Is devRant Losing Its Spark?

Hey ranters,
Anyone else notice how quiet devRant has become? Back in 2016-2017, this place was buzzing with energy, but now it’s down to just 10-12 rants a week. What happened? Did competition from platforms like Reddit or Discord take over, or did devRant stop evolving?

I still believe this platform has huge potential—developers will always need a space to vent and connect. But without fresh ideas or a clear roadmap, it feels like devRant is fading.

To the creators: what’s the plan? To the community: do you feel the same? Let’s discuss!

A concerned dev.

Got my dad to try Fruity Loops so that he can compose with his Tyros 3 keyboard on the computer. If he likes it, I will buy producer edition (that one can also record, that's why) for his bday soon. For Christmas I already ordered midi to USB cable for him. Finally I know what to give to someone who already has everything. He needs stuff for his stuff :p

It will be much fun experimenting together with it. My dad can go very hard on new things, he always becomes a pro in it.

I hope it will be just as nice as the time we spent together on Autocad. He later even made Autocad exams for schools.

He learned me how to install windows 3.11 as very little kiddo.

I like my dad doing computer stuff. It's the moment we really bond.

Ah, shit. First, I get downvoted a bunch, by a rogue jester bot I assume, then the retoornuke goes off, and with her account, even more of my hard-earned updoots lost into the ether.

How is this important? It isn't. I'm merely annoyed. Needed only a couple more to get myself a pet, I was so fuckin close maan. Now I need about 60 again, so not too bad actually, but if you see me shitposting at an increased pace, then you know why.

Okay here's my weekend project
I'll create a Windows 11 virtual machine that will boot, then a macro will run that installs Chrome while closing every intervening Edge popup on its way. After the last popup is closed, the VM is reset to the pre-macro state.
I'll let Windows experience the eternity of me denying its unethical attempts to keep me from using Chrome. And I bet you I'll let it phone home every time.

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

Goes on teams, since it got shoved down my throat because everyone has to use this malware. Might at least clock around to see what free shit it has to offer.

Oh cool, visio? Thats the architecture diagramming tool isnt it? Thats perfect I could use it for my presentation, let me just drag this UML class...

YoU HaVe DiScOvErEd A PrEmIuM FeAtUrE! BuY ViSiO NoW!!

Sometimes, I wish the times of companies simply barring you from access completely to come back. Freemium is the worst bullshit piece of shit business model ever.

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.

Procastinator's tricks to be productive: Schedule messages

I hate to write people. They could answer. My whole plan might be thrown off. But when is the best time to answer them? The day after tomorrow? Too late. Tomorrow. Around 10? Thank you to all messengers that allow me to schedule a message. Instead of procrastinating, I answer, I schedule, and if I am in a bad mood, I later come back and abort and rewrite the message nicer.

Went perfectly swimmingly with my happy new year messages. Everyone got them at 00:00. Yes my friend, you're obviously the most important thing in my life, first thing I did was writing you!

All of you, take note of this date: 12/10/2024.

You get upvoted by green dots, be suspicious.
You see the same date on their profiles, be suspicious.
You see their profiles boosting spam messages, well, you better be fucking suspicious.

There's a bit shy of two hundred of them already, and the numbers will continue to grow. We are getting fucked in the ass, I repeat, we are getting fucked in the ass.

This rectal warfare PSA has been brought to you by [EXTREMELY CENSORED]

So yesterday I had to travel to a different city, which is around 200km to get to (~125 miles), to get my dad to a hospital.
While waiting for him to get processed I did some coding and everything went smooth.

When I came back home, even though my credentials were valid and all, Cognito decided that I'm attempting an "account takeover" and denied my login.

Truly a time to be alive.

Oh, and fuck you Cognito :)

I have paid version of GPT now. Kinda accidental, I wanted the API version and that seemed to be smth completely else. Didn't know. I have a lot of opinions / mixed feelings about it so far. Take the imagine generation, this image is kinda perfectly what I wanted. But it took so much iterations and it was forgetting what i've said lines before. Everytime adding text balloons why I said to remove it, then it removes it but generates a complete new image with something else I don't want with it. THan i fix that, and tadaaa, again a text balloon.

This is the question where it is about: is GPT in current state worth the money? I have no idea, I need some more time.

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 :)

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.

We literally gave ChatGPT their next idea by making fun of them.

They probably saw the posts on the internet where a real person would have a lengthy back and forth conversation with 4o about how many R's are in strawberry and were like "wait, what if we could make the chat bot do that with itself before it answers"

10 quadrillion GPU cycles and $100 in electricity later, we have a "new" GPT model!

Oh and considering their new $200 per month paid plan, it seems like I might not be far off concerning the price to run this parlor trick of a chatbot.

I plainly told the manager responsible for programming that we all use web extensions and there's just no way to effectively prevent programmers from running whatever software they deem necessary, so I'm suggesting to allow them in Windows group policy purely as a matter of efficiency.

It has only just occurred me how much I'm relying on his better judgment not to try and crack down on this.

Wish me and my team luck.

missing rust's infinite loops in other languages now

also now I don't like variable++ and it throws me off

also missing iterators. because you can consume part of them and don't have to keep track that some of a list has already been "used up" so to speak. now I have index counters and laaame (granted not having to wrestle with borrowing rules... actually just strangely feels weird)

also why must languages have different naming conventions. this is a disaster now because my reflexes for what I name variables is all over the place. now I find snake_case more readable than camelCase because the letters are the same height so you can skim for names easier, and by how many words which correlates to how specific a variable is to the logical loops at hand

I guess end of the day we just develop a handwriting style in code our brains like and the idea of having to change your accent every time you switch a locale sounds annoying

We don’t need UEFI
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Now's the last minute at current company. Very mixed feelings about leaving. Working with the people there was such an amazing experience and the working conditions there were amazing. But I decided to move on because the pay was absolutely shit and the work itself was like making me feel burnt out. Its not like that I'm overworked. Its like no challange and my own expertise is not valued at all. Everything I work on is constantly held back by every minute thing so that I finish it months later than actually planned. I feel kinda bittersweet. And finishing off with a blast kinda makes it even worse to leave. As for the last day before christmas there is a big happy hour with a lot of free food and alcohol. Talking to all the ppl I've worked with over the years makes me wish it would not be like this. I already miss them. Its like having to say goodbye to a good friend. I guess I'll stop. It will only make it worse.

Smiling legendary golden boy #3 says:

HEY LETS PUT OUR INTERNAL GEMS IN THIS PROTECTED GEM SERVICE IT’LL BE GREAT :)

HEY EVERYONE SIGN UP FOR THIS NEW SERVICE! YOU GOTTA OR YOU WONT BE ABLE TO DEV! :)

HEY SO I COPIED THE INTERNAL GEM I WROTE INTO THE MONOLITH REPO INSTEAD OF USING THE SERVICE BECAUSE IM A FUCKING GENIUS :)

YOU WANNA USE IT IN YOUR PROJECT? HAHA GET FUCKED :)

jfc