JS: [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’].join(‘, ‘)
Ruby: [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’].join(‘, ‘)
Go: strings.Join([]string{"a", "b", "c"}, ", “)
Kotlin: listOf("a", "b", "c").joinToString(", “)
Swift: ["a", "b", "c"].joined(separator: ", ")
Lua: table.concat([‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’], “, “)
Racket: (string-join ‘("a” “b” “c") “, “)

fucking python: ‘, ‘.join([‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’])

talk let's, like exactly, prioritizes python, comes what, and first, comes what, ‘ ‘ second. Like talking, doesn’t Yoda, you make, wiser any.

We rolled out yesterday a new update out to our Desktop application. The goal was to do it last weekend but we failed for reasons. The update is a success and now we (devs, project manager, QA, COO, support) got an angry email from our CEO, he mentioned:
- He is very disappointed in the whole process
- we released it without a coordinated marketing campaign
- That the devs should have communicated to the customers
- That the devs should have communicated internally more
- That support is getting a lot of new support tickets. I asked support, they counted 0 for this product in the last 7 days.
- Asked us to self-reflect how we can improve.

My project manager (who is currently on paternity leave) responded with an angry email to defend the dev team and pointed out that the CEO fired the marketing guy (again). The deadline is here for months, that the CEO literally ran the update locally and sold the update to new customers. He also called the CEO "lack of self awareness" and "not understanding the update process" and "disappointed in this approach". He also said that he asked the developers not to respond to the email.

Love me some drama between higher-ups

I haven't been on in a while because I got laid off two weeks ago. I made it three years and survived two layoffs. I'm relieved honestly; got a decent severance package. Technically I got an extra week of "PTO" where I still had access to two Slack rooms if I wanted to say goodbye to people.

I've taken two weeks to unwind. Time to update my cover sheet and get back into the flow of contacting old buddies to see what work is available.

I've been at it for over 20 years at this point: Java, Scala, Python, Ruby and even a couple of years of devops/sys admin. Let's see how bad the remote and local job markets suck now.

MS has added copilot to Outlook and placed the button in that left side bar where the other buttons are.

Thing is, that‘s the only colorful icon there.

Now every time I look at this bar, this icon always stands out. It looks like this is the selected icon, even if something else is selected.

For me this is a great example of shit UX.

They probably made it on purpose so that people are constantly reminded that COPILOT IS INTEGRATED IN OUTLOOK NOW.
They don’t care about good UX, they just want to smash it into your face.

s3 storage sucks. Requires you to implement special stuff in software. The s3fs is a terrible thing not supporting many native file operations. For example, i can't cp * /to-target. It can't do nothing.

So, that was a short adventure. Now i found: https://interserver.net/r/1035270/ (affiliate link, why not). 3,- 1tb storage WITH complete vps. 1gb / 1 core but it does great as sshfs drive. It works so fast, i gonna host complete projects on it like https://devrant.molodetz.nl. sshfs drives really have the comfort of a native drive. Boarded just uploaded 600Mb to snek in two minutes. That movie was completely streamable in the snek web interface, you could comfortably click trough the video.

So, time to make a custom script to push all data from s3bucket (blegh!) to this beautiful drive.

How do you guys monitor website traffic?

I was looking of a solution for a long while. Google analytics sucks these days. In the beginning it was an awesome system! Long, I've searched an alternative that was LIGHTWEIGT. That last part was the issue. What the fuck do people with their software? Finally, I've found umami. It's amazing. It shows even the city name from visitors and it shows a nice world map including statistics. Browsers used / desktop / laptop / phone / OS. It also shows debounce ratio (amount of people that run directly away after visit) and users currently online. It's all I could've ever wished for. Using it since yesterday and it's so decent and fast!

It's one of those products that makes me think "This is how I would've written it myself too". Happens sometimes. Same for gitea / cogs. Also such perfect products. There's still hope.

AI chatbot: AI Assistant Miller
User: Hi Miller
AI chatbot (Miller): Hello! It seems like you're looking for something specific, but I'm not quite sure what that is just yet. However, we do have a fantastic range of hosting options available.
Let me know so I can assist you better!
User: sounds fantastic, Miller
AI chatbot (Miller): Thank you! I'm glad you think so! But just to clarify, I'm Alia, your friendly AI Hosting Expert here to assist you.

I've been in a new city for a while, now.

When it comes to getting to know a new city, I like to pick a remote destination of interest within a walking distance /* Which usually is a supermarket, or an electronics store. */ && just pay attention to surroundings on my way there.

Using Google Maps myself, since it works quite well in my area.

Today /* Technically yesterday, since currently it's past midnight, but the event took place a few hours ago, but whatever. */ I have found this interesting landmark.

Games which have a save point or checkpoint system: FUCK YOU!

This is a technical limitation that was present in game consoles in the 90s.

There is no fucking need to implement save points in games made today!

It serves no purpose other than to generate frustration for the player and make the player redo the same section of the game again and again when he fails.
Oh how much fun it is to repeat 20 minutes of tedious shit as a punishment because I fell into your cheap trap and died!

And even if I don‘t fail, I want to be able to stop the game at any time and continue later where I left off. Is that too much to ask?

I don‘t want to be forced to progress in the game until you decide that NOW, after 20 minutes is the time that I am allowed to quit playing.

This is a fucking design decision. Don’t make your design suck to imitate the games from the past that did it for technical reasons!

For some reason, our CEO decides on the designs. I have send some designs to him on Wednesday last week. On Friday, he finally approved the designs (with a minor tweak) at 16:57.

On Monday at 14:00, I had a meeting with him and he was mad that the full feature was not finished and in production.

What did he expect? 😐

For context, Friday we had a deadline to get multiple products updated for a deployments on Saturday. That went to the shitter and we spend hours trying to fix it till the middle of the night and decided to roll back. Now we were fixing the shitshow that it was and he is still mad

(those deadlines that friday were barely feasible and we failed)

Adaptive Latent Hypersurfaces

The idea is rather than adjusting embedding latents, we learn a model that takes
the context tokens as input, and generates an efficient adapter or transform of the latents,
so when the latents are grabbed for that same input, they produce outputs with much lower perplexity and loss.

This can be trained autoregressively.
This is similar in some respects to hypernetworks, but applied to embeddings.

The thinking is we shouldn't change latents directly, because any given vector will general be orthogonal to any other, and changing the latents introduces variance for some subset of other inputs over some distribution that is partially or fully out-of-distribution to the current training and verification data sets, thus ultimately leading to a plateau in loss-drop.

Therefore, by autoregressively taking an input, and learning a model that produces a transform on the latents of a token dictionary, we can avoid this ossification of global minima, by finding hypersurfaces that adapt the embeddings, rather than changing them directly.

The result is a network that essentially acts a a compressor of all relevant use cases, without leading to overfitting on in-distribution data and underfitting on out-of-distribution data.

So a lot of games have in game fake operating systems. They are usually just standard fare utilitarian. I got to thinking that maybe I will have a brand of OS in game that is loosely similar to certain IRL OSes. However, I want to have at least one in game brand OS that insults the user.

user: <clicks on browser in fake computer OS> (loosely based on IE)
computer OS: Don't use that you stupid asshole!
user: ...

so I added a sleek UI upgrade with 3.7 sonnet on windsurf but that was on the dev branch which was pulled from the faulty deployed branch...
couldn't track the changes I made so I created a different branch from the main branch and modified the endpoint issue...

return to GitHub to see how the merge conflict could be resolved in order to maintain the UI mods only for me to realize I deleted the branch while dozing off last night 🥲

summary - I think I'm done ❌

dude1: Some man died from euthanasia.
dude2: He committed suicide?
dude1: No, he was killed by a gang of kids in China.

So I thought of this joke today so its definitely a work in progress. But then I wondered what happened with the suicide machine in Europe. So I found this horrifying account.

https://care.org.uk/news/2024/...

I mean, she got what she paid for...but...this is so fucked. I have seen a few discussions on this and there are complications to this account of what happened. I expect it will take months if not years to sort out what actually happened.

Imagine if it failed due to a dev bug? Who would want to work on such a machine? Seems so fucked.

One day, all down voted posts will be upvoted at once (now they do slowly upvoting the downvoted rants) and devRant will have a spam problem what it can't recover from. More will be spam than not. Thankfully, every comment my bots make is a tag. Based on that, we can filter very accurate on the spam and delete it all when it happens. They smart, but we're smarter. All spam is tagged.

i have figured out the PTSD from my job is just fear and evidently I've never had fear so I was confused
was always an angry kid so I guess I never felt fear before then...

... also apparently all fear is caused by thinking you'll lose freedoms

my job was like a prison... except then I figured out how prisons are, and a prison would be a utopia

so now I literally just can't even bring myself to reply to interview emails cuz I just feel "fear" at them... which I thought was PTSD

and fear always seems big and functions irrationally... and not having experienced it I didn't know that obvious tidbit -.-
all I knew is I was "broken" somehow by that whole experience, even though at the time it didn't seem like such a big deal

people think if you're unemployed you'll just "get off your ass and stop being lazy" when they starve you to death, but starving you to death is just another fear. the first fear and the second breed and power each other up like a reverberating resonance. I rather starve to death than go back to prison so that was never helpful "advice" to me

I've generally been an angry person. I've been fearless quite literally and pretty chill, but when people push on me I get angry though don't necessarily show it. while working I was angry all the time. the interesting thing I noticed about anger is the resonance -- the angry CEO potentially being angry at me didn't scare me, and one time he was finally angry at me. the interesting result was that instead I couldn't keep a lid on my own anger. I got angry at him back. this made me realize you can't suppress an emotion if someone else is throwing the same emotion at you -- it just powers them both up

anger is about territory. either you want something or you're protecting something. it's important to you. anger also seems to dispel fear. ran into something recently and it said "fear is dispelled if you have something more important". just "surviving" is not more important than being free to me, so "starving to death until you get off your lazy ass" was the most annoying bullshit

I've noticed if I'm mad at a job-related person I feel no fear. the anger dispels it. because I was mad at that job all the time, I don't think I noticed my fear. they were frequently using coercion as a "motivational" strategy on everyone... and even though I didn't react to it or was motivated by it, they didn't adapt and try different motivations. I figured I agreed to be doing this, so there's no point in threatening me, and just ignored it. but they never stopped. and things got shittier and shittier. the price they paid me to tank my freedom for purely arbitrary means was just too low, and I couldn't feel any of it because I was angry all the time

I interviewed at companies fine before I left. now that I left I actually can't. because there's no anger. I'm happy. so there's nothing to dispel the fear. therefore I'm cursed, broken, and non-functional... from some mystery I could never figure out before

and I know, this, also. because any time I was harmed socially in these years since, suddenly I could function again, because I was angry, and suddenly I could do so much. but who wants to live life purely angry just to function? it didn't feel right to me. I was so confused

Me: suggests some visual improvements for the web app (because it honestly looks and feels like it has been designed by a backend developer and they make the UI/UX guy design the screens AFTER they've been implemented in the code)

PMs & Management: Okay, let's put it to a vote and get the graphic designer's eye on it.

Me: ...

Is mildly offended lmao.

(I have a graphic design qualification and over 6 years working in web and print design agencies before getting into programming whereas the company's graphic designer knows almost nothing about web design, he's a print designer. Still sends massive gifs to use on the website and doesn't understand web pixel dimensions nor responsive web design principles. These people know my education and employment history btw)

if you could see your own future and the future of loved ones, enemies... would you do it?

or would it just... feel too weird? too much? maybe no one is supposed to know how their life will go. where would free-will then be?!

at the moment you realize you can predict this deadly accurate... what then...

next month's problems, the month after that, the next 10 years of your life. the end of your life.

would you do it? what if you stumbled upon it, and were interested in it working, but the realization that it's actually working is really damned creepy...

---

also if I made an app that did it and you could trade calendars with your friends is that too much lol

AI is a long overdue economic miracle the world needs right now:
- It will create a _lot_ of jobs — even a monkey can be trained to be a “prompt engineer”.
- It will shake up and shuffle stale old corporate status quo. You had a contract with Microsoft, then Amazon introduced some AI in AWS, and you jumped ships. Microsoft then caught up, so the market didn’t change, but got shuffled. That’s good! Many new big contracts signed = fat bonuses for a lot of people they will spend on stupid luxury shit with huge markup.
- “We have no fucking idea how to solve X” -> “AI”. A lot of people with more money than sense will spend big on wannabe startups that will hire a lot of people, pay a lot of salaries/office space rent, and then go under without a lawsuit filed. They would’ve kept that money in their offshore accounts otherwise, e.g. where it can help no one but their cum troph… I mean children.
- Lifes of a lot of people will be improved should they be caught in this grift. But not many people will lose their jobs — AI is still stupid AF. Good enough to impress gullible people with money, but bad enough to not actually have any meaningful impact. Perfectly balanced, as things should be.
- If you’re a junior dev, adding AI to the list of things you show people so they hire you will improve your chances of getting a job. You won’t be replaced — with all my insight and the access to all major enterprise AI models there are, I wasn’t able to make it write passable code, let alone good code.
- If you’re a senior dev, just spend an evening reading some buzzword guide so you know how to use those buzzwords, and you’ll be fine.
- AI consumes way less power than crypto!
- That said, AI still has its uses, and I use it daily. It _can_ do useful things if you know how to use it — ask retoor.

TL;DR: it will make a lot of rich people spend a lot of money (we’re talking cash, not stocks), it will create a lot of new jobs. It won’t replace anyone’s job bc it’s still too stupid to do that.

I'm so sick of placements, every opportunity I ever prayed for kinda slipped through my fingers, my friends made it tho. I'm sitting here helping them optimize their codes during tests and trials while breaking a little bit more. Any one that has a job or would wanna share their story on how they got through this phase, lemme know. Cause i feel like jumping off the roof and im not planning on dying anytime soon :)