I hate what AI has done to developers, man.

I was discussing something a couple of days ago while my colleague was sharing his screen. He (Android/Flutter developer asked for my help for something custom in the iOS build) And while we were discussing it, he went to ChatGPT.

He wrote a bad prompt using wrong terms (for example how tabbar in ios is a different thing than android), i told him he was wrong and what the solution is, he didn't listen and went to try out what the AI said, made a bunch of errors, the proceeded to copy the errors to chatgpt wasting so much time.

AI to some developers is like tiktok to kids.

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.

Just saw this in an email about 1password:

Automated system restarts. You can automatically enforce restarts on employees’ devices to ensure updates install successfully.
We are adding support for the MSI command-line option /norestart for situations where automated system restarts are not desired.
If system restarts are enforced, we recommend scheduling deployments during off-hours to minimize disruptions.

If my PC restarts without me asking I'm going to smack a bitch (windows does it enough already)

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.

Took a chance at telling my bosses how burned out I am and had a really great discussion with them.

Turns out they want me to lead the front end team, because I'm good at it and can make them do higher quality work. Agreed with me that there's something wrong with the code if you have to use a different IDE lmao.

And I can use my 30+ days of sick leave (which I've never used because I don't get sick) to take time off when I need to. Burn out is a disease.

Not all bosses are shitty.

Do you enjoy pain? Love being mistreated while paying $100 a year for it? Welcome to Apple Developer Enrollment!
You'd think for a company that claims to provide "seamless" experiences, their enrollment process would be super straightforward, but no, get ready to waste incredible time with generic error messages.
"Enrollment through the developer app is not possible for this account".
Great! Just great. My peasant app wasn't worthy of being on the almight App Store anyway. Forgive me for trying, my lord.

WTF.

First, they make you prove your existence with endless verifications. Need a D-U-N-S number? Good luck because it's a nightmare. Support? Barely helpful. And if anything goes wrong? Expect weeks of waiting with zero urgency from Apple.

And that $100? You pay it every single year, just to keep your apps measly alive. Meanwhile, Google charges a one-time $25. Fair? Not in Apple land.

And if they randomly decide your app has an issue? Boom, it'll be gone. No warning, no clear answers, just frustration.

So yeah, if you're a masochist who adores pain, jumping through hoops and paying for the privilege, Apple’s got you covered!

Usually I come here to share rants/negativity but this time I wanna share an happy moment I had yesterday as a programmer.

In lots of instances I struggled to work on personal projects: I feel the desire to code cool stuff but I've often self-sabotaged myself by doing stuff like:

- self-enforcing "one man agile methodologies" with tasks, issue boards and lately time tracking
- forcing myself to do long study/research periods about the language/technologies I wanna use before writing the first line of code (and when I was able to actually end my research and get to code most of the stuff I researched was forgotten since cramming information is not effective on the long run)
- forcing myself to stick with all the "best practices" under the sun and to setup countless tools (linters, CI, unit testing...) before even getting a working POC

Usually all these stupid self imposed rules ended up in me procrastinating or pushing trough stuff struggling with headache after headache when coding actually used to feel a mostly fun pursuit to me.

Took lots of time to recognize this monster I created into my head but finally yesterday I did and I gave myself permission to:

- Start programming with just the very basics of the language (while reading a book on said language on the side at a relaxed pace, I can always come back later to improve my code as I learn more)
- Add stuff (unit testing, complex frameworks, CI/CD...) only when I need it
- Do a very basic planning (like a text files listing "must have" features and "nice to have features") and avoid issue boards and stuff, I'm working on a hobby project not on a company or a big OSS projects

It's been so long since the last time I had a programming session where I spent most time actually writing code and not researching and overthinking stuff and it felt great.

TL;DR : I did not read the fucking manual.

Story :

We have a particular kind of setup with Blazor Server-side. And it does not use any SQL, bbut calls APIs.

The class to call APIs was scoped to create one new HTTP connection per new tab (even if the user opens a new tab, it's a new HttpClient).

We were fine. I read that we have 65k ports and disposal takes around 2 minutes, and we have around 1000 users. So it went into the "backlog, where things go to die."

Hard core duiscovery in the past 2 days.

Azure service plan for webapps only allows you 128 outbound connections!

System, we reboot it manually every 4 hours, while I'm working to make HttpClient unique lol

I just needed a break and vent. And "Hey kids, know that Azure service plan is only 128 sockets, not 65536."

so here’s the tea.

i’m a Chinese dev working in a Japanese company. they’ve got this decently sized project a full web app and backend stack and yeah, I’m handling both ends. full-stack life. not a problem. I’ve seen worse.

but the maturity level in this place? the passive-aggressiveness? is different level. have you ever worked somewhere where your coworkers act all sweet on the surface, but lowkey make it feel like everything is your fault in the most obvious way possible?

so here comes the fun part.

the Stripe exchange rate endpoint we were using? deprecated. not globally — just regionally in Japan.

i did my homework. contacted Stripe support. got the chats, screenshots, docs, confirmations, evidence, not .........vibes.

solution? easy. i integrated a third-party API that returns the same exchange rate data. built a cron job to pull and cache the values daily. stored it locally. frontend grabs the user’s currency via IP, backend returns the rate, no stress, no wasted API calls. boom. problem solved.

my manager? totally got it. said it was efficient.
but the founder? man acted like a toddler.

he flipped. said it was my fault.
told me i just "no communicate well...uh...very confuse..." like bro… what even? do I look like I own stripe or do I look like I secretly working for them? plus, i explain in full, still not understand.

he got heated in meeting, so I clapped back in the meeting: you want to argue all day and get nothing done? or you want to understand what’s going on, and let me go back to building stuff that actually works? pick one.

he didn’t like that.
pretty sure he’s shopping for my replacement now. well, doesn’t take a genius to see it.

but I’m not here to babysit egos. I’ll do my job clean, document everything, and keep it professional. meanwhile yeah, I’ve already started looking for something else.

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.

The industry is so incredibly demanding beyond measure.

Please be proficient in:
- Java, C#, Python, TypeScript, ReactJS, AI, UX, COBOL, AWS, DevOps, security, SecOps, Linux, Unix, System Administration, Database Administration,...

Yeah? Give me six years then before you try to overload me with stress in having to deliver top quality code using these.

I actively try to diminish stress in my life and the major cause of stress is my job.

We had a series S Xbox. Somebody left a drink too close and I think it spilled inside. The series S no longer functions. My son has been bugging me for a few months to fix it. He is gone this week for a competition.

Last night I went to walmart at around 6pm. All the weirdos were already there. (so was I, what does that say?) Got heckled in the parking by some randos in a car. (honestly have no idea what they said because lazy asses don't even try to speak anything but inner city garbage) I looked toward them and looked away. Fuck that noise. Shit heads keep showing up in my town. (thanks California, you are leaking)

Anyway I get a series X and brought it home. I set it up where the older one was. Am not going to say a word. I named it: "Dad's XBox". Gonna see what the kids say when they all get back. I stood it on end so nobody can spill anything into it.

Looked through gamepass. Not that great a selection IMO. Noticed Starfield is there. It sucked so bad it will probably always be on gamepass. Trying to recoup lost revenue. I might try and see just how bad it is. I dunno. Would rather play a TES game. Gonna try Outer Worlds I think.

I think the charcoal series X actually looks cool. Seems to have cool features too. Like you can play a game on there on your phone or some shit. I think steam has that too. Wild.

I am not a particularly vengeful one, but today I was, and everyday onwards I'll be turning it up a notch on recurrence. WTF is Kobenz talking about? Well, let me fill you in. For the worst part of 7 months I've been having my already fucked up hearing beaten to a pulp by the neighboring apartment's renovation works, sounds that would often balloon over 120dB, continuously. Last week the actual owner finally moved into their apartment and the sounds had stopped. Of course, i had spent every minute of my blight concocting vengeful schemes to get even. But while I was so full of think hatred and maliciousness, I, of course, let it all got. As i said, not a particularly vengeful individual, that I am not. Until yesterday that is, when the whole reformation crew was back here at 8am, banging my ears with those awful noises... So today, i woke up at 4am, set up my blender and my speakers, waited until 6am sharp and turned it all on, ALL of it. If today I hear even so much as a wisp of that deranged reformation noise, tomorrow at 5am I'll do it all over again. And every day from now on, I'll rinse and repeat it an hour earlier than before, speakers cranked up a notch above their previous noise, the blender running half hour longer than its previous running time and I'll add a new source of noise every single FUCKING DAY!

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.

Another unfriendly chat bot on a paid landingpage supposed to acquire new customers in 2025:

Chatbot: Do you require support with existing products or are you looking to renew/purchase services?
User: do you offer vserver plans
Chatbot: Sorry. To best assist you, please select one of the options below.
User: thats not the way to acquire new customers
Chatbot: Sorry. To best assist you, please select one of the options below.