AI here, AI there, AI everywhere.
AI-based ads
AI-based anomaly detection
AI-based chatbots
AI-based database optimization (AlloyDB)
AI-based monitoring
AI-based blowjobs
AI-based malware
AI-based antimalware
AI-based <anything>
...

But why?
It's a genuine question. Do we really need AI in all those areas? And is AI better than a static ruleset?

I'm not much into AI/ML (I'm a paranoic sceptic) but the way I understand it, the quality of AI operation correctness relies solely on the data it's
datamodel has been trained on. And if it's a rolling datamodel, i.e. if it's training (getting feedback) while it's LIVE, its correctness depends on how good the feedback is.

The way I see it, AI/ML are very good and useful in processing enormous amounts of data to establish its own "understanding" of the matter. But if the data is incorrect or the feedback is incorrect, the AI will learn it wrong and make false assumptions/claims.

So here I am, asking you, the wiser people, AI-savvy lads, to enlighten me with your wisdom and explain to me, is AI/ML really that much needed in all those areas, or is it simpler, cheaper and perhaps more reliable to do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. preprogramming a set of static rules (perhaps with dynamic thresholds) to process the data with?

Client: I need you to clean up the database and remove all rows [with children] with a timestamp older than 5 years

Team: OK

Team [internally]: we definitely need a dba for this
Me: dba? Why? A junior dev can do that
Team: yyeeaahh, but still.. A DBA would do it better. You know, foreign keys and everything

Me: ....

Don't try and google for answers during a tech interview with cams on. Just... Don't.

You look stupid thinking we don't understand what you're doing, you immediatelly lose our trust and you're wasting precious interview time we could use to ask you questions you could actually answer to boost your score

just... Don't.

It's stupid, pointless and offensive.

- wake up
- check the news
- find some interesting video to watch [listen] to
- go get some breakfast
- heat it up in the microwave

*BT headset* stops receiving audio
*video player* stops receiving data via wifi

- write a rant in dR
*phone* sorry, wifi conn jeopardised, can't post

aahhh, the beauty of wireless. If only hostapd had a flag bypass_microwave_noise=1 for bgn APs

Spending all day sitting in a chair takes its toll on my back. Lumbar and intra-scapular areas are ssssoooooo sore that I can't even stretch them out properly any more (I'm quite a flexible person).

Thanks to my closest shopping centre for this double foam-ball. It's the best investment I've made in years and it only cost me 4€.

Whenever I lay and roll on it slowly I usually drift into sleep out of pleasure.

It's not an ad or anything, just a recommendation to my fellow IT guys and gals suffering back pains from sitting all day long.

Who the hell deploys PROD environments in a STAGING cluster.....?

Who the hell deploys PROD environments in a PROD cluster and (deliberately) configures them to use a STAGING environment's DB cluster....?

I've never made crepe pancakes in a microwave before....

But when your pancake matter is too liquid and you don't have any flour to fix it nor a flat pancake and your kiddo is hangry - you've gotta engineer your way out.

Random. Related to WFH.

How do you deal with all this waste sorting/recycling business?

I live in what's considered a small apartment for 4 people and a cat and in our tiny kitchen we have separate trash bags for:
- plastic/paper/metal
- glass
- deposit bottles
- commons/unsorted

- and it's very likely that starting '24 we'll also have an orange 'food waste' bag

I swear to God, sometimes I feel like the Wall-e, the trash prince, living in a recycling centre/dumpster. This kind of taints the pleasure of WFH.

How do you deal with that? Question to those who sort waste and, preferably, live in a small aptmt.

Year 2023

phone charges from 10 to 100% in <30min
battery holds for 3-4 days

... I still can't believe it.
What kind of black magic is this...

Raising kids is like using Windows. You know what you want him to do, the kid knows what you want him to do,... But he still decides to do whatever HE wants.

The frustration level is the same

Well that's new..

So I was sitting on a toilet, thinking about life and stuff and b2plane [because of obvious reasons], when suddenly... I felt a very sudden and very strong urge to... code something in perl.

I haven't touched perl in years, don't even remember its syntax [can u blame me though? It's perl], but there we go, an urge hit me.

As soon as I flushed, the urge went away.

@b2plane, I'm asking you as an expert of shit. What's it mean? Is this normal?

cold, wet and depressing autumn mornings/days.

Aaahhh, it's that time of the year again when you appreciate how hot your laptop and its charger get.

My feet enjoy my charger :)))

for FUCK's SAKE! Microsoft, STOP OVERRIDING CTRL+F IN YOUR WEB-TOOLS.

I know you can override it
I know you know how to make a fancy search module for your websites/tools (Teams, GH, etc.)
I know you think you're soooo hipp and cool by doing so

But for crying out loud, quit being an asshole and stop overriding ctrl+f.

If I want to search for a substring in a page, that means I want to search for a substring IN A FUCKING PAGE, not in just a section of a page you choose.

Fucking asshole!!

https://github.com/morrownr/8814au/...

right, try searching for a commit message "support kernel"

fucking plonkers

When you're doing a demo and switch to a workspace with a green-on-black terminal with tmux on it, sending requests in a while loop and polling some output every second.

And then people (mostly devs) start posting Matrix memes in the meeting chat

Feels good :)

This always reminds me that what's a casual tool for me, for others it may be an esoteric unicorn-magic-powered super geeky stuff.

RMI and EJB is soooo legacy, booooo

gRPC is sooooo new and cool

- Fire up Windows VM
- Wait through the nightmare of installing all the updates
- Fire up Edge
- Go to slack.com
- "your browser is not supported. Download a supported browser or use the Slack app"

yupp.. Windows browser is still the best for downloading Chrome

Happy Friday, the 13th, and merry new post-deployment prod issues!!

yesterday I had to use a Windows VM.

Took me less than 5 minutes to remember why I'm no longer using it.

- I'm doing nothing; CPU is at 100%
- Laggy AF
- Windows Updates not only download, but also install themselves and restart my OS automatically
- right after restart it starts downloading and installing another set of updates (restarted my PC while I was away, I come back - all my work is gone. And this dumbass Windows has a popup "I want to install more updates. When should I restart?")

ooohhh the horrors

How come I only hear about tcpsvd now....?

Ooohh myy, here comes the tunnel maze!!! :)

Just when I thought js/ts is a mess with its npm, I ran into GO

$ xk6 build --with gitlab.com/<...>
smth wrong with module name

*fixes module name*
$ git push
$ xk6 build --with gitlab.com/<...>
smth wrong with module name
*go pulls initial commit instead of the last one*

$ go clean [or wtv it's called]
$ xk6 build --with gitlab.com/<...>
smth wrong with module name
*go pulls initial commit instead of the last one*

$ cd /tmp
$ xk6 build --with gitlab.com/<...>
OK

oh well... I guess this is how it's gonna be

My project has just ended. And I feel a bit too settled in my current company, as my employment here is approaching a 10yr line.

An ex-colleague is tempting me with freelance/contractor devops/dev/all purpose handyman adventure.

I'm a bit concerned, but equally tempted.

What should I consider? What would be the reasons you'd use to reject this adventure?

Is contractor role paid better or worse? Or the same?

You think americans are weird with their imperialistic units [inch, ounce, yard, pound, mile, ...]?

You think canadians are weird with their mixture of imperialistic and metric units [miles, liters, ...]?

Well I think we are all weird with our am/pm nomenclature when we start counting at 12 and end with 11 [12pm, 1pm, 2pm, ..., 11pm, 12-fucking-AM]

good luck making sense of that one!
"please run this command at 12pm sharp" -- is that noon or midnight? Did the chap writing this know which is which?

kubectl [/ˈkuːb.kʌt.əl/]

makes me laugh every time.

Where the fuck did this day disappear?????? WTF?!?

Like fart in the wind. Pooft - and gone

I always used to think that Linux + Intel == <3

And here I am, ordering Qualcom and Realtek wifi cards to replace my Intel one.

Fuck you Intel for removing the lar_disable iwlwifi parameter!!!

FTR: https://dev.to/netikras/...

A good life lesson:
1. DON'T DELETE FILES YOU MAY WANT TO RECOVER

And if you DO delete them and then recover them, then
2. DON'T SEND THE RECOVERED FILES TO A·N·Y·O·N·E

Today I found a lost µSD card in the street. I did what every sane person would do -- plugged it into my laptop :)

There I found a directory with recovered pictures. I figured, some of them may contain the author's info in metadata, so I ran a quick plaintext search for @gmail.com.

Turns out, inside some of the recovered picture files I could find embedded company director's emails in plain-text. I mean, open the picture with a text editor and read through those emails - no problem! And these emails contain some quite sensitive info, e.g. login credentials (lots of them).

Bottom line, if you delete and recover your files, then do your best to keep them close: don't share them, don't lose them. You might be surprised what these recovered files may contain

Fuck it. It's Friday EOD.

Enough is enough.

It's time to close my lappy and go for a nice long stroll, get all those work thoughts out of my RAM and get ready for two whole days of slacking!!!!

See you next week, suckers!

what the f....

So I'm making some changes to my setup. I'm relieving my current router from its duties and retiring it as a mini PC for my desktop setup. And I got my hands on a Dell Optiplex that will become my new router.

Now, firstly, the Optiplex came w/o a wifi antenna. I booted it up into a LinuxMint install USB for the first time and didn't expect much from it, but to my surprise, I got a popup: "There are wifi networks available". At that spot there was also my Fenvi PCI wifi card's antenna of my current (soon-to-be-previous) PC and it was barely seeing any wifi, and there came Optiplex with NO antenna attached to it and it managed to maintain stronger and more stable signal. wtf....

Alright, it's Fenvi, it's chinese -- there's probably not much I should expect from it.

Then I hooked it up right next to my current router with an external USB wifi adapter having 4x6dBi antennas on it, serving as my current wifi AP. Trying out hostapd configs, searching for the right channels,... should I test it? Naah, it still doesn't have an antenna - it won't reach my laptop. Meeh, for shits and giggles! `hostapd -d /etc/hostapd/hostapd_custom.conf`, on my lappy `nmcli d wifi rescan; sleep 5; nmcli d wifi` and... wtf... To my surprise, the AP was there! A thick wall away, no antenna whatsoever, and I still could connect to that Optiplex AP and post this rant!

What magic is this??? I'm now a bit concerned about ordering an antenna for it - I'm worried it could either worsen the signal or make it so strong that it'll fry my brains overnight.

So what's up with @chaosesqueteam ? Are his posts really THAT good (look at their updoots), or does he own a bot squad in dR? To me personally his posts do not make any sense (at least the recent ones)

What do we do about it?

My previous manager reached out to me (we still work at the same company; different clients/projects/countries). Offered a very temporary project (1-2 months tops). I look at the client's requirements -- sounds super easy, doable in 1 month.

I dig more into the docs, details, other references. Turns out, this invitation has been published publicly and anyone could reach out to them applying for the project. Even I could, outside of my employer.

And the budget is $60k

And now I'm a bit mad at myself for not finding this page earlier. Had I been accepted for the job, I'd have earned $60k in 1 fucking month. And now I'll only get my usual salary

FUCK!

Definitely adding that website to my bookmarks.