This is a message to all “yes man” developers:

Yeah… we just got in that the client has new requirements for you to complete by EOD:

1. Go to the gas station
2. Buy two gallons of gasoline
3. Order two 2 ft long dildos online
4. Go to the center of your town
5. Scream “fuck me corporate daddy, I’ll do anything for you” 100 times
6. Shove one dildo into ur ass and one in your mouth
7. Pour gasoline all over yourself
8. Light yourself on fire
9. Contemplate what little self respect you have for yourself and the rest of the world…

why is it everybody wants to hire a head of a department all the time

like that's just super weird to me

wouldn't it make more sense to hire someone into a lower position, have them learn from head of a department, then get promoted because you know they'll head the department to your standards then?

but most posts want you to already be head of a department... and it's like, I don't know your department. what the hell happened to the last head of department? why do so many people need heads of department? why the hell are they choosing to get them from outside the company?

somehow none of this makes any sense to me
like I'm literally just so confused why people hire seniors and expect them to automatically know the way the company does things
it just literally doesn't make sense

promote your underlings? then hire more underlings to sus them out?
WHY ARE YOU HIRING SENIOR STAFF FROM OUTSIDE YOUR COMPANY, LITERALLY NOBODIES, AND GIVING THEM TONS OF AUTONOMY AND CONTROL OVER OTHERS IN YOUR COMPANY, THATS SO CONFUSING

worse yet I hear most people just lie when they apply so it's like... are you rotating irresponsible lying people through senior positions at your company over and over again, as they attrition your underlings and eventually get fired for incompetence?

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THIS ECOSYSTEM

This is one of the coolest shader tutorials I have seen.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

It simply walks you through start to finish enhancing a weapon. I also found it can also be applied to 2D games as well. What I don't like is it is not setup to be generic. I will have to figure out how to make it be a weapon effect you can apply. I think having weapons provide a mask for where the shaders should be applied would make that possible. Then the generic effects can be applied to the weapons or removed. No need to have unique weapons of every type and for every effect.

This is the kind of tutorials that really get me going. When thinking of 2D I had not really thought about using shaders like this.

I'M GONNA KILL THIS MAC

what the FUCK!!!???!!!??? IT WORKED YESTERDAY!!!!

Now the whole iOS build pipeline fails again complaining smth about distribution profiles. Then about certificates. And then it starts using a completely unrelated certificate and complaining that provisioning profile does not include it...

what the f...

IT FUCKING WORKED YESTERDAY!!!!!!

Been looking into 2D maps for a game. I am learning how to use tools that do autotiling. I want to have generated worlds for terrain. It is interesting how the scope of what you are learning starts expanding rapidly and can overwhelm you. I started wanting to learn autotiling. This went from that to autogen, to modifying terrain, to how to store generated terrain, to how to store difference between autogen and player modified, to how to separate things into chunks, to how to store a whole world worth of data! Like dude, chill. Just learn how to use autotiling first. Then learn how autogen, then learn how to efficiently chunk things,. Also the 2d data won't be big so just store the data you genned so if modified. The worlds don't have to be ultra huge. Really stop freaking out what it could be and see what it is. JUST FUCKING ITERATE!

It is wild to watch yourself get featuritus without learning how to crawl fist. Just divide and conquer.

Anti-features need to be fought with fire (metaphorically speaking).

This means they must be eliminated, not just made optional.

Why? Because an optional anti-feature is just one step away from a mandatory anti-feature.

For example, "secure" booting: https://youtu.be/vvaWrmS3Vg4?t=750 (Jody Bruchon)

Another example are disguised remote kill switches, such as add-on signing ( https://digdeeper.club/articles/... ). It started as optional and people were able to opt out, and everyone accepted it because no one expected what would come next.
All that was left was removing the ability to opt out, and then Mozilla has control over which extensions users are allowed to use.

For years, this feature sat dormant and users did not know of its existence. But in early May 2019, the metaphorical thread snapped and an expired certificate remotely disabled all extensions, wasting millions of man-hours of productivity.

From the digdeeper.club article:

"The funny thing is, the whole point of the extension prison was allegedly to increase security - and yet today, all security addons got disabled because of it! Shows how freedom always has to trump over security or it ends up in a disaster like this."

Evil needs to be nipped in the bud before it can flourish.

90% of work as a developer is not development,
it's guesswork and communication, trying to make sense of requirements and third-party software documentation or filling in the blanks if both are missing.

To be honest, Windows Vista looks undeniably beautiful, no matter how unpopular it might was.

The user interface looked amazing. It looks decent even by today's standards. Windows XP looks more like a toy with its over-saturated colours, but Windows Vista appears elegant.

The stock wallpaper of Vista, "Aurora", is among the most beautiful out-of-the-box wallpapers I have seen.

Remember, Windows 7, arguably the most popular version of Windows, is a rebranding for a slightly altered Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Microsoft realized the reputation of the "Vista" trademark was ruined beyond repair, so they had to rebrand.

Image source: https://reddit.com/r/WindowsVista/... ( https://i.redd.it/dr4vqiqqi0q81.png ).

Also see: "Was Windows Vista THAT bad?" - Linus Tech Tips ( https://youtube.com/watch/... )

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

About 95% of developer jobs in my country are unevenly split between the administrative and commercial capitals, with an overwhelming majority favouring the commercial capital. I live in the administrative one. Any dev jobs outside both states pay a fraction of what is tenable

Not having much luck with my search, I reluctantly applied for this php role advertised in one of the other states. I wasn't even expecting them to write back cuz the pay is piss poor. it's on site, about 400km away. For some context the salary is 120k but the tfare to and from there is in the neighbourhood of 70 grand

Anyway, the employer wrote back to me on WhatsApp, sending a full stack sample project for me to complete in 36 hours, which frankly, I found pitiful and absurd. Call me entitled, Arrogant, etc. But I didn't anticipate a cv and github like mine, from a company requiring relocation from the capital for a paltry retainer, would demand I complete a sample project. For 120k ffs. I was already making more than that years ago when our inflation hadn't ballooned 30x over

I haven't been able to bring myself to start the project. Not like I know much else to do with my life, I just slipped into a catatonic state shortly after reading it. EVERYBODY I started software with a decade ago, is either outside the country now or earning too much fx to bother with departure. I'm not envious of them, just asking for something decent to get by or not live in penury. Comfortable enough to afford basics without breaking the bank

Shortly after leaving my last workplace, I made a dark joke that: the best ones who leave, get better jobs. The average ones are either retained or land similarly mediocre positions. But the truly incompetent employees wind up in the village, farming

One detail I left out is that this sample project guy is located in the same state as my hometown. In a sense, I made a self fulfilling prophecy

He's going to request I turn in my solution tomorrow but I might just come clean about his sample project catching me off guard. I did an assessment this morning for a coy advertising a senior developer role. 4 segments, not one single one technical /code. Just boring shits about OCEAN, time management, communication. I checked my results when I was done and saw I'd done a previous test with these same guys 5 months ago. I shockingly aced the topics back then but didn't get hired anyway

This time around, almost none of the scores ramped above 50

Having a hard time thinking the alternates to if statements is a good idea. I was genuinely curious how this was done. The examples I am finding seem to just spread the logic everywhere across multiple objects. To me this makes the logic objectively less clear. I didn't understand the obsession with objects until I saw the examples that creates a fuckton of boiler plate objects. How someone can say this is preferred over a few if statements boggles my mind. I actually am trying to understand the functional mindset as well. It is not going well for me. I can sorta see some value in using a map. Technically a lookup could be faster. But again it spreads the code all around adding more boilerplate.

https://blog.bitsrc.io/reduce-if-el...

https://dev.to/phouchens/...

Is it because these are contrived examples? I initially searched to find ways of reducing ifs in a functional approach. I did find it in the second example. I was however hoping to find that by lazy eval or something. I see people making references to how one you "get it" functional logic is easier to understand and evaluate. I cannot tell if this is straight up gaslighting or my brain is just too fucking imperative.

When teammates mostly work a lot of overtime and doing it becomes an expectation, time to run

Testing rants with images.

Should be fixed now.

when in doubt,
write everything manually,
because even if a package exists,
it's so old and outdated,
it's not even worth fixing all the errors,
so you may as well,
grow your own APIs

it'll be faster!

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Just submitted my first app to the Microsoft Store 🎉🎉

It's a simple offline password manager that also accepts other formats of data such as credit card and personal info.

Made it using WinUI 3. To prevent you from forgetting your master password, each "locker" accepts an unlimited number of passwords. If you forgot one, you can just use a different one. This is my idea to make offline password managers a little less of a hassle.

Can't wait for approval from the store!

The only person responsible for the server maintenance has put in his resignation period in.

The other person that has access to the servers does not know the difference between production & lab.

Fun times ahead

So.. Google Analytics is not working..

Again..

Every time I see this my heart starts beating like crazy, I'm filled with joy and hope and I feel like living my life right. Like in the Christmas morning.

Usually, this feeling lasts until I click on the notification. After clicking on it all these feelings are usually replaced with despair, frustration and sometimes even anger.

How is it possible that nextjs developers could build a much more sophisticated web platforms than i do, much faster much more rapidly and easily and ship it to production for almost no costs, not even using any devops pipeline, unit or untegration testing, while i do all of that + devops and it costs me to pay for servers on aws?????

Literally what a nextjs developer can build in 1 month it would take me at least 3-4 months

From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.

They say that runing the same command over and over again is a sign of insanity.

LIKE HELL IT IS!!!

I've been running `terraform apply` for the last hour (trying to dump an EKS token in plain-text, because my k8s-related providers failed to auth to the cluster), and miraculously the problem went away. Now the error is no more.

Insanity?

I beg to differ!

Narf!

man, SCRUM is a FUCKING chord, sometimes. Isn’t it supposed to make us productive and not hog time and resources?

Why do some devs who work for corpos have a superiority complex?

“Oh I cannot imagine working on a small team of 3 people (2 devs, 1 designer) on a website”, saying it like if he was disgusted. “The team I work in has 40 people”, with a hint of superiority in his voice.

Bro, chill for a moment, it ain’t a race to the top.

* Teams meeting, doing some early testing with the client *

Dev Team: This is an early build, so please be aware that bugs can occur at this stage. (That's why we didn't want to show it but you insisted)

Client: Sure, don't worry.

* 15 minutes later, first bug happens because some state management at the front end was not tunned yet *

Client: Can you solve this bug?

Dev Team: Sure, just let us replicate it and we come back to you as soon as...

Client: Can you solve it now?

Dev Team: ... Okay, let us ser whats happening and we will come ba...

Client: You don't need to hang up, just solve it.

*Dev Team internal chat*

Me: Fuck
Other dev: Fuck
My leader at the time: Fuuuuuck

PS: This happened in two separate occasions. I hated that project.

"Build an entire PoS system, from scratch, that will run in hundreds of airports around the world along with an accompanying back office. You have 6 weeks but 4 would be better"

Even for an agency this was an insane ask but they decided to only put myself, mid-level at the time, and a junior dev on the project.

Somehow we just about managed the deadline and the system has been up and running for almost 9 years now.

Been thinking about if I want voice acting in my games. Potentially it would be really expensive. So I wondered if there was AI libraries for training your own voices. There are a few and some even are trying to do it realtime. Or at least fast enough for web site use.

I find this library:
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Looks interesting, but I need training data. I found that you can license a limited number of words from voice actors. The licensing doesn't seem to care if how you use the data as long as it stays inside your production (video, game, etc). There are even some free ones out there. I think it might be kinda fun to learn how to do this.

Yes, there are a bunch of AI websites, but the voices almost always seem conversational. Not voices in a game setting. Most of those are stupid subscription bullshit. I also looked at text to speech and most of those are subscription. I really really hate the SaaS business model. I avoid companies that use it as much as I can.

Well this is interesting:
https://slate.com/technology/2024/...

Will be interesting to see what happens here. I knew there was a jack up on prices for accessories. Never imagined it would be a lawsuit. I wonder if there is any collusion by Apple and Google to keep other phone makers out of markets? It seems like most phones are either iPhone or Android based. Maybe that part is organic.

TL;DR; I need your advice regd. a new workhorse of a laptop and ARM/MS Surface10/Laptop6 for this purpose

So my hi-end dell XPS (9350) keeps annoying me with its screen flickering. And it's an 8 year old ultrabook with 16G of RAM that I'm using extensively for development, devops, researching and whatnot. 16GB RAM is also becoming...not enough for all of it.

So I'm passively looking for an upgrade. I like the 13" profile (ultrabook style) and battery life, so I'd like to stay away from gaming laptops.

There have been talks about ARM being the new thing. I always saw ARM as a consumer-grade CPU arch (browsing, movies, music, docs, etc.), but the internet says that the new MS Surface devices will have ARM/Qualcomm built in and can compete with MB Pro in terms of performance (ref.: https://windowscentral.com/hardware...) and they are allegedly released this spring.

I'm not much of a hardware person, I prefer staying on the logical level of things, so I want to ask you, people smarter than me, what do you think? Is it a feasible upgrade for an XPS13 (i7 Skylake/16G RAM/4k touch)? I'll be running code and image builds A LOT, using JetBrains IDEs and doing similar resource-intensive tasks. I don't care at all about GPUs - I don't use them (integrated graphics has always been sufficient).

What else should I consider?
Any alternatives?

P.S. while I can't stand Windows, I actually like MS's hardware. They are good at making it.

Today was a good day.

I was told to use in-house BitBucket runners for the pipelines. Turns out, they are LinuxShellRunners and do not support docker/containers.

I found a way to set up contained, set up all the dependencies and successfully run my CI tasks using dagger.io (w/o direct access to the runner -- only through CI definition yaml and Job logs in the BitBucket console).

Turns out, my endeavour triggered some alerts for the Infra folks.

I don't care. I'm OOO today. And I hacked their runners to do what I wanted them to do (but they weren't supposed to do any of it). All that w/o access to the runners themselves.

It was a good day :)))))
Now I'll pat myself on my back and go get a nice cup of tea for my EOD :)