Stupid FaceApp. “Gee! It’s an election cycle. Let’s all download a selfie app from Russia!”

What’s everyone’s take on this app? I’ve seen articles saying it’s no big deal because their servers are all in the US and it doesn’t access the photo library and blah blah blah. My issue is that the photo it takes goes to the cloud for processing. Control lost.

In Soviet Russia, app play YOU!

Looking for recommendations on electronics learning kits. My 16 year-old son has recently been tearing into old electronics and trying to make new stuff with the components. I want to give him a more formal and engaging intro to what it is he’s playing with and how many other cool things he could do. He does struggle a bit with math and gets discouraged easily if he doesn’t understand new concepts or why they’re relevant. So, if you know of a good learning kit that balances lots of cool possibilities with good documentation and tutorials, I’d appreciate a little help.

I’m currently looking at Elegoo. https://amazon.com/EL-KIT-008-Proje...

Getting real tired of your crap, Google. How can I be a technology worker in a world where I have to help clients who use your services without destroying my own privacy in the process? If I tried to live off the grid and keep my profession, it would be like an Amish person doing IT by writing code, etc. on paper with a pen and giving it to someone else to type into a computer.

https://cnbc.com/2019/07/...

Client asks for redesign to look more like XYZ site.

I deliver a redesign to look more like XYZ site.

Client wants the site to look more like his old site. But different. Gives extensive instructions on how to design his website to his liking.

At some point, I think I'll be owing him money for his design/dev services, not the other way around.

What is it with these people?

I don’t love to code. It kinda sucks, TBH. I love to make money and get closer to a hopefully early retirement. Coding is only part of how I’m getting there.

HOLY CRAP STACKOVERFLOW! I get that you're trying to make it easier for people to get their questions answered by structuring question-asking into a multi-form wizard with guides and problem-checking along the way. But when you block my question from being submitted AT ALL after I've done _absolutely everything_ you've asked and then you tell me that my question isn't valid simply because someone HAPPENED to mention in THEIR question A SINGLE KEYWORD I've included in my question? Like the word "What" or "How" or "img srcset" even though I've ALREADY READ THOSE AND THEY DON'T ANSWER MY QUESTION? That seems to be a bit of a jerk move, doncha think?

(Yes, I know the question showing in the screenshot isn't relevant to my question. I was just being a smart aleck at this point because NONE of the relevant questions I tried would unblock me.)

I guess all questions ever asked or that will ever be asked are already answered on StackOverflow.

I hate when I have a development question and the only answers out there seem to be from 5 years ago. And when I apply those solutions, they don't work because old. All that says to me is how stupid I am for even having the question because everyone knows the secret and they're no longer talking about it.

I got out of bed at 2:10am to film the Falcon Heavy launch from my driveway, where I have a direct, due east line of sight to Cape Canaveral. I’m thinking “What a time to be alive!” and “Why didn’t I pursue the aerospace career I started in college?”

I know the video editing software LightWorks has its aficionados. I can see how it's powerful. I've been using it since at least version 12. But my gosh how it screws people over. In the latest version, when you import files into a project and then want to delete _just the reference_ to the files in the project, LightWorks says "Nope, imma delete the FILE, too!" So you can never just start over with an import. When you import a bunch of still photos in one shot, no matter how many, it imports them all as an unwatchably fast 1 second video sequence instead of as an individual file. Like...what? And they've dumbed down the interface so much that there's no toolbar. You have to right-click poke at everything to try to find where stuff is. And right clicking is NON-EXISTENT on a Mac. I had to use a pen tablet to achieve it. I'm too cheap to buy Adobe Premiere for the few times I have to edit video in a year, so I guess it's just ShotCut on Windows for the rest of my life.

Life Coach: "I want a website where I can charge $5,000 for 6 weeks of coaching for [weird life problem very few people have or think about].

Me: "That'll be $5,000."

Life Coach: "That's too expensive for a website."

Me (inner voice): "tHaT's ToO eXpEnSiVe FoR a WeBsItE."

Me (real voice): "Consider it not as a cost but as an investment necessary to obtaining your first customer. Once the first customer is realized, you've paid for the website and the future customers will make you profitable.

Happy (U.S.) Father’s Day to all the DevRant Dads!

“Epstein promotes concepts. He urges individuals—and parents especially—to abandon the desire for instant gratification and easy answers as early performance on tests isn’t an indicator of professional success. He emphasizes traits over particular skills—be curious, flexible, open-minded, adventurous, experimental, and playful. Try and fail and try again. Explore. Read outside your field. Supply your mind with lots of ideas so that you can make the connections that specialists miss, helping you thrive.

Never decide you are too old or too late to the game to try something new. “The tidy specialization narrative cannot easily fit even [the] relatively kind domains that have most successfully marketed it,” Epstein concludes. “So, about that, one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind…research in myriad areas suggests that mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated.”

https://qz.com/1638869/...

Don’t be evil.

“Stapleton said she was demoted and told to take medical leave, even though she wasn’t ill. Meredith Whittaker, an artificial intelligence researcher, said she was reassigned and told to stop her well-known research on AI ethics. Both women detailed their experiences in an email to coworkers in April, which was then shared with journalists at Wired and published.”

https://vox.com/policy-and-politics...

When a client’s website is about how he’s an expert at fixing his customers’ psychological problems, and he’s got those same problems and isn’t managing them well at all himself, you just

1. Build site.
2. Get check.
3. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to even if you really are curious.

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.

Google's PageSpeed is recommending that I reduce the size of a 109kb photographic image to 2kb, which would definitely reduce its size...to a blurry, pixelated mess. Is it all just robots over there programming this stuff now? Doesn't anyone know how to sanity check their code around these types of logical inconsistencies?

Slate.com: "We need to talk about your ad blocker... blah blah blah"

Me: *Close*

Client: Content is missing from my Shopify site that was there a few days ago. Please restore.

Me: But I didn’t touch your site. And Shopify doesn’t have backups to restore from.

Client: Please restore.

Me: ...

A company I once worked for actually had an IT management reporting process called TPS reports. Completely non-ironically. I did ask if they were giving homage to “Office Space” and they were like, “Wut?”

And, yes, the report was obnoxious and a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Oh, look. Google cares about my well-being. https://wellbeing.google

Part of me dies a little inside every time I have to log into GoDaddy for any reason. Is this really going to be our reality for the foreseeable future?

My mom passed away in 2014. Were it not for the pain she was in all her life, I’d love to have her back and I’d gladly provide all the computer help she’d need.

Hey, freelancer programmers, web developers, etc. I need your help. I’m writing a “Mother of All Blogs” post about why clients should a) pay you for your work and b) expect to pay you your asking rate. I’m trying to make the argument more forcefully that you get what you pay for with this work and that when you cheap out you only hurt your business bottom line. So, what are your experiences (positive and negative) or points that you would make to a potential client, who wants you to work super cheap or even for free, that you find are irrefutable about this topic? I want to include as many as I can! Thanks.

I’ve been on a couple of projects like this. Not to this magnitude, but similar types of communication and tech problems.

https://theregister.co.uk/2019/04/...

Move over, James Damore. You have a new ally. And, she’s a woman.

Microsoft engineer complains that company is biased against white men
Internal memo suggests that women don't think the right way to be engineers.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...

I hadn’t seen this interview until now. I was low-key discriminated against at a job, because of my gender, by a hierarchy full of women, and eventually let go. And I wasn’t the only one. This crap just makes me angry. It’s why I always want to be independent and not be directly employed by corporations anymore. https://youtu.be/6NOSD0XK0r8

Google Home Mini security nightmare stories. Aaaaand, go!

I'm about to send an email to a client with some well-written recommendations and advice in it. I swear that if he calls me quickly like he usually does, and before sufficient time has passed for him to actually read and grok what I've written, I will ignore that call and wait until tomorrow morning to get back to him. RTFM, dude!

What’s your favorite high performance video card for PC gaming for between $250-$300?

The 2019 StackOverflow Developer Survey is out. What are the most relevant key takeaways for you?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/...