time traveler: *steps on a bug*
changes to our world:
- C has python syntax based on indentation and has no curly braces
- mario has fall damage
- tetris is called triris and uses blocks of three squares rather than four
- the word "disk" doesn't exist, everything is "disc"
- every device uses a new version of mSATA instead of usb type c
- screens are 3:2 instead of 16:9
- javascript name wasn't adopted, the language was called lifescript instead, as originally intended. because of it, it didn't secure funding when it most needed it, so it never caught on. instead, microsoft bought macromedia, and every site is written with Microsoft Flash. CSS has XML syntax.
- steve jobs didn't rely on alternative medicine, so he succesfully beat cancer. because of him, every phone has the size of iPhone 4s, but bezels are tiny. everything that's bigger is called phablet, and big phones are not a thing. instead, web is "smaller" in size, every ui is more compact.
- wimax caught on and won the 4g war. 5g is called wimax 2.0.
- microsoft had more time to complete vista, and hardware manufacturers had more time to make faster chips. when vista came out, it wasn't buggy and was very fast. it acquired cult status like xp. because of it, windows 8 still had frutiger aero design.

A day in my life. This morning Dell was doing it's update on my laptop before I left for work, so later when I knew my wife was up I asked her via text to shut my laptop off.

W: "You left your laptop on this morning."
Me: "I know, it was still doing an update this morning. I sent you a text."
W: "Leaving your computer on all day is going to burn it up."
Me: "Its 8:30, been maybe a half hour isn't a day."
W: "Still wasting electricity. How do I turn this thing off?"
Me: "It's just like yours."
W: "No, your computer is way different than mine. Just tell me how to turn it off"
Me: "My computer is running Windows 11, yours is Windows 10, shutting down is exactly the same"
W: "I don't understand, yours looks completely different. Stop being an ass and just tell me"
Me: "Select Start, then shut down"
W: "Select what? There isn't anything that says Start"
Me: "Sorry, click the little icon in the bottom left. Looks like four little blue squares. That's the Windows Start menu button, just like yours."
W: "OK, now what?"
Me: "Shut down"
W: "Shut down what? I don't see anything"
Me: "The icon that looks like power button next to my name"
W: "There is nothing next to your name except your picture"
Me: "It'll be on the right hand side"
W: "Where the clock is?"
Me: "No, on the Start menu, where you see my picture, there should be a button to turn it off."
W: "No, it went away"
Me: "What do you mean went away?"
W: "All that disappeared when you told me to click over by the clock."
Me: "I didn't say to click on the clock, anyway, doesn't matter. Start over, select the icon in the bottom left"
W: "You're not listening. There is nothing there when I click that. You're such as ass. You cannot even tell me how to turn off this stupid computer. I'm busy, you can turn this thing off when you get home."
<a few minutes later I text my daughter>
Me: "Baby girl, can you turn off my computer?"
<10 seconds later>
H: "Done. Anything else?"
Me: "Nope. Thank you."

I have almost 8 years of experience, am currently a tech lead in the company im at (a big known music and video streaming platform), i live and breathe tech...

and someone i interviewed for (in a 4 year old fintech startup) wants to put me in a mid level position because he "felt i lacked depth". apart from his feelings he failed to make me understand how I'm not senior enough for him.

so how do i become deep? what is this depth he speaks of?

Ed is responsible for servers in the IT department at work. He is an electrical that does a lot of electronic/electrical design work. So IT concerns are not as high as his design work. Today we had a server fail due to aging hardware. We have another guy that handles IT stuff for Ed. So I went to the IT guy and said:

So I understand the server has Electronic Dysfunction. Is Ed having trouble keeping his server up?

I just had a post-shower thought… If you went even just one year into the past and openly told your boss that you used an AI tool to write user stories, documentation, or code, you would've been scolded for skirting your responsibilities or "cheating." Some companies even had strict policies against using AI, and some still do.

Fast forward to today: if you tell your boss you used an AI tool, you're praised for efficiency and streamlining your workflow.

Just an interesting dichotomy between the two mindsets, and such a quick switchover.too. Even the stuffiest "non-tech" companies are openly encouraging the use of AI in your day-to-day nowadays, whether it be for writing code building presentations. As long as the work is good, they pat you on the back.

As somebody who likes automating stuff, I love to see it. But as a future slave to our future robot overlords, there still needs to be a place for us flesh bags.

There is nothing easier than running an insurance company in the US of A. When a big request comes in from a client in distress that got into a terrible accident that is definitely covered by their (very expensive) plan, you just go to the data bank like Equifax and see if they're still rich enough to win a lawsuit against you should you refuse to pay.

For those of you who don't know what a data bank is: data banks are companies that buy/scrape/suck in every last bit of data they can about every person in the country, and then resell it through their fancy UI with all the convenient features and metrics.

So, Umbrella Insurance Co. goes to Equifax and asks whether Joe Schmoe's accident is severe and life-ruining enough that they won't be able to sue us. Exuifax says: let's see... Joe's Revolut©™ account has the grand total of $80.12, with $7,382.25 recently spent on medical bills. Joe's WhatsApp©™ (a Meta©™ company) classifies their recent messages as "desperate". Joe's iPhone©™ Screen Time©™ is increased, and Joe is doomscrolling a lot, especially on The Washington Post©™ (a Jeff Bezos company). All signs show that if you don't pay them, they won't be able to out-sue you. That would be $0.12, thanks!

As a person who is no one in particular that may or may not have been a US of A's supreme court judge once said, "sometimes it's not about justice, but about making the sucker spend all their money".

Dark Humor

Lets try some seriously dark dark humor. Lets find what lurks in the hearts of men.

My Kid: I was adopted.
Me: We wouldn't have picked you.

Oedipus: <whilst banging his wife> You remind me of my mom.

What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair?
Rollaids

What did Christa McAuliffe say to her husband before the launch?
You feed the dog, I will feed the fish.

Some I found from searching web:

What's worse than a baby in a dumpster?
A baby in 2 dumpsters.

If we had mosquito nets in Africa we could save millions of mosquitos from getting AIDS.

Down syndrome in military is called special forces.

Mom told me to eat my vegetables, now where do I put the wheelchairs.

Whoever thought white men can't jump obviously never watched the 9/11 footage.

Trying to get flex container overflow to scroll is like funking pulling teeth. I've worked with flex containers for 5+ years straight and it still makes me want to kill myself.

Here's the tools you need to make a flex container scroll. God help you if it's nested more than 2-3 containers from the root. You apply these randomly until you see the scroll bar in the correct place.

min-height: 0px;
min-height: min-content;
overflow: auto;
overflow: hidden;
display: flex;
flex: 1;

(Real pro tip: you can place a "dummy" element inside the container you wish to make scroll. The dummy element should be a huge size, like 10k pixels. This allows you to see what containers up the DOM tree are still not correct (any container that is 10,000px is WRONG. Work your way down the DOM tree and fix fix fix))

So there is this discussion about killing children in code. Someone pops in with this:
"I do remember a post from a guy who actually got pulled into an HR talk, to ask why he'd littered the code with references to killing children and removing children from their parents. Imagine trying to explain to a person who's never programmed, that Kill(parent.child)is a perfectly standard phrasing and not a latent psychosis that should be reported to the police."

First I think who is the idiot that reported this? Then I think who is the HR idiot that didn't do a google search or talk to the software manager? So many people had to fail at basic thinking for this to get this far.

Then I think also. Two things can be true at the same time. The person writing this code could also harbor latent desires to kill children. But can hide their sickness in plain sight. CS could just be a place for psychopaths to talk about the true serial killer thoughts.

I was wondering what this would look like. Maybe the psycho programmer will allocate extra hidden children that will get created and destroyed without anyone knowing the better. Maybe they only need 10 children for the code, but they allocate 100. That is 90 children they can create and destroy that only they know about.

Is balancing a tree really about cycles to read the data? Or is this some sort of karma balancing with latent desires to add or remove children with different karma leanings? Linked lists? Obviously only a psychopath would make a singly linked list.

Then I read posts on devrant and think there is probably at least one psychopath here that looks up to Anakin. We know you are here! You can't hide forever.

How is MSSQL so popular? "Oh yeah, sometimes you have to use dynamic SQL because the compiler doesn't correctly detect the impact of DDL commands and rejects working code" god fucking what? Why does the compiler infer the future structure of tables after a DDL command if it can't do so reliably? In my world, if it becomes public knowledge that a compiler incorrectly infers something, the maintainer scrambles to remove the inference instead.

I also find it surreal that I have to disengage versioning on a table in order to be able to modify the version history. Like surely, there should be a mechanism to temporarily skip the hooks other than ALTERing the table into a regular unversioned database table and then ALTERing it back, rebuilding the versioning infrastructure from scratch. SQL is awful and MSSQL is doubly awful.

I'm developing a board game and it’s so much fun to come up with structures and logic to implement the rules of the game and make it in a way that is clever and doesn’t require a lot of repetition and explicit definitions which would increase the probability to introduce bugs and make future changes tedious.

This is what I love about programming. The pure joy of thinking about those problems and solving them.
I'd never want to delegate this task to an AI even if I'd be convinced that it would do a good job.

We're so back guys! Someone starred my truthchain repo - at this point I'm sure we'll kick X (twitter) out of business! There's only like 90% of the features unsafe and broken and every release has a major flaw and is broken and requires extra bs to work, but it's fine at 0.1.6, imagine someone actually contributed or makes a comment - I would immediately quit my job and dedicate full time (not). 😅

Let’s say you’re an upper-middle class US of A citizen, sitting at $950,000 net worth. You commit huge wire fraud. But instead of going to prison, you get a $50,000 fine. Isn’t that a slap on the wrist?

Yet this is exactly what Goldman Sachs got away with in 2016 (95B market cap, 5B settlement).

Isn’t it neat that those who are too big to fail are always too big to obey the law? Rules for thee and not for me.

Real rant.

If you downvote, go get cancer faggot.

I make $1,370.26 (200k yen) a month after taxes and rent. That's only if I overtime 40 hours a month extra, otherwise it becomes $959.27 (140k yen). I save and save, but a single trip breaks bank.

$2,740.36 bonus twice a year. (June and December)

Has a health insurance. In Japan. 27 y/o male. 1 wife and 2 kids.

Do I quit and look for better paying company/country or stay? ($5 a month pay raise if I stay)

Totally getting dominated by spam. Not that it's a surprise and I predicted two weeks ago: https://devrant.com/rants/18085133/...

But nobody wants to use the dr.molodetz.nl proxy that I wanted to enhance with anti spam futures. Just a few migrated to Snek.

Well, fuck you all, you guys don't diserve any of the effort.

Sincerely, retoor.

@buffon you'll still lose the spam war on my site when I'm home, but this site, good luck with it.

This community is not dead, the users are, and I'm not talking about the bots.

Yes, I had the opportunity to buy any mouse in the world, but I picked a weird apple one with one physical button acting as two separate buttons, a trackball for scroll wheel (it's neat to scroll horizontally though, not gonna lie), virtual middle button, virtual squeeze sensor and a tiny internal speaker. Yes, I'm an idiot.

But hear me out. When I was a child, I accidentally wandered into an apple store. I was blown away by what their UIs looked like (it was a Leopard era, maybe Tiger, I'm not sure). I still remember how I approached a desk where an iMac stood, and this was the mouse it came with. This. This very mouse was my first experience with apple. and oh boy, how memorable it was, and how much I wanted a macbook of my own.

Apple still means a lot to me. It's so unfortunate that their privacy approach went real bad real fast. Somehow when people say that nintendo, which is a shitty anti-consumer company, means a lot to them, it's suddenly okay, because that shitty anti-consumer company is based in japan. mark my words, if apple was a japanese company, it would've been much worse, but it wouldn't have been hated as much.

I now possess my childhood dream, or at least its fragment: the best mouse that apple ever made. it feels comfy and substantial. modern flat magic mouse is a disgrace. if you're still an apple user (my condolences), buy a mighty mouse on ebay. wireless ones do exist, they take regular batteries.

Oh, and this mouse works perfectly with Debian out of the box. If you pair it with a Mac, you can see probably the oldest bit of UI that's still in modern os --- the mighty mouse settings panel. It's there, unchanged since the 2000s.

I made a bad design decision on the DB level, I made 1 NON-NULL column so i can avoid 2 NULLABLE columns
Small thing, but over a couple of years it's now bed-rock code and Projects, Services, API layers, all have to deal with "Am I a URL or an EntityID?", n on-demand derivation across Projects (or even param-passing) has started to birth bugs T__T
If it were something small like a log I'd ignore, but it's core to how content is stored n entire analytics is tied to it

It's theoretically an easy fix, BUT IT'S SO DAMN TEDIOUS. I've to make a LOT of things to live together and migrate some data, if even 1 portion is messy, there'll be silent failures (:
I've been putting it off for a week now coz my mind actively avoids doing it. Kill me

we were in space. we failed our mission in this rust bucket of a ship. we were the last of humanity. surprised the thing was holding the oxygen in from space at all. we didn't even have power for lights inside the rust bucket

and there was this thing... we did something to it but it failed, we needed it for some mission but our plan went wrong... and we had 2-3 hours of oxygen left. it was impaled on a rusty sharp section of a half broken wall. right down the middle. of its mangled human body if you could call it that. it had melting skin, dripping blood and melting cartilage. in this rust bucket, of high heat and humidity, and you could smell its melting flesh like you bit your own lip and singed it somehow at the same time. like burnt meat, cartilage on the BBQ but with fresh irony blood, the taste of the flesh of your lip. and it noticed me and started tearing itself along the rusty wall segment that was serrated... moving fast and terrifying. it was hungry. it was angry. it had nothing else on its mind, and no possibility of anything else. livid

can't even enjoy suffocating to death for 2-3 hours in peace

one thing to have dreams of dying but come on. can't even die in peace now!

It's so funny sometimes to tell americans facts about their country that completely demolish the whole "America is a free country" bullshit.

Once upon a time, there was a guy that took his car in for service. Then, maybe he was creeped out by the people there, or by something else, but he felt like something was fishy. Lo and behold, when he went back home and inspected his car, he found a weird little box retrofitted where it can't be immediately spotted. He figured out that it was some kind of a tracker, so he removed it, and you know what happened next? I kid you not, he got IN TROUBLE for TAMPERING WITH GOVERNMENT PROPERTY!

If you're a US citizen, you're not allowed resentment. You're not allowed to resist oppresive measures like whatever the fuck happened to that guy.

The US of A is not a free country. It used to be, but it became a police state at exactly 8:46:40 on September 11, 2001.

It's so sad that some of you go on and on and on about their gun rights, but when it's time to use them for the purpose stated in the second amendment ("A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state"), they do nothing.

TIL empathy I've always had is auras

I am an idiot

ok time for a crazy story

so I've been sick 3 years. when I got sick I went to the hospital and I couldn't explain to the doctor what my issue was in a way he would understand. I hadn't slept in 2 weeks and couldn't, and it had all started with a weird headache (which was neither a migraine because I had those before, and my BF thought maybe it was a stroke but the doctor said no it was a migraine even tho migraines do not feel like that). one of the things the doctor couldn't seem to comprehend is how I said I didn't have "space" in my head anymore. he just totally ignored that. I kept coming back to the hospital and trying to all the different people. I was confused, exhausted, had to keep pacing or i felt myself fading out, felt my "consciousness" nearly going "lights out" all the time (like a shade was being closed on my eyes). had weird electrolyte misbalance issues which made me pee out a lot of water and then the consciousness lights out feeling would modulate. my resting heart rate was 110 whereas before I couldn't even get it over 80 exercising lol, not to mention I always had conscious control over it and yet here I didn't -- nurses tried to get me to meditate and it wouldn't work! I also had to say all my thoughts out loud and couldn't think in my own head. my whole world became "flat". prior to this I thought in spatialness -- I could generate and simulate 3d+ dimensions in my head, like dreamscapes, I could simulate visuals, textures, sounds, smells, even turns out mix foods I've had or invent totally new tastes from aspects of foods I knew existed. apparently not everyone can do this (I didn't know at the time). I also could simulate empathy in there and other more complex stuff. I lost all that. strangely I couldn't empathy feel IRL people's emotions anymore either (which was always trivial for me before, it was harder for me not to). nor could I understand what they were saying to me anymore. I could see them LITERALLY say it but I couldn't understand. it was weird. I didn't know it at the time and it only occurred to me weeks later that I was "alone" (disconnected I just realized). I have NEVER felt alone in my life before. now I understand

about 9 months ago I started getting my intuition back. so I can ask in my head for advice and a voice will aswer or sensate nudge me in a direction. this inspired me to look into witches, since I was sick and witches do herbs and stuff. why not. everybody kept saying psychosomatic. well magic-type shit is psychosomatic, clearly? if it works it works. I ain't gonna question it

I started practicing it and etc but didn't really get it. but now I am understanding so much

so the whole reason why that doctor didn't understand is because all of those abilities come from the soul... my whole life I've been empathetic and mind-reading. I can even read someone's intentions and thoughts from their texts. and this isn't like projection-stuff (though now I understand better how that works also... which I never could before. I studied psychology for a bit after a bad job situation but projection had never made sense to me)

you can hear words and not see the mental images associated with them. this means you're disconnected from your mental plane, ignoring it, maybe because it's fucked up which was the case with me. I have absolutely no clue what the fuck rammed me. but I've been meditating and fixing my soul-realms (etheric, astral, mental... and I regained access to the casual! now I understand why people acted confused when I could tell the future! cuz they can't hear the casual realm yet!)

and I was looking into reiki healing. everybody seems to have the opinion that you could just send "healing energy". while true this is immensely exhausting. apparently reiki is literally "rei" the god-consciousness of life (like spanky) moves "ki" which is energy. so you connect to rei, figure it out, and suddenly you can channel rei... sounds cool

as I was listening to a chick describe reiki and reiki concerns... I fucking figured out how empathy works. and why my life's been fucked. d'oh. this magic shit solves everything