Do you have a favorite dull software utility? Here's my favorite alarm clock that I install on each new phone:

https://f-droid.org/packages/...

I thought 90s internet would be forever then the iphone came and the internet got corporate shillings

now the surveillance state is coming... verify ID this, save the kids (as if they care about kids)

can we go back to the 90s internet. our own blackjack, and hookers! no verify, no paypal/internet money. only grassroots memes and wholesome trolling

Sorry guys, but I have to say this. In Iran we are facing a lot of pain, our future is absolute darkness. The regime has killed more of our people than any foreign attack. The regime has apocalyptic thoughts and will attack Israel as soon as it builds a nuclear weapon.
Please be our voice.
Hoping for better days all over the world.

When using AI to help out I sometimes think of a fitting analogy to represent how it impacts the work.

For hundreds of years nails have worked to construct things. And then someone invented the screw.
Those with hammer experience would say it's stupid. A nail takes 5 hammer blows to go all the way in. With a screw it takes 10 hammer blows for it to go all the way in.

Can't wait for the AI bubble to finally burst

Someone posted a PR this week, mostly coded using LLMs and spec driven development, which I left 15~20 comments on for stuff that didn't make any sense or was coded inconsistently. It's encouraging to see all of them addressed, and the general code of the PR look a lot better, as I approved it this morning. Despite all the things I don't like about this current shop, after 25+ years in software, this is the most I've really felt like a "senior engineer," as far as really guiding project design and mentoring people.

@retoor your mentions service seems to be off. Requests are loading forever.

how common is getting betrayed by people I wonder?

I wonder if I'm too paranoid outside of typical statistics because of subjective experiences

like learning some rich elite chick's sister was married to a hacker... and the hacker helped her family. and I'm here sitting like. I dated a hacker once. I felt like he wanted me to incriminate myself so he could blackmail me into marriage (he shared with me that that's how his parents were together... probably forgot he shared that). I got too paranoid and started talking to him less after that lol. though to be fair he never did do anything malicious against me, just dumb childish things sometimes

I think a lot of people just don't betray you because they just don't have the means by which to do it, too. like they just can't comprehend ambition, not that they're actually loyal to you. but this also makes them pretty lame pack-mates

I was too paranoid to take workplace related "opportunities". like someone inviting me to another job. because during computer science all the dudes would try to con you into going out with them or for nudes. so they'd say they have something you want so they could drag it out and then "negotiate" so that caused trust issues in me in regards to job networking. if a guy won't even show you his homework that he got a good mark on and you didn't on yours, and I just wanted to know what the teacher was actually looking for, would be hell in terms of jobs where you're bound by contract and monetary dependency, and any notion of pushing back is insubordination (nor does HR ever work, I found for toxic workplace stuff). so you're fucked if you're "close" to some dude enough for him to actually want something like that from you to where he's devising these things, or if he thinks you owe him because you "only got the job because of him", in my mind anyway

is it as grim as I think?

It's been a while since I was here last time.

What's new?

I fucking hate how ugly Angular is

lol AI worms hahahaha

I spent the last 5 hours running and re-running a script on a database, and trying to figure out why it doesn't seem to affect a different database. I was ready to get into the bushes with encodings and investigating how the LIKE statement interacts with them. FML.

Hello there!

From my 5 min lurking procedure, good to see this place didn't die.

So. I guess AI took my job... But not in the way people preach.

I survived the first layoff wave, but not the second. Cutting off on game driver development. Everything goes towards AI now.

Well, I get nice severance, and I already have another job, and I learned good shit, and can always pull the old FAANG style "worked at V".

Life goes on.

Wow, apparently when you're authorizing a Github App with your account there's always a "[This app can] Act on your Behalf" permission that you have to agree too

Bro what??? I just want to add https://utteranc.es/ as a comment system on my blog ;_;

Fortunately it doesn't actually mean what it says. It just means that the app can do all the *other* listed permissions *in your name*. I think?

This wording has been criticized by multiple people but apparently GitHub will not fix it for some fucking reason. Great way to scare off literally every single person who want to comment on some random blog. Because there's so many of those in the first place..........

I followed some c# course the past few days. .Net really has a name for everything, every code convention, every code syntax. There is no way, I'll remember half of the names. I still don't struggle with the names of my department and we are only 11 people after 6 months :')

After all this job searching, I start to wonder: "What the FUCK do companies even want?!".

If you value: security; loose coupling; explicitness; disk space; separation of concerns and being able to focus on the business domain of your software: stay the f*** away from Nuxt and Next

Test rant

https://justice.gov/epstein/files/...

~2020
Us: "We should switch from user-defined table types to JSON for stored procedure parameters. Its too much hassle to make database changes when we need to add or remove fields."
DBAs: "JSON is just a varchar and not structured. We can just keep adding number suffixes to the type name. See, Invoice15 works just fine."

~2022
Us: "Specifications changed, here are the fields we'll need to update .."
<4 hours later>
DBAs: "You developers need to make up your mind on what fields you need updated. My team doesn't have time to keep creating new user-defined table types and updating all the corresponding stored procedures."
Us: "Why not use JSON? That way the schema binding really falls on us to keep everything in sync. New fields or removing them would be easier, faster, and safer on a case-by-case basis."
DBAs: "NO! JSON is just a varchar and too slow for mass updates!"
Us: "We haven't needed mass updating since moving the data notification pushes to Service Bus almost 10 years ago."
DBAs: "JSON in SQL Server is still too slow, unsecure, and hard-coding field names in string is not best practice!"

~2024
DBAs: "We're only using JSON for this one stored procedure. Its going to be up to you guys to keep the your schemas up to date and be prepared to constantly make changes. We may not support JSON if this doesn't work."

2026: <more than 80% of the stored procs use JSON to pass in parameters>
Us: "Specifications changed, here are the fields we'll need to update .."
<30 seconds later>
DBAs: "Done. Fields ready to go in the JSON schema. If you need to add or remove fields, just let us know. Dealing with JSON is sooo much easier now."

What happened to ostream? I miss his stupid shit rants.

Just doing some math about AI financials and its pretty crazy:

A one-gigawatt data center allegedly costs $50 billion to build.
Lets say its written off totally over 5 years. The building, cooling and power infra won't be,
but the GPUs and CPUs -- which are really expensive -- will be much quicker than 5 years,
so I think this is a fair assumption, not to mention personell and power costs

$50 billion over 5 years is $833 million per month, divided by $20 is 41 million

OpenAI needs 41 MILLION (!!) customers that pay $20 a month just to pay for
this ONE data center, and obviously they require a lot more than that

How do you cope with genuinely hating your employer? I’ve been fully remote since 2023, and at this point I can’t ignore how badly it’s wrecking my mental health.

What makes it even worse is the company itself. It’s a 5,000+ employee mess built around ancient, proprietary, closed-source “high-security” appliances. Every single day, working in this environment drains whatever motivation I have left. It’s a constant barrage of bureaucracy, cargo-cult security policies, and security-by-obscurity nonsense held together by duct tape and ego.

They love preaching about “security” while running a brittle, opaque infrastructure that actively fights anyone who tries to do things properly. Every meeting, every ticket, every decision just reinforces how little they understand modern software or trust their own engineers.

At this point, even logging in feels exhausting. The disconnect between what they claim to value and what they actually build is demoralizing, and the longer I stay, the harder it gets to care at all.

Liquid glass, my arse.

Hr is where we keep anyone who shouldn't be allowed to get near anything useful. Now if we just could make some chatbot that fills their useless surveys and performance reviews... we could put this entire occupation in a matrix and be rid of them forever!

:big sigh: The industry recommends writing clean code... and what do we see pervasively in real projects at work? : )

I think you'd have to be lucky to join a company that doesn't write messy code... not just in one project, but in all. Legacy. I hate legacy. Arrghhh.

lol.

There was a time when Java 8 and React 16 were all the hype as if it were yesterday... and now we have Java 25...

The world of IT just moves way too fast. lol

if AI replaces all the humans what will the humans do do you think?

Creating mobile-first & responsive designs remains such an unfun experience. At least a lot of css frameworks makes it less painful but it still remains painful :(

How did we end up with such a bad convention for font weights?

Is thin thinner than light? Is regular thinner than medium? Is medium or regular the default? Is semibold thicker than medium? Is heavy thicker than bold? What about black? Why is it even named like a color? What the fuck is going on? Just use freaking numbers!

0 should be the default.
Negative numbers should mean thinner and positive numbers should mean thicker.