API Guy.

He has a serious regex problem.
Regexes are never easy to read, but the ones he uses just take the cake. They're either blatantly wrong, or totally over-engineered garbage that somehow still lacks basic functionality. I think "garbage" here is a little too nice, since you can tell what garbage actually is/was without studying it for five minutes.

In lieu of an actual rant (mostly because I'm overworked), I'll just leave a few samples here. I recommend readying some bleach before you continue reading.

Not a valid url name regex:
VALID_URL_NAME_REGEX = /\A[\w\-]+\Z/

Semi-decent email regex: (by far the best of the four)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i

Over-engineered mess that only works for (most) US numbers:
VALID_PHONE_REGEX = /1?\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-8][0-9])\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-9]{2})\s*\W?\s*([0-9]{4})(\se?x?t?(\d*))?/

and for the grand finale:

ZIP_CODE_REGEX = /(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{1} *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$)|GIR[ ]?0AA|((AB|AL|B|BA|BB|BD|BH|BL|BN|BR|BS|BT|CA|CB|CF|CH|CM|CO|CR|CT|CV|CW|DA|DD|DE|DG|DH|DL|DN|DT|DY|E|EC|EH|EN|EX|FK|FY|G|GL|GY|GU|HA|HD|HG|HP|HR|HS|HU|HX|IG|IM|IP|IV|JE|KA|KT|KW|KY|L|LA|LD|LE|LL|LN|LS|LU|M|ME|MK|ML|N|NE|NG|NN|NP|NR|NW|OL|OX|PA|PE|PH|PL|PO|PR|RG|RH|RM|S|SA|SE|SG|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SP|SR|SS|ST|SW|SY|TA|TD|TF|TN|TQ|TR|TS|TW|UB|W|WA|WC|WD|WF|WN|WR|WS|WV|YO|ZE)(\d[\dA-Z]?[ ]?\d[ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}))|BFPO[ ]?\d{1,4}/

^ which, by the way, doesn't match e.g. Australian zip codes. That cost us quite a few sales. And yes, that is 512 characters long.

Posture difference b/w developer and a designer😀

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

A is for Assembly, a wizard's spell

B is for Bootstrap, so bland and the same. And also for Brainf*ck, will blow you away

C is for COBOL, your grandad knows that

D is for daemon, your server knows what

E is for Express.js, you node what is coming

F is for FORTRAN, which is perferct for sciencing

G is for GNU which is GNU not UNIX

H is for Haskell using functional units

I is for Intance, An action of Object

J is for Java plays with them Always

K is for Kotlin, Android's new toy

L is for Lisp, scheming a ploy

M is for Matlab, who knows how it works

N is for Node a bloatware of code

O is for Objective Pascal, you did not expect that

P is for programming, we all love to do that

Q is for Queries, A database is made

R is for R, statistics are great

S is for Selenium, you have to test that

S is for Smalltalk, let's make it all brief

T is for Turing Test, how human is this?

U is for Unix, build with all talents

V is for Visual Studio, built with all laments

W is for Web, lets build something cool

X is for XHTML, remember all that?

Y is for Y2K, I'm tired as f*ck

Z is for Zip, let's zip is all now.

Get yourself coffee and back to the grind.

Public sector. Guy wants to upload a PDF file into our system that exceeds our file size upload limit by a factor of more than 10. The PDF contains a lot of pictures.

His idea: print the hundreds of pages of the PDF on paper in b/w and scan it because b/w takes less space then colored pictures.

I am perplexed. He asked first though, so we could prevent the actual printing.

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

Me: Right, its Monday, time for a fresh start. Things have been unbearable, but i've nowhere else to go just yet. I gotta just dig deep, ignore everything bad and just get it done, It's all about positivity right? Lets just ignore the little things and keep moving.

*My morning so far, 2 hours in*

Remote dev: (timezone 5 hours earlier than me) Hey so whats the plan for this quarter?

Me: ... I posted a big detailed plan in the group chat on Friday night so you wouldn't be delayed ... but anyway, lets just move on. I need you to work on A, B and C. A is just copying what Android has already done, for B one of the backend guys working next to you is doing this, he'll be able to help you. C is all documented in the ticket.

Remote dev: cool thanks.

Local dev: So I was just chatting with remote dev ... yeah he told me he has no idea what he's suppose to do.

Me: ..... Ok i'll book a video call with him in the morning. Can't do it right now.

==========

Remote dev: Hey i'm helping the BE team do some testing. I found a bug in Android. Homepage says theres no trips. But Offers screen says there is.

Me: Ok so just to confirm, The "available" offers screen has offers to accept, but the white notification on the homepage saying "You have X offers to accept" is not showing up?

Remote dev: Correct!

*debugging for 5 mins*

Remote dev: actually no, the "accepted" offers tab has offers, but the homepage says there are no upcoming offers to work on.

Me: ..... ok, thats very different ... but sure, let me have a look.

Me: Right so the BE are ... again ... sending down expired offers. Looks like the accepted tab isn't catching it and the homepage is.

Remote dev: Right i'll open a ticket for Android.

Me: ... and BE team.

Remote dev: why?

Me: ... because they once again have timezone issues. This keeps causing issues in random places. BE need to fix this everywhere.

Remote dev: right, i'll chat to them and see if they can fix it.

==========

Product: So this ticket xxxxx is clear right?

Me: eh, kind of, so you want us to add feature X to user type A?

Product: correct.

Me: right but I don't see anywhere talking about the time it will take to build the screen for feature X

Product: What do you mean the screen?

Me: ... well, feature X is only accessible on screen Y ... we would have to change screen Y to support user type A ... you know ... so they can ... use the feature

Product: .... hhhhmmm .... i suppose you are right. Well we can't just add screen Y, we'll have to add W and Z, it won't make sense without them.

Me: ... ok sure, but our estimates put us over for this quarter. I don't think we can just add in 3 screens.

Product: No this is a must have.

Me: Ok so we'll have to drop something else.

Product: hhhmmm, don't think we can ... let me get back to you.

==========

Backend team invited me to a meeting at 6am my time on Friday.

==========

... 2 hours into Monday ... there must be vodka around here somewhere

The GashlyCode Tinies

A is for Amy whose malloc was one byte short
B is for Basil who used a quadratic sort
C is for Chuck who checked floats for equality
D is for Desmond who double-freed memory
E is for Ed whose exceptions weren’t handled
F is for Franny whose stack pointers dangled
G is for Glenda whose reads and writes raced
H is for Hans who forgot the base case
I is for Ivan who did not initialize
J is for Jenny who did not know Least Surprise
K is for Kate whose inheritance depth might shock
L is for Larry who never released a lock
M is for Meg who used negatives as unsigned
N is for Ned with behavior left undefined
O is for Olive whose index was off by one
P is for Pat who ignored buffer overrun
Q is for Quentin whose numbers had overflows
R is for Rhoda whose code made the rep exposed
S is for Sam who skipped retesting after wait()
T is for Tom who lacked TCP_NODELAY
U is for Una whose functions were most verbose
V is for Vic who subtracted when floats were close
W is for Winnie who aliased arguments
X is for Xerxes who thought type casts made good sense
Y is for Yorick whose interface was too wide
Z is for Zack in whose code nulls were often spied

- Andrew Myers

Vim is super easy, guys! You don't use arrows to navigate around the text, that's too obvious! Instead you use HJKL keys, because it goes Hup, Jleft, Kright and Ldown. You can also use B to go Beginning and E to go to End of the word, oh and W to go to the WstartOfNextWord.

- Hey man, ready to spend your last day in this company?
- I W A S B O R N R E A D Y

A2035/17 NOTAMN

Q) RKRR/QRPCA/IV/NBO/W/000/100/3535N12700E999

A) RKRR B) 1711160405 C) 1711160440

E) TEMPO PROHIBITED AREA ACT DUE TO NOISE ABATEMENT FOR COLLEGE

SCHOLASTIC ABILITY TEST(CSAT)

-----------------------------------

Anyone arriving to South Korea by aircraft between 13:10 and 13:40, all departures and arrivals will be delayed 30~60 mins.

*maniacal laughter*

/(?<digit>\\d)|(?<non_digit>\\D)|(?<alphanumeric>\\w)|(?<non_alphanumeric>\\W)|(?<whitespace>\\s)|(?<non_whitespace>\\S)|(?<horizontal_tab>\\t)|(?<carriage_return>\\r)|(?<linefeed>\\n)|(?<vertical_tab>\\v)|(?<form_feed>\\f)|(?<backspace>\[\\b.*?\])|(?<NUL>\\0)|(?<control_character>\\c[A-Z])/g;

... I need to sleep

Printers come straight from hell!

I visited my grandma. She told me that she has a problem with her printer. I printed something (b/w) and looked at it. It looked really bad. The printer showed an error message saying that there's a problem with the color cartridge. I took it out, put it back in and printed again. It looked perfect. But the message appeared again.
Every time my grandma wants print or copy something (even in black and white) she needs to take out this cartridge, put it back in and pray.

One time I printed something with my paper. I have the right paper for it (A4). The printer scaled it down...
IT PRINTED A VERSION FOR ANTS!
It took several attempts and wasted paper and ink but FINALLY it came out nearly perfect.

Printers are the worst devices I've ever worked with.

Gotham...

why, oh God, why do you have a scene in SE01 E17 at 9:20 min into the episode, where

J.Gordon uses reading glasses to a screen of an old B/W TV and magically is able to read a logo brand of a jacket.

How did the glasses add hundreds of more pixels to the resolution behind them.

This has ruined it for me, not watching now. Even Mission Impossible where they say "use DDOS to take over their systems" is better than this.

In PHP, this:
<?php
if($a < $b) {
$c = 'W';
} elseif($a > $b) {
$c = 'E';
} else {
$c = ' ';
}
?>

Does the same as this:
<?php
$c = ' WE'[$c<=>$a];
?>

How cool is that?!? xD

-_- every time I use windows recently, I'm reminded of why I haven't for years... I swear, the simplest things are so freaking hard to do. It's like, windows doesn't support W, but blog post A references program B, which converts Z into Y, and after spending 3 more hours googling I find programs C and D, which convert Y into X, and then X into W. Were you able to follow along? Yeah, neither can I. The logo comes up and I immediately get PTSD and start falling down Alice's rabbit hole only to realize I've just wasted 5 hours of my life...

Unfortunately, ASUS is horrible and refuses to make even the most basic, minimally-functioning Linux drivers, or provide anybody with the resources to do it themselves, and they put everything on GPIO chips capable of frying the laptop!!! I'm so freaking done...

I feel like an adult locked in a child-safe playroom full of baby toys...

Difference b/w Front-End and Back-End ;)

I was just watching a web series on X: the generation that changed the world, and damn!! Those X-ers (people born b/w 1961-1981 ) have really made changes that disrupted the whole world! Comparing to them, i feel like we millennials haven't made anything *that* disruptive.

- calculators happened which evolved to computers and then began a crave for knowledge and technology
- Netscape gave a new use to computers
- Tim Berners lee ,napster disrupted the way of sharing data.
- Google changed the way of searching.
- Amazon gave the true business value to internet.
- The revolution of music , hip hop and television.
- ...
(And these are just the first 2 episodes!)

Btw what do we millennials bachieved? Tiktok, heartbreaks, and porn fetishes :/

Convo b/w female software engineer and her boyfriend;
him-Hey babe
her-Hello world;
him-??
her-Ohh no, I meant to say hy babe, actually u r my whole world;
him-Ooo pls!...wt were u dnh anyways?
her-been doing coding for last 12 hrs with boss;
him-gosh!! ...did u eat?
her-0;
him-??
her- I mean false;
him-false?
her-sorry , I meant no;
him-ur mom called , so call her
her-mom();
him-WTF?????
her-I will call her...dont worry;
him-I think u should rest for a while
her-while(project!=over) {work();}
him-U r enjoying this...irritating me...aren't u?
her-what? :)
him-When will u come home?
her-if(boss==leaves){cout<<"soon"<<endl;}
him-Now its too much...its really annoying...are u getting me? Have u lost ur mind?
her-ERROR 404....mind not found!
him-u do realise...I m not getting any of ur jokes
her-JokeOutOfBoundException
him-Are u drunk? How many eyes do I have?
her-1
him-Idiot , I have 2 eyes
her-oh sorry I counted from 0
him-i think we should break up
her-oh no!!, dont break; continue;
him-thats it, urBF.exit()
her-No wait..... ; is imp , write like....urBF.exit();

Ugh am so done with linux.

I dualbooted ubuntu 16.4 LTS alongside win10 on my new laptop 3 years ago. Back then , the whole os and kernel stuff were new for me, but once i understood how things work in it, i always found linux to be a superior alternative for doing any development related task than windows.
The way terminal gives us sheer raw power to handle services and applications ourselves makes everything easy in linux.

Wanna run a lamp server? Install all parts by yourselves. Problems with the lamp server? You are just 1 command away to know which service/package is causing issue. Some python module fucked up? You can go on checking every package present anywhere on your disk. No permissions? Sudo.

But recently i got so much fed up of its gui. I have gone from 16.4 to 18.4 to 20.4 , but no version seems to handle multiple gui s/w running parallely .
I usually have the requirement to open 2-3 windows of chrome with 30-40 tabs, 1-2 projects of Android studio and studio emulator. But this shit blows even with just 1 project open on studio and nothing else! The even the keyboard and mouse gets stuck when i studio is making a built.
And don't get me started on how slow my system becomes when switching b/w AS and chrome :''( . Maybe there's issue with the dual boot or because i gave very large swap/root partitions when i first dualbooted or something else , but i am in so much pain :/

Finally i went back to win10 a month ago and was a little surprised to find that it sucks a little less now. Aside from the ugly forceful updates, it has been a breeze for working . The builds take longer time (fuck windows defender), but My Android studio (and everything else) does not lag when switching between multiple processes. I even once ran an emulator instance and it was still working fine . The process management of windows is very good.

I have heard that mac is kind of in middle of the 2 and better than both providing rich process management and powerful terminal commands . Waiting for the day when i have enough money(or no longer require my kidney) to buy and maintain a MacBook :/

Similarities b/w Java and JavaScript

Knock: K is silent

Hour: H is silent

Numb: B is silent

Wrong: W is silent

JavaScript: Java is silent

So many…

I think in general they boil down to: “you may be an expert, but I know what I want”

But the worst experience above all is one I had with a German school: the director/previous dev got angry cause they were told a real dev was needed (they were told this by most of their colleagues) and tried to actively make my job miserable. Oh and they requested an auto starting video with sound ofc! Q U A L I T Y - W E B S I T E

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

WTF I can't find any difference b/w Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin posts now...

Who says life is not just black and white...?

Convo b/w me & lecturer.

Me: Is one line that explains exactly what it does okay?
Him: No.
Me: Okay I'll make it a paragraph explaining it a lot more in detail...Is that okay?
Him: Nope, you need to elaborate for laymen.

I don't know what more I can add. Sick of useless documentation. Any one else have this problem?

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

Time for a 00:30 rant that has no structure!
(There is a theme tho)

TI-BASIC optimization (framecount is from TI-84 Silver, with the higher Z80 clock):

"0→S": 3 frames
"DelVar S": 2 frames
```
0
Ans →S
```
1 frame???
(Variable "Ans" holds the last answer given to the normal calc functions. This makes it blazing fast to use [for some reason])

also refreshing the real TI-8x line's LCD at its actual, normal rate is bad and *SOMEHOW* ends in LCD overvolting (makes parts of the LCD blue instead of dark gray) after ~15 frames. The TI-8x line's normal OS thing refreshes the LCD at 30-45FPS depending on their clock speed, the LCD is native 80FPS. Just figured i should point this out. (Yes, TI, you do make hardware, it's just that sometimes you should make it when SANE)

why the fuck did they make a multitasking machine that runs on a Z80 at, like, 7/8 the original Gameboy's speed (the B/W DMG, the original. The CGB had DoubleSpeed mode.)

In elementary school, when I got my first computer (a 286 with b/w monitor and a whopping 8mhz), I discovered that a .bat file was nothing more than a set of instructions.

So my first "programs" where nothing more than .bat files. Then, at summer camp, one of the instructors noticed I was kind of a nerd, so he introduced me to QBasic. Later on, a friend of my mother showed me Turbo Pascal 6.0. So I was already creating games when I left elementary school.

Then, on secondary school, I stopped most of my programming stuff and was mostly interested in drawing and making music.

But, on college I rediscovered programming with Flash, HTML, PHP and Director. This was around the time that AS2 and PHP4 were still cool.

Later on, in university, I became nerd full on, but still the main focus on web development.

TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.

Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.

Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.

My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.

Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.

I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.

Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.

I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers.

Most fun I had coding?

I was developing my first android app and the database accounted for all the weekdays.

It was a night and I was coding. I build the app after 90 minutes of last build. I was fucking amazed to see that my app was running perfectly on Genymotion Emulator whilst the same god damn build crashed on my phone.

As a new novice developer, I thought it could be due to the OS version difference b/w my phone and VB.

I went on to spent an hour or so, to figure out where I had gone wrong. I re-read my code multiple times and nothing. I could not find a single error in the code.

I was fucking speachless when it hit me, FUCK, today is Saturday (last build was around 11PM Friday) and VM's time is usually screwed (it was Wednesday there) and since I had not accounted for weedends entry in database, the app crashed.

It was really fun having this sort of a bug for the first time in my life. Solved it within minutes after that.

We had a dispute @ work yesterday on this topic :

aproach 1 :

$res = getSomeData( [ 'filter_1' => 'str_1', 'filter_2' => 'str_2', ... 'limit' => 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $data )
{
...
}

VS

aproach 2 :

$res = getSomeData( 'str_1', 'str_2', ... 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $filter_1 = '', $filter_2 = 'default_str', ... $limit = 20 )
{
...
}

I had used 1-st b/c IMHO it's more dynamic and easy to maintain and call ( especially when there are many params, most of which not used on each call )

and my colleague didn't liked it w/h his main arguments that one can not easily see the needed params and no default vals for them ( the latest could be easily corrected in the function body ). I'm curious to read your opinions, arguments & contra arguments for each aproach

Practice to connect the dots b/w your CV and actual knowledge

what is life if not an eventual step towards sadness?

i have been working professionally in wfh setup since 2020 nd have seen my dad work as a businessman for 20 years , then a fulltime wfo job employee for 5 years. i have been a wfo*(hybrid) employee for last 2 months as this is my first wfo job.

everywhere i go, i am told that the "work-life during covid is a lie, a mere anomaly in otherwise horrific work lifestyles" .

let's consider 3 lifestyles.

1. a software engineer graduated in 2023 and starting his first fulltime office job.

- guy goes to office everyday, travels for 2 hours, changes between a metro , rickshaw nd physical walk, works 9 hours in office, again travels b/w different modes for 2 hours to reach back home, have his dinner, watches some videos nd goes to sleep.

- in office there is no one happy, everyone is either bitching about or buttering someone.

- later he moves naar to office in a rented flat and his travel time is replaced by daily chores, like washjng clothes , cleaning home, stockings supllies and cooking etc.

- life goes on. he eventually starts making some assets (home appliances, car, home etc) and starts saving money. he also gets into relationship , then marriage happens, then kids come. the office days are full of office for all nd weekdays remain source of fun and entertainment for all. kids grow, move out and do the same thing over. death

>> souce of sadness :a monotonous life with no time for happiness in everyday life. he even meets more sad people everyday who are again just bitching, cribbing and lamenting

------

2. a small scale car mechanic with 2 labour.

- almost same life, just a bit more pressure, as he not only has to make sure that his employees are giving him enough output for their income, he also has to ensure that the business keeps running and generating revenues.

for him, their are no time shifts , he needs to ensure the shop door opens at 9am and closes at 9pm for business, while ensuring all the stocks remain available , revenue and sales are documented and business dealings are done. fuck the family fuck the food, fuck the home, he would sleep in his shop if needed and his future family would be just their to unfuck/provide these ignored essentials.

>>> source of happiness : no time/people to emjoy life

----

3. a social media influenza/motivational speaker : these guy hates himself from day 1 . they know they are just a fluke and even though they say they are "not working", they are pulling all the legs to keep their revenue source running : sending posts on trendy things asap, cold mailing, begging for sponserships, publishing content asap.. not sure if a single person exosts who has been a happy social media influenza for last 30 years.

>>> source of sadness : unsatisfactory work, delusional life

---

so what the fuck is wrong with life. i have a board that says "make dotenvironment @64 proud" . i am 24 and following the path of guy 1 in above post. i can prob make myself a proud man by 64 but how can i make myself a "man who lived a happy life" by 64?

tell me guys what would you prefer:

function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,p6){.
...
}

or

function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}

function b(
p1,
p2,
p3,
p4,
p5,
p6
){
...
}

if you read this rant before expanding, you got a complete context on how what function a is, its calling b 2 times and how function b looks.

if instead of the first option, i had used 2nd block, you wouldn't even know the 2nd param of b function without expanding this rant.

my point?
i prefer to keeping unnecessary info on one line. and w lot of linters disagree by splitting up the code. and most importantly , my arrogant tl disagree by saying he prefers the splitted code "for readability" and becaue "he likes code this way, old-eng1 likes this and old-eng2 likes this" .

why tf does an ide have horizontal a scrolling option available when you are too stupid to use it?

ok, i know some smartass is going to point that i too can use vertical scrolling, but hear me out: i am optimising this!

case 1 : a function with 7 params is NOT split into 7 lines. lets calculate the effort to remember it
- since all params could have similar charactersticks ( they will be of some type, might have defaults, might be a suspendable/async function etc), each param will take similar memory-efforts points. say 5sp each.
- total memory-efforts= 5sp *7 = 35 sp.
- say a human has 100 sp of fast memory storage, he can use the remaining 65 sp for loading say 5 small lines above or below.
- but since 5 lines above are already read and still visible on screen, they won't be needed to be loaded again nd again, nd we can just check the lines below.
- thus we are able to store 65+35+65 = 165 sp or about 11 lines of code in out fast memory for just a 100sp brain storage

case 2 function with 7 params IS split into 7 lines.
- in this case all lines are somewhat similar. 5sp for param lines as they are still similar which implies same 35sp for storing current function and params
- remaining 65sp can only be used to store next 5 lines of 13sp as the previous code is no longer visible.
- plus if you wanna refresh the code above, you gotta scroll, which will result in removing bottom code from screen , and now your 65sp from bottom code is overwritten by 65sp of top code.
- thus at a time, you are storing only 6 lines worth of code info. this makes you slow.

this is some imaginary math, but i believe it works

random thought:
Life= tension. But you are only winning it if you don't let these tensions divert you from "what you gotta do"

Life will always find a way to give you some kind of problem. if you are not tensed about something, you ain't living a life.

But we often start ignoring our favourite habits/ aspirations/ goals in order to tackle these problems .

For eg I had made a habit of meditating for 15 mins followed by 45 mins of workout b/w 7-8pm last year. but since January 12th there hasn't been a day when i could achieve this habit simply because life kept throwing random tensions at me.

1. first my hand got fractured and i had to leave gym for a month. "no worries", i thought. "meditation doesn't require a working hand and i could do start walking as an excercise from next month"

2. then my office got wfo 3/5 days. i will get back to home after 7.30 and on wfh days my work won't finish till 8 on home days. "no worries" , i thought
"i will shift it to 9-10 every night next month"

3. then next month office got wfo 4/5 days annd family started steps for buying a new home. all time affter pfffice went into those steps/discussions "no worries ", i thought. "it wiill be over by the next month and i will be free"

this next month hasn't fome yet :/

next week im buying my first ever car. its gonna be a benz. im literally taking a cash credit loan from a bank B, just for deposit of the car, and then taking another loan from bank A, to be able to buy the car on leasing for the next 3 years.

basically I'll be giving away my whole entire salary of 2024 that i worked as devops engineer, plus cash credit, plus leasing credit, just for a fucking deposit of the car, and the car costs only 35,000 fucking euros €!

thats not a big fucking deal. ppl drive 90,000€ cars every fucking day. or 50,000€ cars as an average. i am buying a below average car, or for me The Bare Minimum Car... and i still struggle like hell to do it.

im willing to go broke buying this car bc a car would never cheat on me. it would never lie to me. a beautiful car standing outside of my house always there to remind me why this meaningless fucking existence called life, is still worth living.

a car for me is beyond just a car or art. it gives me meaning to continue living. life by default for me is valueless. a beautiful car and mine, finally generates value of life. every time i get depressed (which is every day) i take a nice night ride in my new benz

its a 2020 car. and im satisfied with it. i also got offers to buy the brand new 2024 one. but that shit is almost twice as much in costs. dont have money for that shit. I'd need to work my shit job for at least 3 more months and save every penny JUST FOR DEPOSIT.

out of my budget.

im buying a CLA class. i wanted C class but that shit mad expensive! i think A class is too cheap for me so the only class i can afford and not look cheap is CLA. C class is the next tier. I'd need 2 more salaries for C class but only 1 more salary for CLA, hence next week (first week of september)

hopefully, this new car will get me new whores. i really do hope that whores will fuck w a nice car and want to finally go out with me. i dont care if they're using me for money (which im not even gonna have). i care about using these whores as a form of revenge for my ex whore blonde cheating on me for the past 2+ years

so aside from clearing my mind of bullshit by driving a nice car at night which i fully bought myself no handouts, driving whores in it would just be cherry on top of the cake. a bonus.

lets see how it goes.

WTF?
W_T_F?
W-T-F?
W$T$F?

how the fuck do you brand codebases?

say you've got a brand called dicks,

and you've got a website, api server, some SDK's, and whatever else. How do you format the codebase names so it's A, usable as a variable name, B clickable at the variable part of the name, C, that's fucking it

dicks-website can't be used in js because

dicks-website = require('dicks-website') won't work

dicks_website can't be used in url's and in general because double clicking any part will select the whole word, so you can't replace dicks_X easily.

dicks$api seems to work, dicks and api are seperately clickable, and usable as a variable in javascript. I already know that the $ sign probably fucks up many many systems so that's probably a no go

has this question been addressed already?

React is so flawed in the sense that it forces you to go a very round about way to implement interaction b/w sibling components..which just gets worse in large scale projects
I had to implement my own event management system for React that worked well in conjunction with Redux.