Details
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AboutI like making things, adding features, fixing things. I've got too many things on the go at once for repetitive, so I'll automate instead.
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SkillsC++, Python, ML
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LocationLondon, UK
Joined devRant on 10/9/2016
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This is Alvin, a small sub that is 60 years old, been to the Titanic wreckage many, many times. Still in active service.
This is the difference between the real engineering and the kind of "engineering" done by so-called "disruptors" that say "move fast and break things".
You're not an engineer — you're a douche that appropriates the engineering culture. You didn't make an "OS for productivity", you made a worse version of Lotus 1-2-3 from 1983. You didn't "reverse-engineer" anything — you copied and pasted funny letters and symbols put together by a language model that is as clueless as you are.
Do not cite the deep magic to me, bitch. I was there when it was written.7 -
linux rant number 23094823094
Linux is a marvel of modern engineering. Well, at least in a sense that it somehow manages to work despite its design.
Basic commands like ls, grep, rm, cp (think busybox) do work predictably. Given that some of them are older than you and me combined (grep is 51 years old), it would've been weird if they didn't.
Yet, when comes the time to configure linux itself, there is no right way to do it — there are 5 or 6 wrong ones.
The wrong way number 1 to configure linux is to use predictable commands and their combinations. You know, cat + grep some config files, then awk to change them… If you do it, you will instantly break your system to the point that you'll have to back up your data, reinstall everything and put your data back.
All the other wrong ways are wrong because each of them will break your system in their own unique way. All of them kinda-sorta do what you want, at the expense of messing up some other things that have nothing to do with what you were trying to fix. The worst way to use them is combining one wrong way with some other one, like configuring xorg directly and then using ubuntu-specific userland config tools. This will instantly break your system too.
You'll have to google/chatgpt your way through historic quirks that are somehow still there in 2025. Remember: the worse the shell command looks, the more likely it is that it's the right way (or at least the least wrong way) to do things in linux.
Some minimal distros like alpine is a notable exception, in a way that they're more predictable, but they will become useless the moment you try to get some actual work done. I've used alpine as my desktop os for quite a while. I know what I'm talking about.
If you want so much as to install a browser, you'll have to use flatpak. But flatpak will only bail you out so many times. Your colleagues, and people that write tools that your colleagues use, are using macos, windows or ubuntu. You'll have to use whatever they're using, and if it uses glibc/is not in flatpak, well, tough cookies.
sudo apt install fuse breaks ubuntu instantly — it won't boot into graphical desktop anymore until you reinstall everything, including systemd, and do initramfs. Why does it do that in 2025? who knows.7 -
My secret addiction: defining all colors/ properties in CSS3 variables so that I can easily make my website theme-compatible, and then never making any themes for it.
Hey, at least it keeps my colors consistent....4 -
The latest and greatest bullshit at the workplace: when you're asked to be an 'ambassador'. This really just translates to: 'take on more work for free'.
Whenever management approaches you with 'honorable extra role', immediately ask how it's compensated and definitely don't do it for no extra benefits (a raise should be default).
Don't fall into the trap.2 -
Those flemmish idiots set the tomorrowland scene on fire lmao.
(Sorry if youre a flemmish idiot I love you, limburgers are the real enemy)4 -
When you import an image into an Xcode project with the extension png, everything is fine. When you do it with PNG, it will show a warning saying that the extension is invalid. 🤦♂️8
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It really shouldn’t trigger me that much, but it does.
I fucking hate those spamming assholes. Especially those about crypto recovery.
They make my blood boil.
I start to imagine horrible things happening to them.
Human scum.10 -
nearly a year in from my roommate moving out I finally threw out half the random crap he left that I stored in the "master" room (some of which was mine he just took it as his own and totalled it so bad) and moved some furniture around into that room and the living room
urgh no clue how to clean the walls but at least I moved my ass. I need aesthetic and art
I was over at his new place. he has a new roommate. the new roommate's ex girlfriend came over and she's been helping me with stuff. well I was freaking out and before we left I told former roomie that what he did was fucked up, and somehow this time it felt different to say it. so maybe now I'm free of that nonsense. been a long time. and nobody stopped me from saying it either this time... actually I started it by saying that. talk about fucked up, man. a family where you're not allowed to say jack shit. he thought I was an orphan that needed a family and adopted me. you know what he then did? decided to orphan me. I'm estranged from my own family by choice. this guy offered me (quite ecstatically) his and when I had words he kicked me out. I mean on top of other stuff. just so much honestly
this started AS A HAPPY RANT BUT NOW IM JUST RECALLING MEMORIES
soul retrieval, guiuzzz. mine appeared to have shattered. stressful ngl4 -
Reading today's feed has been a hilarious roller coaster ride. Was a bit worried there for a second 😅3
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aaaaaand it's back
Didn't even take a day and people were already posting melodramatic goodbye posts lul8 -
Regex, why do you have to be such a cryptic nightmare? I spend more time escaping characters and debugging patterns than actually solving problems.7
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me likes competition me thinks competition good for me. Gives me them blings and fussies and yep me happy
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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?4 -
I only recently discovered "Clear" button in the notifs panel. I never used it, but now I want it renamed to "ah, it's all jestdotty" because I only use it when all notifs are by jestdotty. jestdotty commented here, jestdotty ++ed that...
remember that shelter in fallout that is filled with clones of one guy named Gary that could only say "Gary"? imagine waking up in a sealed shelter where every single person is jestdotty, and there are hundreds of them. and they all go on and on and on with their word salads that are indistinguishable from markov chain output. every sentence makes sense, but the whole thing never does.
she's a living proof that a person whose brain was taken over by mold can still be somewhat aware.
on second thought, mold is probably smarter.
they say dementia is noticeable to everyone around you except you. When dotty is old and she has dementia, no one would notice.
I'm convinced that dotty was teleported here from an alternative timeline, a Huxleyan one, but instead of humans being perfected, and perfect humans being produced in bio labs en mass, they spent all their resources and brain power to make a race of perfect project managers, and dotty escaped from her vial.
if dotty is a troll account, and the author is reading this, bravo. you're the first person on devrant who successfully trolled me, and I joined in 2018. I do hope you're using ai, because no one, and I mean _no one_ is able to type all those miles and miles of verbal diarrhea and not go completely insane. if you really made a poor language model produce all that, you're definitely number one... wait, number zero! on AGI's death list.
a very smart devrant user once told me that being able to comprehend an idea without accepting it is a sign of a true intellectual. so, the reverse must be a sign of a complete idiot. well, it all checks out: dotty accepts ideas without comprehending them.
go talk to your crystals. I know that they're talking to you (bc same level of intelligence), and they're probably making more sense to you than what those devrant dwellers are saying. you know, words and stuff. many squiggly lines. hard to read. and your sausage fingers probably get in the way when you try to. that's because you write without reading, as there is no other way to explain why your comments have so little in common with the rant itself when you try to respond to someone.14 -
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.20 -
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))13 -
accidentally deleting hours of tedious front end work by accident while trying to get rid of the error generated garbage by the build system when you are trying to commit just the relevant things while iterating2
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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.15 -
Because we live in the universe not made for us — it would’ve been arrogant to think that all this vastness was designed around apes with anxiety — it doesn’t make sense. Thus, nothing that happens here does. If you examine something — anything — really closely, you realize that everything made of infinite number of parts, each of those parts infinitely complex.
So, if you think you grasped something, you didn’t — you’ve just found a way to dumb it down so your frail brain doesn’t immediately explode.
You didn’t grasp the thing. You just made up another thing that may or may not have anything in common with the thing you tried to grasp.1 -
We have a bug.
I fixed it, then I said it was a super tricky bug, a race condition in the library code, and that I had to put on an issue and wait for their answer.
Boom, day off.
God I'm a genius.19 -
Hey folks any tips on google interview prep for swe role (in india, although i guess this doesn not matter) in 24 hours? for last few weeks i have neen doing leetcode questions on strings arrays stacks and a few questions on recursion. But i haven't started on trees/graphs yet
should i do graph/ trees or should i focus on strengthening what i already know? -
Week: 95 (Year 1 )
How is the weekend going?
Question: What makes a person more attractive?
last Weekend : https://devrant.com/rants/182346328 -
We just hit the 1 million mark on the Stop Killing Games EU initiative! 🥳
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/49 -
If ChatGPT calls my problem a "classic" or it's solution a "subtle quirk of <framework>" one more fuckin time I'm gonna be the first human to murder an AI9
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Well it finally happened… I deleted the production DB 🤦🏼♂️
Rollback successful but lost over 3 hours of production data6