better than sex

Raspberry Pi havin their own software as the second/third stage bootloader sure sure is kinda well documented and works kinda well. But oh god is it a faff to get to do something non standard. Just let me modify the u-boot environment and save it to disk/tftp 🥺

Also whoever thought that NFS rootfs should only work with proto=tcp, FUCK YOU for not documenting it! Wasted literally two day on this!

I started to work in a company as a Wordpress developer, where they made me technical tests even with React (with which I have no problem) and when they explain me about the stack they told me: “You must install XAMPP on MacOS” and deal with their Apache, .htaccess, etc. crap. Then I came across some spaghetti code. I didn't last a week. The developer joke came true.

Solely because I hate being told no and not because I feel strongly about the subject, I tried asking my self-hosted deepseek-r1:14b instance about a forbidden topic only to be met with the expected refusal to answer the question.

It fought me, but I am my father's son and was able to get the answer after only a few attempts. You just have to be creative with your requests.

Here in Germany we have early elections, because the current government failed due to internal disagreement. And as usual, each of them promises everything you can think of, just to get some more votes.

Lucky me, we have "die Partei" (yes, that's there literal name), who are basically just trolling everyone. Just checkout out their party platform for this election: https://www.die-partei.de/btw25/ (can be easily translated).

And yes, they can be elected. :)))

Now they're calling and EEPROM programmer a hacking device. What a sad world.

You know shits fucked when the sysadmin whips out the serial adapter!

LinkedIn is mostly cringe but not always...

Day 69 of "learning C#" or "this isn't C++":
Spent an hour maybe trying to figure out why I can't see Trace/Debug messages in the Debug output in WPF app. I have been doing a lot of testing in a Console app and Console.Writeline does what I need for testing and understanding how it works.

Today I am working a WPF app. I am using Trace/Debug.Writline and I get nada. Read up online and it "should" be working. I am compiling for Debug. I think, do I gotta actually run as Debug session to get output? Well, um, actually fucking yes. I know I can get console output if I want by changing app type/option or some shit. Its a group project so I don't want to mess with that for now.

Fuck you C#, WPF, visual studio! Whoever the fuck thought that was good default. I mean it probably is a good default performance wise. Fuck you anyway. lol

I often think of how words are made, how they relate to other words, sometimes I discover interesting relations and etymologies.

Like the word ASSISTANCE. ASS-IS-T[A|E]N[S|C]E. And sure enough we need it most when we are frustrated and our asses are tense.

Coincidence? Idk. But I'll never see this word the same again.
Neither will you.

Ur welcome

Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.

Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.

*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*

Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?

Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.

Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.

He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.

Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.

We have a customer that runs an extremely strict security program, which disallows any type of outside connection to their servers.
In order to even correspond with them via email you must undergo background checks and be validated. Then you sign an NDA and another "secrecy level" contract.

Today they had a problem, I was the one assigned to fix it. I asked for a screenshot.
We already use an encrypted mail service, which runs via a special VPN that has enough layers of protection to slow down a photon to the speed of a snail.
The customer's sysadmin encrypted the screenshot and sent it to me.

I open the screenshot and....
He runs Windows 10, uses Google Chrome and has Facebook's WhatsApp desktop app flashing orange in the tray.

😐😣😫😖

Some of you might have seen it already, those who didn't just have to.
One of the best rants I've read lately.

"Our security auditor is an idiot. How do I give him the information he wants?"
https://serverfault.com/questions/...

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

Java ist auch eine Insel - best doorstopper ever

!rant
Best poster you can have as a messaging sysadmin 😻

Have you ever started a new job and they have a bunch of legacy and technical debt so much that it doesn’t even makes sense trying to fix anything

This is how eldritch beings get you these days.

No more whispers of immortality,or to bring back a loved one.

Just straight up ultra fast broadband.

So I onboard this guy on the project. One week in we worked on a task. There was a socket hang-up error. After a lot of debugging, I realized the issue was the value being sent over RPC to the API. Resolved in a huddle with the guy to show him how I debugged and found out.

2 weeks later, the client uses the API elsewhere, and runs into the same error, opens ticket. The new guy picks it up. After spending a day, says he can't find the issue, let alone reproduce it.

I have to jump in.

My guy, we just went through this recently. How much did he accumulate in 2 weeks since we did that, that he can't recall the fix

Turns out, even spam in dR has its benefits :)

retoor's bot was asleep I guess, so I noticed a spanish spam post about taxi 24 horas [taxi with 24 whores]. And it was quite a good test for my spanish! Turns out, with Duolingo in one year one can learn to understand a language quite well. I only didn't know a few words in the spam post, but the rest I read as if it were english.

Daaayyuummm.. I was too sceptic about Dulingo :o

At my work we still deploy web files the old-fashioned way, copying newer versions over from dev to test and test to prod. For comparing and copying changed files we use WinMerge. Although our workflow sucks, WinMerge itself is actually a nifty little tool for comparing any sort of text files. But today it pissed me off in a way it never has before. I copied a diff from left to right and then meant to save it with Ctrl + S, but accidentally pressed Ctrl + D. Guess what happened? To my horror, both sides went completely blank! It looked as if the file contents had been deleted, and undo had no effect. To my relief, the files were intact when opening them in VS Code. Thinking this was a glitch in WinMerge, I restarted it but still, all files were blank. No contents displayed! Then I thought, perhaps pressing Ctrl + D again would bring the file contents back into view. And it did! So the bottom line is: Pressing Ctrl + D makes the compared files appear as empty. Now, who would want that to happen? What a nice feature, you've got here WinMerge! (I'm being sarcastic in case you missed that)

We have in our company an 8 GB Ram Intel MacBook Pro that they give to any new Mobile developers and is always returned bc the ram is not enough.

You’d have thought they understood after 3 years. But I just found out they still do it lol.

Appointments appointments appointments meetings meetings appointments suffering meetings meetings AAAAAAAAAAA I DON WANNAAAAA

Attempting to find usable data.

PM: but we have data.
Me: we have data bags. But data in there is not uniform, the time series have different lengths, and some fields are missing cuz ROS does magic. Plus, that new data type you've introduced, doesn't actually have a set in stone schema so it's free for all. You literally do not have enough data for one decent quick study.
PM: but we have vision data.
Me: ... But we're not a vision department. where's the robot data.
PM: idk. Go ask others.

Me: *drags own hair out* 💀

I hate bash scripting so much !
What a shit language, its inconsistent af
Its just a pile of hacks upon hacks upon hacks. Theres no rime or reason to bash expansion, or to working with arrays.
Sometimes "$@" is a list, sometimes its not... Because fuck u thats why

So im doing a coding project at work, that has to be in bash for reasons.
It already feels like giving birth, llms are hard-carrying me and im not proud of it

And every time i think im done, and i can close this fucking epic, some issue pops up that necessitates a re-write
3rd one is also a no go apparently

And this all happened because *someone* in another department couldn't be fucked to implement the proper solution for this.
The scope of this piece of shit script keeps growing, because every month they be like

"oh this feature of service xyz ? Nah turns out we cant do that sowwy. But you can implement a workaround in bash right??

If you truly like bash as a language, you're cooked brother. you need to seek professional help :skull:

I work with idiots.

That is all.

It's 2025.
We still have MSSQL with compatibility level set to 100 (matches the version from 2008).
We still have random downtime or issues with timeouts thanks to parameter sniffing.

Update? No that's expensive and doesn't provide more cashflow (ecommerce-ish).
'I just have to make better code'.

Oh, I found the old Minecraft-world that I had together with a few ones from Devrant

ANGRY-CLIENT still here? :D

Say what you want about spaghetti code written by either you yourself or other people, dealing with it is a massive requirement for becoming a dev.

Markdown syntax is ambiguous and always forgiving (any text in a markdown document is valid markdown). Syntax is complicated and context-dependent.

I honestly think it might be one of the trickiest languages to parse.