Idea for a next gen image compression method:

* Put your image into a reverse AI image generator to get the prompt for that image.
* store the text string as the compressed image
* Put the text string into to AI image generator to get back your compressed image.

I was wondering if there are "employees" in scam call centers, who genuinely don‘t know that they are scamming the people who they call.
Maybe they get minimal information or are lied to and don‘t care enough to question it.

So I‘ve tried to google it. I‘m bad at googling and couldn‘t find anything. All the results were how to avoid or to spot scammers and similar things.
I tried searching in German and in English and I also tried Duckduckgo. No luck.

Then I asked ChatGPT and it basically said that it could be very well true and gave some examples and referenced some articles.
Of course I know that ChatGPT can‘t be trusted because all of it could be hallucinated.
So I asked for references. It gave me just one link, which lead me to a 404.

Maybe you can help me out on this topic?

The reason that I want to know is because I get a lot of those scam calls for years now and I started to mess around with the scammers.
But if they don‘t know, then maybe I should try to convince them that they are working for a scam "company".

A mandatory update (for security) for MS Outlook has just broken the badge indicator for new emails 🤡

I have a personal rating system for personalities of people.

On the very bottom of the list, which represents the most disgusting scum, I have those "people":

…
dictators like hitler
politicians
ad spammers
scammers

I never fell for a scam myself but I just can’t comprehend how someone can do it the whole day. You must be a very fucked up piece of shit to do such a thing.

The sad thing is that there are so many of them. This makes me lose hope for humanity.

Teams annoys me again by selecting the black skin tone for this emoji 💪🏿 no matter what I try to do to select another tone or the neutral yellow tone.
Now my colleagues must think of me that I want to send some message or something… damn it Teams!

I need to go to the freaking iOS Teams client to be able to post 💪. The other one is the bullshit electron desktop client.

I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

MS Teams sending an email to inform me about people which "are trying to reach me", one hour after I already talked with those people via Teams chat.
🤦‍♂️

Sounds weird without context:

How to fuck up a simple feature in terms of usability and functionality and take two freaking years (!) for it?
Just use some low code dogshit like the crap that SAP provides.

Fucking hell! Why can‘t I block notifications for a specific conversation thread for a limited amount of time in Teams? I get spammed with shit that I don‘t care about but when I block it now, I will forget to unblock it later. 😡

Another reminder to be be very cautious when you rely on services from MS or Google:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/...

(App Center is shutting down)

Dear fellow devranters

ostream has created his 3rd generation accounts, @godiebitch and @gofuckyourself

Can we please downvote him this time?
He will delete his accounts anyway in a few months but maybe we can reduce the spam that way.

And also try to convince him to get some help.

Programming

Inspired by this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/10314669/...

Not a kiki post 🙂

Pelmeni, the Russian dumplings cuisine, sold in Germany, have a big label on the packaging saying "Made in Latvia" since the war with Ukraine has begun.

I was thinking about what the correct term is for the "." symbol at the end of sentences. Is it dot, point or period?
Turns out it is period, but I also learned that in British English it’s called full stop, which I find very funny 😂. It sounds like something that one would scream in an emergency. FULL STOP!

Anyway, in German there is only one word for dot, point, period and full stop.

"with that said" is the most overused phrase in meetings.
Not sure if it‘s a just a German thing when we speak English.

Judging by the amount of bitcoin recovery ad spam here on devrant, there must be a huge amount of people somehow losing their bitcoins on a daily basis.
Thank god those altruistic scammers… *ahem* I mean hackers of course… are there to help.

"Let‘s make a service where the users can enter all of their secrets and sensitive data so that we can warn them if that data has been leaked elsewhere"

What could possibly go wrong?

How do you type with pairs of characters like () [] <> "" etc.?
Do you type them both, then move the cursor back and type the stuff inside or do you type the first of the pair, then type the stuff inside and then close it with the second of the pair?

I just realized I do both techniques, apparently randomly, which weirds me out.
Also my IDE often places the second character of the pair automatically.

Update on the API based game that I’m working on.

All of the game logic and API is mostly done.

Here is a gif which shows a few turns with a very simple "AI" vs a passive bot.

I’m bad at graphics so a went for a more abstract UI:
The arrows represent the looking direction of the units and the black dots represent the direction of the shots being fired at a particular turn. Units can look and move and shoot in different directions in one turn.

https://devrant.com/rants/10176221/...

Currently working on a game for developers.
Two players compete on a randomly generated arena by sending instructions via a REST API such as "unit x move in the up direction and shoot to the right". So units can be controlled by manual user interaction but the idea is that the players create a smart program that controls the units automatically. So it’s about who can implement the best "bot".

The game is turn based and the units can move one grid cell per turn and shoot in one of the four directions. Shots require energy which regenerates a certain amount per turn.
Units can also look in a direction to spot enemy units which are not visible by default.
The winner is who manages to destroy all enemy units or the main stationary enemy unit "the gem" (diamond shape in the screenshot).
There are walls which block the movement, the line of sight and the shots (green cells).

Everything is randomized. The size of the arena, the number of units, max hp, max energy, etc. But it can be replayed by providing a seed.

There will be a website which lists all games, so that players can watch them.
Alternatively a player can also implement an own viewer. Everything necessary is provided by the REST API.

I’m curious about what you think 😄

!rant
Just tried Vapor (server side Swift) for a web api project and expected to be troubleshooting a lot but it was super easy and worked out of the box. Even openapi/swagger generation.
Now I‘m exited to build a fullstack project with native and web clients, completely in Swift. 😁

Idiotism and cluelessness is a plague among dev world.

JoyRant build 24:

* @mentions from the keyboard suggestions are now inserted at the text cursor instead of at the end of the text.
* max height of 1000 points for image previews, to counter large image spam by people like ostream.

TestFlight:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/...

I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).

First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.

So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?

No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.

"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.

The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.

Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.

No enums. Do I need to say more?

No generics (of course, lol).

Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).

No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.

No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.

No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.

The need for null AND undefined.

No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).

JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.

Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.

That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.

It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)

Marry Christmas!

I got @-red bombed 😂
Thanks, pal!

Seems like the ad spammers are quite active recently. I‘m worried.

Also: fuck every single one of them human scum.

Windows: I have updates, please pick an option:
* Update and shut down
* Update and reboot

Me: Ok, update and shut down

Windows: Updates and reboots

Found the secret Bethesda HQ. It’s located in Germany and is disguised as an old people’s home.

For those of you who still refuse to accept that safety features in languages are useful and important:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/...

The author of curl himself admits that this security flaw could have been prevented if he had used a memory safe language.

I‘m not blaming the author for making this mistake and I‘m not saying that curl should be rewritten in another language.

I just want to rub this in the faces of people who argue that "bugs are always the developer’s fault, therefore it’s perfectly fine to keep using unsafe languages"