There’s a guy at work I hate so much. He doesn’t know when a problem shouldn’t exist, he never checks to see if there is a better more maintainable and efficient way to solve a problem, lacks attention to detail, has the attention span of a goldfish, writes shitty overly complicated code, fuuuck

If you talked to this guy in person, you’d think he’s a genius who has it all figured out, but he’s just a professional bullshitter

Some two years ago I purchased a license for AV solution on Amazon UK which is my default place for shopping.

When attempting to activate the license, I kept getting this annoying error somewhere along the lines of:
'License from another region.'

I contact the support, they did their magic && the license got applied.

Fast forward some two years - the license is about to expire.

The software is actually good, so I make the choice to renew it.

Thing is, I keep getting redirected to the local site w/o an option of choosing the English language.

I edit the site's address to reach an English version of the site.
On UK's site I am unable to choose my country of residence so I can't complete the purchase form.
I try a few other things && finally reach the Global site where I am able to input the correct data for the purchase, but all attempts to finish the payment fail.

Fine... I'll purchase from the local site.

I purchased the license, activated it w/o problems, but when attempting to download the installer it keeps downloading the localized version which doesn't allow me to change the language.

I contact Support.

S: 'The license you've purchased can be used solely w/ localized version of the software. If you want to use the English version, you'll have to get a refund && purchase from our Global site here [link w/o redirection].'

_Fuck_ this trend of automatic redirection to localized sites && forced localized software.

One shouldn't have to go through all these hoops to get the software in the language of their choice, instead of having the localized version shoved down their throat.

I inherited a nextjs project from an unknown guy and am fangirling the codebase

But the deeper I familiarise myself with it, the more the cracks begin to appear:

1) The dude Is incapable of grasping the basics of DRY concept. He actually setup a ton of stuff I may have done poorly if I'd started working straight out of the docs, so I feel like I owe him a shower of praise. I guess being new to nextjs makes it look more impressive than it actually is. He was paid off, yet getting the credit seems unearned to me. I'm just afraid reaching out to him might turn around to bite me in the ass
***

I had the above in my drafts, contemplating sending him a token to show some appreciation for unknowingly showing me the ropes. I was going to find him on LinkedIn using his commit names. But after doing everything I've done, undergoing the anxiety and severe pressure I faced at the hands of the project owners, I'm not sharing a farthing with anybody

Yes, I may not have known about zustand and persist middleware. Yes, he did all the ui. Yes, he created the base components and fancy wrappers around form and button html elements. For those, I'm grateful

But the amount of refactoring I had to do to, for an opportunity to implement my own target features, I'd say I can lay as much claim to the project as he does.

Side note #1: I have some newfound respect for front end devs. We used to discriminate against them for doing just css but that was only relevant in the jquery days. Now, they have to use cryptic css frameworks (sass, less, tailwind), they have to learn esoteric syntax of some js framework and write controllers/components as the case may be. They have to (the worst part), bind this data to an API, which would never make sense to me coming from a php ssr-natural world

Back rewarding the guy, some of the challenges I came back from were:

1) Next server outages: I still don't know the workaround this. The app terminates, browser giving an error about using up memory. I have to wait for about 10 minutes before I can access the app again

2) spring Webflux authentication not hydrating: I was unexpectedly asked to work on the back end too, where I got tortured with this horrifying condition. The most poorly documented framework for the Web has no upto date guide on how to implement jwt security measures. I opened a question on stackoverflow. A day later, both my question and the helpful answer got downvoted

3) Zustand not retrieving any data from localstorage once page reloads, until I miraculously stumbled on a hack: there's a config callback for reading state after rehydration or thereabout. So I interact with the state there. That's the only way content clearly in localstorage can get transmuted into dynamic format accessible by the code

4) Mongo database suddenly disconnecting: for no apparent reason, this bailed. Accessible on compass. This was even when I realised it was responsible for front end requests not going through. Eventually created a new database and requests surprisingly began connecting again. Thankfully, my laravel background taught me about seeders so I had them on standby from the onset. Wasn't difficult to just port to a fresh database after confirming the first one was inaccessible to the app

After this painful odyssey and the time constraints, threats of moving forward with someone else, I deserve every dime they deem me worthy of and more

So, my wife's family has a "no shoes inside the house" rule, what is fine... until you realize that they mean "*no shoes inside the house*" - regardless if you are actually wearing the shoes or if those are in your luggage or something.
So you're supposed to leave all footwear on a shelf on this bench outside their door.
That proved to be tricky when my 10yo twin girls started freaking out that someone was going to steal their prized shoes if we left those outside the house during the night.
It would actually be a risk in our own neighborhood, infested with amazon-package kleptomaniacs, but here we are deep in the country.
Now, I've been to my in-laws place many times, and they absolutely cannot be reasoned with. I wish I could use their stubbornness to train a LLM into relentless compliance with company policy.
So, in order to spare my girls from some of my in-laws paranoia, I've spent some time before we came here rigging up a wifi cam to a facial detection service. (I know I've just exchanged their covid-style paranoia with my own surveillance-state-style paranoia. Those are the times we live in. But i can see the irony)
The server monitors the camera feed and stores the first few seconds before, during and after some face is detected.
I trained a facial rekognition model with our family's faces and had it notify me every time some unknown face appears on camera.
Finally, I've printed a "smile, you are on camera!" sign, taped it over the laces of my tracking boots, and hid the camera (and a powerbank) inside one of the boots.
My daughters were pacified with that solution, my wife laughed out loud with a devilish smile, and my in-laws completely ignored me when I tried to explain it all. Perfect.

The system has been up and running since before christmas. It notified us when some relatives arrived for celebrations and one package delivery - no shoe-related shenanigans. Until this morning.
My daughters have been playing with some neighbor kids, and a couple of those decided to fill their shoes with mud on this new-year morning, as a stupid childish prank.
I know because they kneeled in front of the camera earlier today.
Right when I was finishing up my stretches for the morning... less than 2m away from the door.
The wicked kids looked straight at the camera, and you can actually pinpoint the moment that they realize they have been caught. Then you can see when they hear me unlock the door...
I opened the door to find a bucket full of mud and no soul on sight.
I'm not posting the video, they are minors, after all. But my family is sure to laugh at it every year... and my in-laws will keep on bringing it up with the kids' grandparents forever :)

Disclaimer: This joke will be lost in translation but I can't help but make it

In my country, you can use the phrase "it's not beans" to describe something difficult eg "that ielts exam no be beans". Given my recent woes with spring boot, I can also say "spring webflux no be beans". But it's funny to me because the framework calls objects bound to the container "beans" so it's a nerdy, don't leave me joke

Working on creating an asyncio UDP server/client. Going to have it talk to another server/client. Why? Because I don't want there to be a round trip to my data. I want send and forget.

So I created a combo server/client in C++. I am testing out the client and I find that it connects and sends data with zero errors as a client even if there is no endpoint (server) active. Okay, well its connection-less so it kinda makes sense. So I am not even sure what connection means at this point. I figured it was sending data into the ether. Fine, I don't have to worry about dropped endpoints or some shit. The server does see messages once it creates itself (tested with Python server). Not old messages, just the ones currently being sent.

So I do the same thing in Python and use asyncio to create server/client with opposite ports to talk to my C++ server/client. However, if C++ server doesn't exist the Python client throws an error. Okay, wtf... So Python UDP client is gonna be extra steps because why? Because fuck you! That's why! lol

UDP Client Comparison:
C++: I don't give a shit, if you don't get the data then fuck off. I won't error no matter what.
Python: Oh shit, there is no server, so I won't even run. Because fuck you and wanting to send messages to the ether.

Now I need to do the same thing in C# and see what kind of "fuck you's" it will have.

What did I learn? I learned Python has a nice asyncio system similar to asio from boost.

So I am navigating the hellscape called vcpkg. It is a hellscape to me because I don't understand fuck all about how its supposed to work. It has things like manifests and keys which point to repo commits and other weird shit.

I am trying to learn how to get it to install boost.asio today. It keeps installing this old as fuck version 1.80 instead of latest 1.86. I try specifying the version in the vckpg.json file of my project. Then it starts throwing hands and saying it doesn't have port shit for other boost libraries. I try to provide versions for those and it throws more hands. I search and search to no avail. So I give up and let it install 1.80 and all its dependencies. Then its starting fucking erroring out compiling boost.coroutines. So I search on that. Nothing of substance. Just flabbergasted at this point. Does boost work at all with msvc?

I am looking through the errors and is says run "vcpkg update". This fails because I am in manifest mode. Why didn't it give me the command for manifest mode, is it stupid? Then I find the command for manifest mode: "vcpkg x-update-baseline". This updates it commit number is some random file I don't know about. Still don't know what the fuck that does. Then I run the config again on my vcpkg.json. This starts installing boost-asio 1.86. Okay, that is what I wanted in the first place.

So I let it run and do its thing. It installs everything and compiles everything. Its all ready to go. At this point I am like what the fuck is this shit. I don't really want to learn any of this shit. Yet there is someone somewhere that probably can't get enough of this. At work I will probably eventually need to learn this, along with cmake, and all its quirks. It just makes me tired to learn this just to get to a point to write one line of code. I am sure vcpkg will save me time and energy at some point. But 2-3 hours of guessing is annoying at best.

The last time I used boost on windows I just downloaded the source and built it. It was simple and then I just had to provide paths. vcpkg is nice in this respect. Especially when I upgrade the library.

I don't know what the point of this rant is. Getting tired of fighting tooling I guess. Already learning black magic trying to setup my build environment for making skse plugins. Docs are almost non-existent. I did find a discord with some cool people though. Respect to the trailblazers of this art.

So I get a message from my ex-colleague today, and it’s déjà vu all over again.

Apparently, the CTO at my old company went full Hulk in the office this morning, demanding to know who used the ops@ email to subscribe to something called "custom purring ASMR." If that sounds familiar, buckle up - this one’s even better.

For context, this is the same company where I once had to explain to the CFO why our tech@ email got invoiced for "panties juice, extra virgin." If you don’t remember… Yeah, I left, but the shenanigans clearly stayed. Here’s a spot-the-difference picture: https://devrant.com/rants/6213132/...

Turns out, one of the devs was testing an API integration for some niche subscription platform. Nothing new there — sandbox environments, dummy accounts, €5 test payments. Except genius over here decides to jazz it up and names the testing account: "Cat Daddy Deluxe, meow to pay." Obviously not meant for production, right?

Fast forward to yesterday (yes, Friday): the platform goes live without clearing the sandbox database. Dev’s test account? Now the default subscription for every new creator. Not only that, but every 1k subscribers it "wins" a discount for the next most popular account. What are the top 5 other popular accounts?

5. "Leather Daddy Lullabies" – soothing bedtime stories narrated by a guy in full BDSM gear.
4. "ASMR For Adult Toys" – exactly what it sounds like, but HR will still ask.
3. "Moaning Meditation Mondays" – very NSFW guided mindfulness exercises... weekly!
2. "Kinksploration 101" – a podcast exploring bizarre fetishes you wish you didn’t know about.
1. And last but not least, "Spicy Grandma Diaries" – erotic stories written and narrated by a sweet old lady from the local senior centre, apparently depicting real-life escapades from her 70s. In great detail.

Here’s the kicker. Friday, ops@ gets two discount emails. The same guy who roasted the “panties” girl the hardest, the very one who caused this mess, is now sure they’ve finally sent him more accounts to test - because clearly, those can’t be meant for production. Right?

Long story short: he spent €118 of real-life company funds, and IT is now on the hook for lifetime memberships to “Purring Dominance 101” and “Whisker Tickler Masterclass.” How satisfying is it to see the universe balance all his not-so-funny comments?

Also, I’m definitely getting them to forward me those whisker-tickler classes. No matter how good you think you are, some areas of life always have room for improvement.

Needed an application that generates data very fast for a networking application i'm writing but I did notice that /dev/urandom and /dev/random are not very consistent in speed.

Still, i needed something fairly random with more consistent speed. Now, I made an application that caches 1000 randoms upfront and use them for calculation. Now I have my own randomization algorithm backed by the uniqueness of the original rand(). For fun I added data in the set like some phone numbers. I can watch ages to the data to find smth in common or interesting combinations of the data.

I did verify with GPT is the algorithm is unique and it's fail. It generated a complete ML script for itself to check it. Very awesome.

You use urandom, i use retoordom. We are not the same.

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

Suddenly remembered that, at one point in time, every few rants here I would read something about wordpress, and how nightmarish working on this or that blazing dumpster funeral pyre was.

So, hot take: you deserve it.

I'm sorry wordpress devs, but you do. If the whole point is getting a site up and running "without extensive coding knowledge", then the whole point is not needing to hire a developer. You get that, right? These folks straight up tried to take your job, realized they couldn't, then came back crawling, and you accepted the offer right after getting spat in the face.

Mother fucker, have some self-respect. On both sides of the equation.

This foray into needlessly antagonizing my fellow programmers has been brought to you by RectSpace. Need to flip off Bertrand Wanker-Fuckfaceberg here and his dumbass fullstack chops? Just fire him! Bring your amateur pornovlog online TODAY with NO programming knowledge whatsoever -- you'll be sucking off webdeving limp-ass DICK in no time!

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Microsoft is a greedy piece of shit company. I hate them. They continuously make my life harder. I'm an arch user, but I had to install Windows on another laptop. Guess what? They literally to throttle the downloads for the ISO itself unless you use their ass Media Creation Tool. Recently, they also removed some drivers from the said ISO, which literally can't be found anywhere, so they pretty much force you to use their shitty media tool from another Windows machine to get a working installation.

Oh man, you guys get two rants for the price of one tonight.

DEVRANT IS RUNNING REALLY FUCKING SLOW. I know the platform has been 5.999999 feet under for about 4 years now, but it's starting to get reallllly grim.

Also: single wick candles always fucking tunnel. My girlfriend is trying to say I use them wrong. I do not. I burn them for long periods of time and they still have a huge fucking coating of wax on the outside. My triple wick candle is perfect. Burns to a nice puddle of liquid wax on the top every single time. Can we get SOMEONE working on fixing this?????

AI hacking attempts being spotted in the wild because they're too polite

https://someone.elses.computer/@mik...

there's actually a similar vetting process in the crypto industry where you have to swear or you won't get hired. forget why now

this seems optimistic to me because companies generally don't do security. a hacker desperate for money has less money to blow on AI hacking than someone invested in protecting their company would on AI pentesting. poor low level pentesters I guess though

Hey all, not sure what the mod rules are around this but.. I'd love some feedback on my project..

This project, I call it Thingtime, is my life's work..

It's a GUI for web development with a direct connection to HTML, CSS and JavaScript using React and Chakra UI..

It's like writing code and adding it to a runtime while being in that runtime, and that runtime is powering itself..

So, it aims to fully elliminate the gap between code editors and the end result.. I jokingly refer to it as code-no-code.

Anyway, it's a long 13 minute video which goes over the basics to a pretty cool demo..

I'm trying to work out what direction to take with the platform and idea.. private investment, shares, crowdfunding.. etc..

So I was hoping for some input from some fellow 9000 IQ devrant degenerates..

Here's the vid !!! 🥰
https://youtube.com/watch/...

Lopu 🌈💖✨♾️✨💖🦄

Update on my 60% keyboard and (neo)vim journey:

I've been getting much more used to the motions and hand posture required to use vim, but I still don't understand people who use it as their main editor.

I'm still using vanilla nvim, because:
- I am afraid of learning to install plugins
- I want to master the baseline experience before adding more

I enjoy the snappiness, and I feel my keyboard skills further improving, but everything about neovim is disappointing me from the syntax highlighting to the clunky copy/paste to the difficulty of finding code you need.

In VSCode, I can just do ctrl + p to go to any file, f2 to symbol rename, ctrl + shift+ f to do a recursive directory search. These are things offered only by plugins in nvim, but are available out-of-the-box in vscode.

Even saving your file is clunky. I've gotten used to esc + :w, but it's just more keystrokes than ctrl + s.

Sure, my hand is RIGHT in the middle of the keyboard, and key for key, I'm probably writing code faster when I'm in a groove. But there are so many things that are easy in vscode that are difficult in vim that I know that I'm losing time anyways.

Maybe crazy idea but couldn't you implement a kernel level garbage collector for compiled languages like C/C++/Rust?

The biggest issue is that without a runtime you don't have safe points at which you know a thread isn't updating references... except you do! At thread context switches you know the thread isn't executing code, so you can safely do your stack traversal and reference marking without fearing race conditions

That's still somewhat problematic because OTHER threads may still be executing but there's probably concurrent gc designs that could deal with that...

Hmm maybe I should actually try to work on this

AI is cheap. It only costs a few euro to translate a whole Harry Potter book using the best AI models I just calculated.

Wow, a few euro for the whole book? That's cheap! Yes, but it takes time.
Days? Hours? Minutes?

And how much do other things than a translation service cost since if you're doing smth more complex and need the most expensive model? My article is all about wasting as much money as possible regarding AI.

The article we really need regarding AI pricing: https://molodetz.nl/retoor/gists/...

I translated the terrible AI pricing to something humans can understand! Time and Harry Potter.

If you didn't read Harry Potter, read that first. Priorities.

And this, this was a great christmas night!

TLDR; if you would use the best AI (4o!) for a translation service it would cost you $0.0015 per minute.

So I decided I needed to tell you all a funny Christmas story.

I got a bunch of shirts for Christmas (not surprising). A couple of them were t-shirts and one was a red plaid shirt that buttons up. So to show my appreciation to my wife for the gifts I decided to wear a t-shirt and the plaid shirt (left unbuttoned so you can see funny t-shirt). I put them on and went to talk to my wife in her office at home:

me: Do you know what I would do if I had a wife like you?
her: I dunno, what?
me: Two Christmas shirts at the same time.

If you don't know the reference here is a link:
https://youtube.com/watch/...

Chatgpt and WhatsApp LLMs replaced the time I spend on Google, combing stackoverflow, articles, forum suggestions and documentation. Which makes sense since those primary constitute their software development training model

Its interactivity is like personally iterating with those authors in real time, yet the experimentation I do remains the same. We still do the hairpulling, catfighting, back and forth, tantrums and clawing each other's eyes out when things go awry. I'm mostly the one doing all these when it's completely useless and worse than a mental retarded thing, missing whole points, regurgitating same solutions you told it are dud

More irritating cases are times it withholds information due to ethical reasons. I get redfaced livid and cuss it out. My message gets scrubbed out for violating community policy. Days when its sympathetic, it apologises for my frustration, other days it just retorts with more venom that the umpire supervising our exchange promptly erases

Prompt engineering is probably the ubiquitous language javaScript aspired to be, and may be the future of software development