting quotes around hello world so it would actually print the string).

Fucking hell. Waste of a semester class.

Anyone looking for something interesting to do???

Step 1) understand how basic circuitry works on a bread board nothing too fancy. ( Implement NAND, AND, ADDER, SUBTRACTOR)

Step 2) learn about microprocessors and how OS works

Step 3) learn assembly

Step 4)write a basic assembler and understand how loaders and linkers works !

Step 5) write a kernel with very basic features like memory management and process management and some drivers for IO

Step 5) write an emulator for some simple systems .! ex chip-8.

Step 6) read about compiler theory and automata

Step 7) write a basic Python interpreter that compiles (not interpreter) to native assembly.

Step 8) implement TCP stack .

Step 9) learn as much as u can about complexity measurement ), data structures and algorithms using C or C++ it's very important ( familiarity with pointers and thus computer memory )

Step 10) learn any high level language of choice like Python or Ruby.

Step 11) stop debating over tabs vs spaces , emacs vs vim , angular vs vue, php vs Python , OOps vs procedular vs functional ( just know about all of them and when to use but don't fucking debate over which one is superior )..

Step 12) live happily and be healthy.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

*wrestling commentator voice*
"In this weeks episode of encoding hell:
The iiiinnnfamous UTF-8 Byte Order Mark veeeersus PHP!"

For an online shop we developed, there is currently a CSV upload feature in review by our client. Before we developed this feature, we created together with the client a very precise specification, including the file format and encoding (UTF-8).

After the first test day, the client informed us, that there were invalid characters after processing the uploaded file.
We checked the code and compared the customer's file with our template.
The file was encoded in ISO-8859-1 and NOT as specified UTF-8.
But what ever, we had to add an encoding check, thus allowing both encodings from now on.

Well well well welly welly fucking well...

Test day 2: We receive an email from said client, that the CSV is not working, again.
This time: UTF-8 encoding, but some fields had more colums with different values than specified.
Fucking hell.
We tell the customer that.
(I was about to write a nice death threat novel to them, but my boss held me back)

Testing day 3, today:
"The uploading feature is not working with our file, please fix it."
I tried to debug it, but only got misleading errors. After about 30 minutes, at 20 stacks of hatered, I finally had an idea to check the file in a hex editor:

God fucking what!?!!?!11?!1!!!?2!!

The encoding was valid UTF-8, all columns and fields were correct, but this time the file contained somthing different.
Something the world does not need.
Something nearly as wasteful as driving a monster truck in first gear from NYC to LA.

It was the UTF-8 Byte Order Mark.
3 bytes of pure hell.
Fucking 0xEFBBBF.
The archenemy of PHP and sane people.

If the devil had sex with the ethernet port of a rusty Mac OS X Server, then 9 microseconds later a UTF-8 BOM would have been born.

OK, maybe if PHP would actually cope with these bytes of death without crashing, that would be great.

Okay lets write this before i go mad...

I'm one of those guys who says "use the os which suits you the most, or you're most familiar with", and i'v always been a windows guy, didn't really have any reason to use linux, because for school stuff, or programming (java and android and c) windows was great enough...

BUT MOTHERF@CKERS at microsoft, i'v had enough...
First my handheld computer goes nuts, because windows is eating 80% of processor, and if i fix it, then some other kind of windows related thing eats up that much, and you know what? I've been okay with that, because thats only a handheld computer, but boy, didn't my main computer start to do the same?!?
I cannot do anything, basically i start something trivial up (by trivial i mean trivial, like idk, a texteditor not even a browser, or an ide or anything that would take a bit of more ram) and my computer cant do shit....

I'm so mad.... Currently installing elemantary os... F@ck this shit i'm out...

(And lets not forget the hours of 'updates' which dont do shit....)

Me a while ago talking to a recruiter over the phone. This was for a C++ dev position.

(R)ecruiter : So except for the development things, we are looking for someone who has experience configuration linux. Do you have any experience with that?

(M)e : Sure, I use Linux all the time. What do you mean.

R : Well, Just using Linux isn't enough for this position, you need to have experience in configuration Linux.

M : Well. I can't answer your question if you don't specify what you mean. Do you mean that I need to be able to install my own packages? Set up my dev environment? Bash scripting? Being able to configure my bash profile to have good aliases? Use Linux to develop software? Because I can do all of these.

M : Or do you need someone who can write Kernel modules for the OS, because I don't have any experience in that but would like to learn.

R : Oh, I don't really know what it means. But the paper says that you need to have experience configuration Linux. So what would you say your experience with that is?

Me internally : JESUS CHRIST I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I KNOW AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ASSESS ME CORRECTLY.

Me 😎 : I use Arch and you have to set it up completely from the ground by your self so I know everything there is to know.

Basically every question was like this with the recruiter. I got further in the process but quit because the workplace looked like it would drain my soul when I got interviewed by the employees of the company.

Jesus Christ though, some recruiters could be replaced by an automated phone system.

My friend just introduced me to devrant today, and then we decided we're going to write an OS together...

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

Started writing an operating system several years ago. Taught me just about everything I need to know about computers.

Oh, and make NES games. That teaches you a lot about how we arrived to where we are today.

The more I use Go, the more i start to like it. I didn’t realize how nice being able to generate binaries for every OS that matters was, until I had that power. It beats the hell out of trying to distribute a Python app for sure.

Sure, it has its warts.

It’s overly bureaucratic in the same way Java is.

I hate that you can’t import something without using it (most people I’d wager preemptively import libraries they know they’re gonna need even if the code isn’t written yet)

I really wish there was a way to just say “See this JSON blob? All those keys and values are strings, trust me, you don’t need me to tell you the type of each one individually.”

Generics would be nice.

I’d kill for exceptions - any decently sized go program is going to have very many if err checks where most could be condensed down to a single try/catch in most other langs.

I wish the tooling was better. Dependency management was a solved problem when Go was released and yet they chose to ship without it. There’s still no standard. Many hours of time have been wasted dinking with this.

But ya know what? Even with those warts, it’s still easier to write than Java. It’s still write once run anywhere, it’s blazing fast, and doesn’t require your end user to install an entire freakin runtime.

<3 Go

15 years ago I had a job interview as technical leader. They asked me about the trendy framework in those days, Struts. I didn't know much to be honest. I actually started to study java the month before. I was 30 y.o. and I managed to sell myself well.

I got the job. I never saw Struts, the real job was to migrate a z/OS application written on PL/I for DB2 (all things where new to me, I programmed something in VB when I was younger, before studying a career in statistics). Anyway, somebody else already scaffolded Struts, I implemented some business logic here and there, and mostly tried to make sense of the monster-legacy.

Fast forward now.
Two months ago I was interviewed on the last version of Angular and AWS devops, kubernetes etc. I managed not to look completely idiot, but honestly, I never went beyond an Hello World in Angular, and kubernetes, well, I like the name.

I got the job as Technical Architect.

First project I'm assigned to: migrate a 15 years old Struts application to cloud.
Somebody has containerized everything.
Somebody will scaffold a dotNet application.

I'll watch. Maybe I'll write some nice powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'll fill in some business logic in some methods.

I wanted really to be a technical Architect and do things other modern people do.

I actually wanted to learn something.

Anyway.
For 160K$ a year is not bad, I wouldn't complain.

there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.

Was at school the other day and met a dude who was told by an acquaintance that I'm a "computer guy".

Dude comes up to me and jokes that the acquaintance was spreading rumors about me being a programmer. I was a bit confused and tell him that I do in fact program, and then he asks me what I've done, to which I explain what languages I've dealt with.

Next thing he asks me: "Have you made an OS?"

BREH

He tells me about how he went through Linux From Scratch. I have no idea how in-depth that book goes, if someone who has read it could enlighten me that'd be nice.

Acquaintance mentions that I won an app contest. (At this point, I'm internally telling acquaintance to shut his face.) I explain what I made(an Android app that helps sort Lego pieces) and he promptly tells me that I just used an API and barely wrote any code.

After (hopefully calmly) going back and forth with him, I just say "So I write bad code. What's it matter to you?" He stopped talking right there.

He apologized later. Yeah right, I'm sure you're sorry.

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.

they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)

the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.

the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.

flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.

it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.

animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.

you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.

oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.

oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.

I just found a vulnerability in my companies software.
Anyone who can edit a specific config file could implant some SQL there, which would later be executed by another (unknowing) user from within the software.

The software in question is B2B and has a server-client model, but with the client directly connecting to the database for most operations - but what you can do should be regulated by the software. With this cute little exploit I managed to drop a table from my test environment - or worse: I could manipulate data, so when you realize it it's too late to simply restore a DB backup because there might have been small changes for who knows how long. If someone was to use this maliciously the damages could be easily several million Euros for some of our customers (think about a few hundred thousand orders per day being deleted/changed).

It could also potentially be used for data exfiltration by changing protection flags, though if we're talking industry espionage they would probably find other ways and exploit the OS or DB directly, given that this attack requires specific knowledge of the software. Also we don't promise to safely store your crabby patty recipe (or other super secret secrets).

The good thing is that an attack would only possible for someone with both write access to that file and insider knowledge (though that can be gained by user of the software fairly easily with some knowledge of SQL).

Well, so much for logging off early on Friday.

Learn Rust becau... Write an operating sy... Build a Westworld host with consci...

That sums up about my patience and focus. Facepalm.

So atleast to complete the OS I started writing a month ago. And learn Rust and some AI.

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

Gotta make a decision matrix like the one in the picture. It's for a recommendation report concerning whether or not to distribute laptops to the CSCE students at my university and what kind of laptop if so.

I need help determining the weights for my matrix, because my personal preferences may not reflect the majority. As a programmer, how would you weigh the following three (very broad) categories?

Power(CPU, GPU, memory, HDD, I/O, etc..)
Quality (Durability, material, aesthetics, etc..)
Comfort(Weight, size, shape, keyboard, screen-eye comfort, OS familiarity, etc..)

Please write an integer 1-10 in the following format:
Power/Quality/Comfort ex: 7/4/9

Thanks, everyone!
-The Adderall'd-up devRant Noob, Benby

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

i wrote a website, a server in go, a small os in c, a game in js, a game and server and web scraper and other desktop apps in java, mobile apps with flutter, a website with php also, implemented aes in go, wrote a parser in java. done sysadmin stuff on my vps and pihole/openvpn/nextcloud on my rpi. learn about c vulnerabilities and used metasploit. attempted to write an interpreted language. did some led displays with arduino. currently learning tensorflow.

i have never...
- written a driver
- made a game with a game engine
- created a file encoding
- implemented an oauth2 server
- made an api
- worked with vr

what am i missing? i want to be a very well rounded dev.

Today, my manager received a brand new Macbook pro with all its cool features while I am still stuck using an old Macbook pro (mid 2012 model). I always complained him about performance issues and all he did was to approve an OS upgrade (to Sierra). How does that even enable me to be productive? I am already running applications at the peak of the machine limits. Sometimes, the JVM crashes and other time Node.js runs out of heap space.

The manager is not a programmer. All he really does is attend online meetings, track and report to management, and write emails. Ideally, he would need a Mac Air or perhaps a Windows machine. I still wonder how did the company management allowed this. He is simply misusing his privileges as a manager and I can do nothing about it.

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

the one that exists (c#) seems underused compared to where it could (or even should) be used. and the place that uses it the most (enterprise) butchers and mangles its use, just as enterprise tends to do with everything.

the one that i'm designing... the fact that it doesn't exist yet, and that even as i'm zeroing in on syntax and philosophy that i'm very much starting to be proud of, i still don't have a proper idea of how to implement even the most basic parser/interpreter for it, not because it's in any way difficult or unusual, but just because... i've never done that before, so i get into weird circular thought paths that produce weird nonsensical code...

... on top of that, i still only have a very, very fuzzy idea of how will it (sometime in extremely distant future) actually implement the most interesting and core feature - event-based continuous (partial) re-parsing of the source code and the fact that traversing the tokens at the leaf level of the syntax tree should result in valid machine code (or at least assembly) that is the "compiled" program.

i *know* it's possible, i just don't yet know enough to have a contrete idea how exactly to achieve it.

but imagine - a programming language where interactive programming is basically the default way of working, and basically the same as normal programming in it, except the act of parsing is also the (in-memory) compilation at the same time, so it's running directly on the hardware instead of via interpretrer/vm/any of that overhead crap.

also then kinda open-source by definition.

and then to "only" write an OS in that, and voilá! a smalltalk-like environment with non-exotic, c-family syntax and actual native performance!

ahhh... <3

* a man can dream *

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

Doesn't it suck that we still need to write an app multiple times for different operating systems? I mean for me it seems like how the web was a decade ago. I think we deserve better!

While there are cross-platform frameworks, I feel like the OS vendors must work together to make native development less of a pain in the ass.

I'm kinda bit embarrassed when I write my code in public or internet corner especially with my friends cause I'm not using an open source OS. .

I just wondered... Is it even possible to write unit tests for an OS kernel or a bootloader?

How would you do that?

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

I am overwhelmed in my mind right now and I kinda just need it out.

I'm incredibly divided. There's so much I want to do which is fine I can balance some of it kinda well but when it comes to the programming aspects of what I want to do is where my head gets tugged in multiple directions.

Parts of me really want to continue to dive into C# and learn it a lot more than I currently do so I can continue to write the tools I use for problems I come across.

And the other part of me just wants to go do lower level development with C because that's where most of my goals are being mostly embedded and OS development.

But so many people I know that are incredibly smart devs use C# and I see why it's an incredible language and I'm glad it's one of the languages I know but I feel like there's so much to learn about it and I there's so much shit I see that I'm just like I don't know when I would want to use this, or I can see X feature being very useful but I don't know where I'd use it in my projects. Hell even C#s version of structs I know are very useful but I'm not able to make good use of them

I'm just in that headspace where I'm not learning enough and I feel dumb when I look at someone else's project because there's a lot more complexity In their project that none of my projects have ever had and so many people make use of language features I've never used or thought about using (generics being a good example) and I'm constantly asking questions which I know is okay but too much is happening in life lately and it's just making it harder to handle.

Thanks to anyone that got through it hopefully I'm not alone in these feelings

I have to write my IoT coursework in an Ubuntu VM running on Linux 3.2. VBox Guest Additions doesn't support this Ubuntu version, neither does anything else. Contiki, the operating system we're coding for has been abandoned for many years, the devs moved to a new project called Contiki NG. If I try to compile with any standard above ANSI C it fails with cryptic errors deep inside the OS. The docs for the old Contiki are paginated with JS so I can't use the browser's fulltext search, but they also don't have proper bulitin search.

This cannot be legal. They are violating every accessibility guideline in existence. I just need the text to be slightly larger and even I have to go through hell. I imagine blind, deaf or dyslexic students just give up.

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

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.

I once was working on my family's business during summer and was doing something on the laptop that was there (according to the owner, it was in a "good shape" - oh my god that laptop nearly gave me cancer: an old Toshiba, running W10, with half the F keys not working - specially F5. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT F5 OH MY GOD -, and also the ➡ key (arrow keys). It was bought in a flea market and some IT guy, a friend of the owner, repaired it a bit and installed the OS because a laptop that old ran WinXP or Win Vista for sure) when suddenly it died on me.
I rebooted the thing and right before the time it should be showing the windows logo, the screen froze (on a black screen with some text) and it started to beep. Loudly. A loud continuous beep. I turned it off and on some times after that, seeing if turning it off and on did something (as it seems to work LoL) and it continued with the beeping. After a quick search I found out that that was a common problem with Toshibas that old, and that I needed to press F2 (that key worked thank god) when the black screen with the text showed up (I don't remember what was written there, it were some booting instructions, I think).
It worked. Great. Now the N key doesn't work when I press it. Greeeeeeeaaaaaat. Also it seemed that, when I opened the start menu, it would automatically write "nnnnnnnn(...)" without me pressing any key (pressing any key would make it stop though, maybe it was stuck).
Then I told the owner not to turn it off, because the laptop would start beeping and such (and I know he'd panic about it).
From then on I think it went off for good and now he's been using his own Toshiba, that runs Vista and is slow as all hell.
Moral of the story: he should have been used his crappy PC from the beginning, at least all its keys work

(Note: watching him type hurts my soul. When one is used to use both hands to type, and is fast-ish on the keyboard and uses tabs to change fields, watching someone type with only one hand every 2" or so and using the mouse to change fields hurts. So much time wasted 😭)

I have an opportunity to buy a cheap ThinkPad which I want to install Arch Linux on to get more familiar with Linux. So I want to setup the environment and try to use it as my home PC to write code, watch YouTube etc. No gaming.

Is it worth it? It’s not a lot of money but definitely not free either. Does anyone have any experience going from OS X to any Linux/GNU? I’m not expecting to enjoy it so much that I’ll switch permanently but who knows.. And what about ThinkPads, good stuff?

I don't understand how I/O streams work. I mean as a userspace developer i saw the stdin/stdout streams as magical objects that i could read or output infinetely in a continuous way, without caring how much data i write or read (ok, not entirely true because overflows)... But now i'm making an os kernel and i really don't know how i'll implement them..... :(

Why do you lil' shits keep making LAYERS and LAYERS of unnecessary abstraction and then call it goddamn progress???
Dude what the fuck is this UEFI shit?!
Why the hell do I NEED to import a frigging library and read tons of boring and overly complicated documentation just so I can paint a pixel on the screen now uh??
Alright alright yeah so the BIOS is a little basic but daaaamit son if you want something a bit more complicated you make it yourself or install an OS that provides it! Like we've been doing it for years!!!
Dude, you don't get to know what a file system is until I tell you!
The PC be like:
"You wanna dereference the 0x0 pointer? There you go: it's 0xE9DF41, anything else?
You wanna write to the screen? Ok I have a perfectly convinient interrupt setup for that.
Wanna paint a pixel yellow? Ok, just call this other interruption. Theere we go.
And it only took four bytes and a nanosecond to do it."

That shit works, and if you want something more complex, but not too much, that still runs efficiently install DOS.
Don't mess around with the hardware pleeease.
We can still understand what's going on down there. Once UEFI steps in, it'll be like sealing a door forever. Long live BIOS damn it all!