Details
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AboutI'm an...older...dev who got derailed by a stint in social media PR management. Gave up getting my coding mojo back and need a place to rant about tech in general.
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SkillsWordPress and way too much social media.
Joined devRant on 11/26/2016
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CrowdStrike came down to an untended, uncaught Null pointer that could have been caught with basic code review and testing before push. That is all. https://x.com/Perpetualmaniac/...9
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Stayed up until 2am launching a website for a client. Now I’m up too early in the morning and can’t sleep anymore. I feel like shit. I’m too old for late night work.3
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Filling out IRS forms using the Brave browser in privacy mode:
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Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "http://sa.www4.irs.gov/modiein/...?" on this server.
Reference #18.cfc3117.1714401007.25a9c99f
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.cfc...
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Filling it out using ridiculously non-secure regular Chrome browser which exposes bookmarks, history, and cookies to anyone with enough knowledge:
"Right this way, sir. Don't worry, your data is in safe hands. We're totally not mining your data for leverage against you for your political leanings in a future tax audit."3 -
Windows is THE STUPIDEST FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT OS ON THE PLANET! All I wanted to do was hook up an HP Spectre laptop running Win11 to a Vizio 60 inch TV. Every time I try to do this it's a crapshoot as to whether it will work. Sometimes, it comes right up as a duplicated display. Not tonight! It flashes for a second and shows the duplicated display, and then it disconnects. EVERY tutorial says use Win + P to select the display mode and it just doesn't fucking work. I've even gone as far as editing the registry to try to make Windows forget old settings. This is BASIC functionality at the end of 2023 and Microsoft FUCKS IT UP! THIS is why I use Linux/MacOS. Because those work every time.23
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I have a bunch of text files from writing that I did in a copy of DOS software called WordPublisher from 1992. When I open them in TextEdit or Sublime on a Mac, there are a bunch of special characters, some of the readable text, and then more special characters. The software just doesn't exist anywhere in any format now. Anyone know how I can recover the full text from a file like that?31
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So, let me get this straight. At a company called OpenAI, which has the mission of making AI available to the world, the CEO was fired (then rehired, then fired, then rehired) and all the employees stood in solidarity with him through all that. But then there was this new AGI development that the supposedly open company is hiding from everyone and which could threaten the existence of humanity. Because OpenAI is open and is very concerned about AI's existential threats. Except when it's not because it's concerned with AI's existential threats.
Did I get that about right?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/...5 -
This is about the best blog post describing exactly how the tech industry works. Or doesn't work, as it were.
"I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars"
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/...3 -
How far back do you remember of the things exhibited in this “museum” of the Internet?
https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts...
For me, it’s mostly stuff beginning at or a little before 1992.4 -
I recently deleted a bunch of bookmarks from between 2002 and 2014. None of the websites even worked anymore.5
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I want to torture very painfully anyone who uses Word to send me content expecting that their exact formatting can just be copy/pasted into any old CMS or web page quickly and easily because the press release is going out NOW and I only got this to you NOW so just quick copy/paste it onto the website and we're good to go, right? You can do that, right?
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I CANNOT! AND YOU LEFT TRACK CHANGES ON WHICH CARRIES OVER SPECIAL CHARACTERS THAT I HAVE TO REMOVE BY HAND BECAUSE MICROSOFT HIDES OR HAS REMOVED THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF TRACK CHANGES IN SHARED DOCUMENTS! AND YOU INCLUDED TABLES, WHICH I HAVE TO REBUILD BY HAND OR TURN INTO LISTS! YOU WENT TO UNIVERSITY AND NOBODY EVER TOLD YOU THAT YOU CAN'T PASTE DIRECTLY FROM WORD TO A WEBSITE AND HAVE EVERYTHING LOOK EXACTLY AS IT DID IN WORD? WHAT ARE YOU SOME KIND OF MORON?! IT'S BEEN OVER 30 YEARS SINCE THE WEB WAS INVENTED AND YOU STILL HAVEN'T FIGURED THIS OUT?!
At least I get to bill more time.2 -
I'm genuinely curious: Is there anyone here who is offended by the use of the name 'master' for a Git repository 'main' branch? If we all moved to 'main' and never used 'master' again (for anything, Git or not) would that make a difference to you?37
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Been working long hours and 6-day weeks for not much gain these days. At this rate, I think I will likely end up poor after working myself toward an early grave. My retirement fund actually looks kinda nice when combined with family wealth inherited or that may be inherited sometime in the next 20 years. But the high taxation that’s coming, inflation, and public debt problems that will feed inflation spirals will way more than halve my net worth by the time I am old enough to retire. At that point, I won’t be suicidal but I will be praying to die before I run out of money. From what I see of the local homeless population we try to help, being dead is preferable to sleeping on the street.2
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If this isn't reality, I don't know what is. I don't read job descriptions today the same way I did 27 years ago.3
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New thing I'm going to put on my resume and website when people want to know about my reputation in the industry: I am highly sought-after by hundreds of recruiters from India. I get at least three calls per day from someone there. ;)5
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Don’t be cynical and prideful. Respect people older than you in the profession, even if in your judgment they are “dinosaurs”. Even if they’re not as well-versed in what you consider “The New Shiny Thing”, they’ve seen some shit and can teach you a thing or two.6
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I often wonder if tech recruiters realize we are evaluating them and their “opportunities” just as much as they will be evaluating us if they consider us at all. When recruiters send me opportunities and then never follow up, even with a “sorry, you weren’t selected”, when I submit my application and résumé, they’d better not be wondering why I don’t apply to anything else they send me.4
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One of the things I’m frustrated with is that I own top-end devices but I am fearful of using their top-end features. It’s because I have a strong hunch that despite the privacy policies of the corporations I bought them from, my personal data, IP, and biometrics are being back-doored out to the intelligence community, the military, or those of foreign adversaries. My question is this: Does anyone on Devrant have personal knowledge that my hunch is true? Or to the contrary? And to what extent?
Context:
https://twitter.com/wideawake_media...16 -
StackOverflow locked my account. I'm hoping someone here might be kind enough to help me with a bash script I'm "bashing" my head with. Actually, it's zsh on MacOS if it makes any difference.
I have an input file. Four lines. No blank lines. Each of the four lines has two strings of text delimited by a tab. Each string on either side of the tab is either one word with no spaces or a bunch of words with spaces. Like this (using <tab> as a placeholder here on Devrant for where the tab actually is)
ABC<tab>DEF
GHI<tab>jkl mno pq
RST<tab>UV
wx<tab>Yz
I need to open and read the file, separate them into key-value pairs, and put them into an array for processing. I have this script to do that:
# Get input arguments
search_string_file="$1"
file_path="$2"
# Read search strings and corresponding names from the file and store in arrays
search_strings=()
search_names=()
# Read search strings and corresponding names from the file and store in arrays
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n "$line" ]]; do
echo "Line: $line"
search_string=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'\t' '{print $1}')
name=$(echo "$line" | awk -F'\t' '{print $2}')
search_strings+=("$search_string")
search_names+=("$name")
done < "$search_string_file"
# Debug: Print the entire array of search strings
echo "Search strings array:"
for (( i=0; i<${#search_strings[@]}; i++ )); do
echo "[$i] ${search_strings[$i]} -- ${search_names[$i]}"
done
However, in the output, I get the following:
Line: ABC<tab>DEF
Line: GHI<tab>jkl mno pq
Line: RST<tab>UV
Line: wx<tab>Yz
Search strings array:
[0] --
[1] ABC -- DEF
[2] GHI -- jkl mno pq
[3] RST -- UV
That's it. I seem to be off by one because that last line...
Line: wx<tab>Yz
never gets added to the array. What I need it to be is:
[0] ABC -- DEF
[1] GHI -- jkl mno pq
[2] RST -- UV
[3] wx -- Yz
What am I doing wrong here?
Thanks.17 -
It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.
The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.
Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.
What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.
It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.
Then, I got an idea.
Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!
So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.
It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!
Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.3 -
Adobe is predatory. I bought a subscription to Adobe Premier four months ago. After using it a little, I found Davinci Resolve (it's free) and decided it was just as capable for my needs. Upon trying to cancel Adobe, it offered me 3 more months at a good price and I thought, well, maybe I could still use it for some other things. But that didn't turn out to be true or necessary. I went to cancel today at the end of the 3 months and it said I would have to pay $94 for cancelation. I guess the fine print was too fine for my 49-year-old eyes or I wouldn't have signed up for that 3-month extension. I got on live chat with their AI, figured out how to get a real person, and began negotiating. They tried to sell me a lower cancelation fee. No. I don't want any fee. They tried to sell me other products at a lower price. I didn't need any other products. Finally, I used a little reverse psychology and said "Fine, I'll keep it. You win, I guess. Just tell me when I can cancel something I'm not using and won't be using and without being punished with a fee."
Apparently, that unlocked something in the Indian guy's call flow script and he offered to waive the fee. Just needed a moment to converse with his manager and get approval. That's 20 minutes of my life and billable time I'll never get back.7