reading a book on depression, which this psych dude I met apparently glowed about when I mentioned it. pretty sure this was a popular and pivotal book in psychology. "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy"

it has a quiz in it for "dysfunctional attitudes" which after you take it will tell you your psychological strengths / resiliencies and weaknesses / things people can abuse and manipulate you with, which will cause stress and eventual depression

then the guy tries to argue at the end of the quiz against you having the dysfunctional attitudes with this and that reason. which I'm finding quite validating because..

I took the quiz and scored it the first time I was like "whoa I'm so weak" but apparently I reversed the numbers because my brain is scrambled eggs. in reality I have no weaknesses, and the things that most annoyed people about me and had them try to put the most pressure on me are my strengths. I am so validated

but the problem is... ummm... everyone is highly fucking dysfunctional and they think you're the problem if you're different from them. if they can't manipulate you then they get irate and think you're good for nothing (you could just ASK instead of manipulating me. I always found this so disrespectful and insulting)

now I'm thinking my job PTSD / fear / anxiety is because everyone's attitudes at work were so dysfunctional. they really didn't sell me that such a life would be worth living. and in this book, yeah, literally those attitudes were tested to cause emotional and mental issues in people. wtf. I felt not built for this world but it is the world that is wrong -- according to this book anyway

so that gave me some hope but trying to research workplace attitudes made me feel worse. it's so wild to me that we believe these things as a culture and try to impose them on each other when they make us miserable

and workplaces seem to literally be looking for these "insecurities" (how I saw it before this quiz). that if you fail to agree or be friends with everybody that you're worthless. that if something you say upsets someone it's your fault. toxic competitive mindsets where you should always be "on" or you're worthless. displaying weaknesses is gross, etc. put others needs before your own. the stupid status or competence means happiness myth which always drove me wild about people because in my experience status is just a manipulation tactic and there's no gold at the end of the rainbow, just management then making everyone an enemy of yours by using you as a measuring stick until people unnecessarily hate you which is just so goddamned toxic (all the while you're not even making more money but you are working more unpaid overtime -- also the myth of "if you put in the work you will be rewarded" which they told me even though I don't believe in entitlement and then how am I supposed to rationalize that they promised me something and it wasn't even my attitude / belief but I got to suffer the depression from it anyway because they told me that was the worldview I should be having to belong and be a "professional"?)

omg and perfectionism. finish everything you start. I even got these at interviews totally unprompted, but it isn't like I lacked content for them to judge me on

I remember a "friend" heard I got let go at a job and he started laughing and saying what a failure I am and I was taken aback because I was having issues with my boss there. I felt _relieved_ they let me go, because it was causing me stress to try to work with my boss who wouldn't communicate her expectations to me but would always get mad at me and not explain why she was. to me that whole situation was dysfunctional. to the company, none of my co workers saw it as a problem, and eventually I contacted HR and a few days later I was let go so I guess they didn't see it as a problem either. it was a problem, objectively though, like how physics works. if you don't say what you want you're not going to get it. it was making me crazy trying to explain that to people. I was happy to be rid of the problem. but this guy for days went on how it was a personal failure of mine, but all I could think of was how I knew myself better from the experience. and this "friend" wasn't the only tech person who sided with dysfunctionality in tech. an ex of mine was vicious another time and you'd think someone you're dating would have your back, but in his head all criticism was always valid and he was in the wrong if he ever got any and should be ashamed of himself as a person and he put that on me and I thought that was so fucked up

recently someone got irate at me and terminated friendship because something a mutual friend of ours said to me was unhelpful and I told the guy as such. well said guy took it personally, and then I was under pressure to be "compassionate", and "understanding". yo what about being understanding of me? when I wouldn't go with the pressure he turned a cold shoulder🤷

I swear the world is fucking mad

Abayisɛm.

Ok so they want me to "taylor my CV"

Im gonna stalk the shit out of every recruiter in this continent. When I apply I will know the color of his underpants, his political affiliation, his entire background and his sexual performances (or lack thereof).

A while ago, i wanted to automate literally everything with AI. So, taking screenshots, clicking, mousing, typing automation it is! Of course, you can imagine how the process looks like. But the project failed because when I asked for x/y coordinates of elements in a nice json output from the AI (of the screenshot) it all gave wrong values. I found out that those values are batshit wrong AFTER building the whole application that only worked in expection of that part (kinda most important).

Fuck.

But it really understood "Go to the address bar of the browser" (and it would do on the backgran a query to dimensions of the address bar. that's where the neat AI comes in). It could locate elements with poor descriptions. It understood very well. Only coordinates went wrong.

The hoops you have to go through to summarize a document even using LLMs with 100s of billions of parameters is insane. Even when you get something that "works" with RAG, all you are really getting is a summary of the distilled version of the document, not a pure summary.

I've got a script that breaks down documents into manageable chunks with an overlap so the meaning isn't lost between paragraphs, and it works decently enough, especially when you add terms and definitions to the system prompt for things it has trouble with. But the context window is still a problem so you have to discard older entries, which means you can't correct previous items based on new entries.

Using vision models to OCR the image instead of reading in a text document seems to be working a bit better, but it relies on the image being the right size and you can't load in too many at a time.

The Orwellian irony is that A.I. agents can probably help me better at finding a job than most recruiters can. lol

Interview question:

We want team members who are passionate about our mission. If you’re excited about helping people live healthier and longer lives, tell us about a moment or experience that sparked your interest in healthcare.

So I was at the hospital where my uncle was working and i stole a temesta lmao

I'm so over this new job. Things move so slowly, everything is broken down into waaaay too many micro-services. Managers have to micro-manage because there are no integration tests and there are always production problems.

My last place was so streamlined. When things got in, they were in. Continually testing/continual deployment. The thing was a massive beast and had problems, but I could run Linux and there was a real sense of everything moving.

There's only been one chat in the 9 months post layoff in our old TeamBlind room and things seem to be going alright. They're finally hiring mid-engineers to replace the layoffs/attrition. They finally dropped Kanbanize, a terrible project management tool, and went back to Linear.

I'd never work for them again, but the work did feel more meaningful and the engineers were a lot better. It was also $30k more per year.

My senior dev pushed the backend on lab finally. It's even worse than expected.

- No documentation
- 1 query that retrieves data
- the one query is not even usable in our application without changes
- the total of 1 record that is able to fetched
- somehow misses queries he demo'ed in a meeting more than a month ago

What is your preferred coding style? Such as those imposed by Checkstyle.

This November shall be... Noirvember, i.e. watching Film Noir. Nyah, see? H'what are you saying, see?

Degrees of comparison are weird as they go in the "more" direction for almost every human language but not in the "less" direction.

For instance, there is hard, harder and hardest,
but if it goes in the other direction, it’s suddenly "less hard" and "least hard".

It’s even weirder for languages that don‘t fall back to the "more" form for long adjectives, like English does:
More retarded, most retarded.
Which is again symmetrical to the other direction with "less".

Just some shower thoughts…

My job is not satisfying anymore. I used to live creating beautiful pages from scratch and totally get a kick out of working for A-clients.

However i’m currently more and more turning into a software developer. Nobody cares if it’s pretty as long as it’s functional and working noone cares.

Ofcourse it give me freedom but at least half of the stuff i’m working on is not creative in the least bit and worse; is created by AI in seconds.

Are there any developers out there who made a successful career switch?

So November is epilepsy awareness month.

People literally shaking with excitement about this.

2025/6 is the year contrast dies.

Apple, obviously, with liquid glass (AKA, "I can't see what's on top or bottom!")

But now also, trying out Visual Studio 26, everything is just a slightly different shade of gray.

Won't anyone think of the clarity?! We have reached the point where we are so biased towards form over function, that our form is no longer functional! Bring back contrasting shades of colors in UI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have a cold moving through our house. Some people have it, some people don't.

Me: Do you have a cold?
Kid: I don't know...
Me: Is your nose running?
Kid: Yes
Me: Then why don't you go catch it?
Kid: ...shut up...

Shamefully, after years of c++ hobbyism, I've only now discovered the ABSOLUTE BEAUTY of constexpr

I thought it was just the "new way of defining constants", so I always skipped over it as more of a basic utility than a hugely powerful part of c++

I didn't realize it could do comptime code! I can pre-compile huge arrays into my binary just like I could with comptime in zig.

Fuck me, I feel stupid as hell. More c++ rants to come, surely.

I've always been a frontend guy but this time I'm ready for the backend

And no I'm not talking about code

The push for AI is going to put people in hot water and possibly jail. Here is one example.

Is it okay to put a resume into an AI Detector to determine if it was AI written?

If PII is not removed, and the AI Detector is a public service (meaning no control of where the data goes) then it may be a GDPR violation. PII is not a joke in the USA either. There are things you have to follow to protect that. Work history is also a form of PII. It names places you worked so someone could figure out it is you that way.

Also, why would anyone care if they used AI to work on their resume? People are being asked to modify their resume to match job descriptions. One tool to do that is to use AI to help with this. If someone does this, and doesn't proof read that is on them. Also, you have to tone down the flowery bullshit AI produces. It embellishes and flat out lies.

Rust is fucking hard! I think I need more estrogen.