Oh my fucking god I deserve to be shot for my stupidity.
I spent an hour in absolute fear trying to figure out what was wrong with my PC - it would boot but the monitor wouldn't show anything.

I'd forgotten that I'd changed to monitor to show HDMI input - but I was using a HDMI-to-VGA converter so the monitor should have been set to VGA input :/

#require "A rant from a few days ago in which some guy actually did this";;

Current fantasy: I wish the two assholes sitting at the table next to mine in the cafe and being super loud and obnoxious were discussing a business idea so that I could buy their domain name and put a large "eat a bag of dicks" type picture on it.

Relatives: You're a computer guy, right, what are you working on these days?
Me: *should I bother explaining, should I not* Oh, just some stuff.
R: Oh come on, tell us, how difficult can it be?
M: *sigh* I'm working on a custom garbage collector for-
R: !!

They're now under the impression that I'm involved in collecting rubbish from bins. Sigh. My hair doesn't help here, either, lol (I have one of those tangled, unruly mops of hair)

This will take time to explain.

Planning on building a Ryzen 5 2400G setup for light gaming/home lab stuff, I need it to run a bunch of VMs and have passable frame rates in games on Linux (I hardly play AAA hard to port games, so should be okay there).

Planning on going full Linux for this, you guys got any tips/warnings/gotchas? Also, have any of you encountered issues with using NVMe SSDs on Linux?

Certified Enganeers: 0, Internet Connectivity Issues: 1

Those idiots couldn't even understand why I'd connected a second router (a DLink DIR 816) for better WiFi than their default garbage modem/router. And one of them told me that he'd login to the router by "putting the address in Google" (and proceeded to type 192.168.1.251 in the search bar, after I explained to him that Firefox was a browser too, just like Chrome -.-)

And they didn't even fix the problem, which is most probably on their end since everything checks out here. Brilliant. More shitty 3G/4G for me.

YOU CERTIFIED PIECES OF CRAP

I feel like distro-hopping again.

I was thinking of trying Gentoo (Arch is too mainstream, meh), but I came across an article on FreeBSD and realized that I'd never tried a BSD.

Any of you use BSD as a desktop OS? If so, which one? The laptop I'll be running it on is about four years old now, and there's no nVuDiA shit there, so hardware compatibility shouldn't be an issue.

RememberMe's relatives' guide to raising a kid:
1. Enroll kid in school IT course - Java/SQL.
2. Let kid be useless on Facebook all day. Kid doesn't write a line of code unless it's for exams.
3. Realize that kid need to do a project for 12th grade (final year in school).
4. Complain loudly to everyone in the vicinity.
5. Let kid choose a project waaay above her skill level.
6. Have some other relative mention that RememberMe is a "computer waala" (computer person).
7. Ask poor RememberMe to do the kid's project.
8. Use typical family blackmail ("oh you can't have that much work, do something for your family for once").

Yeah, nope. Get lost. I don't mind teaching, but I'm not doing your work for you.

Good ol' WanBLowS, powerin' the Delhi Metro.

IntelliJ Rust is fucking awesome.

Blender.

3D modelling, UVs, texturing, animation, video editing, compositing, motion graphics, motion tracking, 2D animation, and a fucking powerful render engine? Check.
Great community? Check.
Powerful and easy scripting system? Check.
A well organized dev team? Check.
People who care about UI/UX? Check (look at Blender 2.8).
Does it compete with a major corporation that would go into sloth otherwise? Check. (If you thought M$ was shaftware wait till you see Autodesk)

There are other FOSS projects that I really like, but my vote definitely goes to Blender.

While writing a raytracing engine for my university project (a fairly long and complex program in C++), there was a subtle bug that, under very specific conditions, the ray energy calculation would return 0 or NaN, and the corresponding pixel would be slightly dimmer than it should be.

Now you might think that this is a trifling problem, but when it happened to random pixels across the screen at random times it would manifest as noise, and as you might know, people who render stuff Absolutely. Hate. Noise. It wouldn't do. Not acceptable.

So I worked at that thing for three whole days and finally located the bug, a tiny gotcha-type thing in a numerical routine in one corner of the module that handled multiple importance sampling (basically, mixing different sampling strategies).

Frustrating, exhausting, and easily the most gruelling bug hunt I've ever done. Utterly worth it when I fixed it. And what's even better, I found and squashed two other bugs I hadn't even noticed, lol

I fucking hate the design and aesthetics of PC gaming hardware in general. Who the fuck do they design those things for, edgy teenagers? Give me something that looks well built and professional, damnit. Heck, most console designs are much better.

I'm sitting in darkness playing my acoustic guitar because the power cut while I was working on a particularly difficult task. Oh well. Feels nice to disconnect sometimes.

Blender animation playback under
Windows - 9.1 fps
Arch - 10.6 fps

Impressive! Both are too slow to be usable (curse my shitty laptop) but hey, I'll gladly take that 1.5 fps improvement.

Game devs/other content creation people, how do you version control large asset files? So far I've been using git, but is there a better way?

Fun fact: Windows loads faster than Autodesk Maya does :/

(By loading I mean going from zero to responsive and usable)

Wow, this is so on point.
Credits: SMBC

Conversion rates and shipping make it awfully expensive to get official t-shirts here in India, so I decided to experiment with t-shirt printing till the time I can earn enough to donate directly to open source foundations.

I call this design "FUCK YOU, AUTODESK!!"

(Yes it's literally just the logo. Yes I'm not a graphic designer)

Not too bad, but the print could've been better. Time to start tweaking things.

*opens up a library file, reads first line*
{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell #-}

Oh boy, this is gonna be intense...
I always dread having to go through Template Haskell code.

Autodesk + Linux is such a goddamn clusterfuck.

Firstly, they only release RPM builds for Maya, and say that they officially support RHEL and CentOS only.
No support for Debian, Arch, etc. What. The. Fuck.

Fine. Okay. Corporate policy. I can live with that. I use alien to convert the RPMs to DEBs on my ZorinOS installation and then found a script which does the installation for me. Cool.

Installs with a few library fuckups. Okay, no problem. I added the missing library versions (ancient libpng and libtiff). I run it. It throws up with some error involving licensing.

Upon searching it seems that Maya 20-fucking-17 can't handle the "new" consistent device naming system (the one which renames eth0 to enp1s0 or whatever). WHAT THE FUCK. Okay. Found a way to disable that. No effect. It's doing the equivalent of a boot loop with the same error.

Wow. This is the leading player in 3D content creation software :/

(As an aside, I did try to install Fedora 28 but it keeps failing with a TPM error. Yay for Linux distro quirks).

Privacy peeps, what's your opinion on usage of surveillance for national defence, domestic security, etc. ?
I'm just curious, most privacy-minded people I know generally trip up when confronted with stuff like "yeah, but if surveillance was a thing then that blast which killed 20 people yesterday could have been averted."
I've heard quite a few opinions on both sides, what's yours?

One of the biggest barriers to the wide(r) scale adoption of functional programming languages like Haskell, F#, and Scala is how snooty and condescending your average FP developer is. And beginner-unfriendly.

Ask them a question about an intermediate topic (in my case, the Free monad) you're likely to get a whole torrent of category theoretic rubbish in return.

This is a common pattern I see when "experts" answer questions.

Now, it didn't bother me much because I've studied a fair amount of category theory and can usually follow such answers, but, for the sake of the general case, I'd like to shove these rules into the heads of everyone writing an answer to a question (not just FP):

1. If you can't illustrate a concept clearly without going into verbal diarrhoea with phrases like "monad homomorphism" and "just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" then you clearly haven't understood it properly (unless, of course, the answer absolutely requires it). An answer is not the place to show off your knowledge of a topic.

2. Please remember that everyone was a beginner at some point. Including you. Understand that some concepts can be extremely frustrating at first and yet incredibly simple after you grok them (eg. monads).

3. If the person asking the question is a beginner, using complex concepts in an answer just because it's a more "elegant" way to explain it doesn't really help them. They are more likely to get confused and drop the topic.

(Kudos to those people who give highly relevant, insightful, simple, and intuitive answers, you guys are the best).

When you just started learning a new web framework (in my case, ASP.NET Core)

Ah, the beautiful feeling of fanatically trying to debug the code in a particular file for a few hours only to realise that the error was in a different file...

Fuck you too, C++ template errors.

Installing Windows on a laptop, it's late in the night here, so I kept that laptop aside and was programming away on my primary laptop, when suddenly-

"HI THERE I'M CORTANA!"

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Seriously, Microsoft, I like the recent stuff you've been doing but please get rid of that. It's extremely annoying.

Whoever at Microsoft decided to give away so many freebies in the Visual Studio Dev Essentials thing deserves a fucking knighthood.

Oh, SMBC.
So, how many of you are actually plants?

(Taken from: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/...)

!rant
The more I learn about advanced C++ the more I love this language. C++'s template system is so insanely cool!
Just made a proof of concept expression templates based linear algebra library for my own projects. It was actually a lot of fun to make, and seeing it spit out optimized, loop-fused code with no temporary variables...magic.
Long live C++.

!rant
So it turns out that my dad accidentally took my spare laptop on a work trip. He's about as non-tech as you can get, and that laptop runs...Arch Linux. Yeah.

(call from dad)
M: hi dad
D: what's your desktop password?
M: (confused) {Password}
D: okay.
(cuts the call)

M: *shrug*

(call from dad)
M: hi dad
D: so where is PowerPoint?! where's the Windows button?! I've been at this for half an hour now and I have to edit a presentation for tomorrow!!
M: (realizes what's happened) oh...uh...dad...that's.. Linux...
D: don't you people do anything the way it's supposed to be done?
M: uh...
D: ugh! So you can't edit PPTs on this?
M: (processing...LibreOffice isn't installed on the laptop, and he will have to use the command line to connect to the internet to use Office Online or Google Slides since the Deepin WiFi module keeps fucking up for some reason)
D: well?
M: (internal sigh) No, you can't edit PPTs on that.
D: wow.
(cuts the call)

He either thinks we're all useless or that we have godlike computer skills to be able to edit PPTs on Linux. Oh well.

(He managed to use the hotel's "workstation" to get it done, so all is well. I should tell him to change his password though, hotel computers have rubbish security.)

So my homegrown raytracing engine somehow managed to render this.

(It's supposed to be a material approximating oldish gold: a texture, a diffuse material model and a specular material model)

Yay!

(Note the reddish bright interior areas. I think energy isn't being conserved in the specular BSDF. Bug. Gah.)