Yikes. Bad bot, bad!

I apologies for my bad English.

I was 14 and addicted to PC games, I take money from my dad and bought new games every day

One day he got angry and told me: "What's are you doing with your life son? I don't pay for your games anymore! If you can build your own game and play with it!"

My mother had a computer academy, So i ask her to teach me how to build a game! She starts teaching me VB6, It was amazing.
After that, i started programming, Searching for VB6 sample code all day.

We had a local online game and it was a time killer, So i build an auto bot for this game to play for me, wit VB6. It works great, And send it to my friends and they loved it. Then I create a website and put it there so other players can use it, And after some days downloads reach 5000 times! I was shocked! Then I put a lot of time and improve it, Downloads reach 15000! After three years it reaches 50,0000 and more.
Between these years I learned VB.Net, C#, HTML, CSS, JS, Java and Android programming. Just because of some game.
And really thanks to my parent to put me in this path, It's great.
I think I can never get enough of coding!

But haven't created any games yet, So learning continues :)

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Fucking precious fragile snowflake dick heads.
Some bot beats a contact form captcha and an email with "offensive" content gets into a mailbox, and they're immediately shouting to HR that we're not protecting them from it.

Bitch, we'll NEVER be able to shield your super special self from all the big nasty bad men on the net - GET THICKER SKIN YOU THUNDERCUNT

One more fucking whine like that, and I'm gonna get far more offensive than your fucking inbox

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

Would it be a bad idea if I mention my biggest project is a Discord bot supplying explicit material to a total of 7000 servers on my CV?
Honestly unsure.

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

I have a crush on my Zumba instructor (whose classes get booked out immediately) soo bad that I made a bot to ensure that I get my spot as soon as bookings open up

Hey guys.
Arduino + Bluetooth + L293D + car Chacis and 4 DC motors.

Finaly finished my second bot/Drone.
Actually finished it yesterday but had lots of problems with hardware bugs (learned so fucking much in a day).
Tought I fucked two unos with bad soldering... No they are fine, just won't turn on in the circuit that was already working (was fine running the code).
Redone everything from scratch with a arduino uno, it's perfect now.

Funniest part is how I got my hands on a 50€ car kit for almost free... So some Chinese store sended this kit instead of some cheap stuff. Saved another arduino with the chip rack (that one that you can trade the atmega chip), I'll save it to program single chips. Plus a h bridge and lot lot more cool stuff.
Used only the Chacis.
Next: esp8266 and camera... And maby a gun? Would be cool

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

I started learning Golang today and really like it.

The error handling is *excellent*. It always works the same way and is standardized, unlike the hell that NodeJS error handling is (.catch(), try).

Modules confused the fuck out of me. I eventually figured out how they worked, but Go really doesn't try to make it easy to have multiple source folders...

I'll probably be re-writing my Discord Bot in Golang soon. Being able to have just one binary output will make things infinitely easier. Compile-time variables are another feature that's nice and easy to implement.

The goal is only having to upload a single binary to deploy on production from my CI script that has all keys and stuff inside. Feels good to finally throw all that old bad JS code out and starting completely fresh.

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

How bad an idea is it to avoid having to write VoIP for my game by writing a discord bot instead that moves people between rooms that represent the literal rooms in game?

Bad bot.

I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)

(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗

First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂

Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.

I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.

The Berlin rental market is so bad that I have to spend my long weekend figuring out how to write a bot to send applications for me.. (or keep hitting F5 all day and still be too late)

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

I don't know if it counts, some weeks ago I wanted to publish my first telegram bot on github, so...
Well, I was quite nervous when I wrote it, and I didn't care about writing good code... That wasn't even passable... It looked like an american coffee... Washed, tastes bad, looks ugly...
I wrote it back in two days, changed module from telepot to python-telegram-bot (more pythonic), wrote a c extension for a xorshift algorithm and pushed it on github.
Well, that was quite satisfying, but I became pale when I noticed it didn't need to be restructured, but entirely rewritten

Is having a public repo on git with some simple hack that I've written for fun (for example, word bot for online scrabble) a bad idea?

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

AI bot for heroes of might and magic 3, the old AI is simply too bad :)

A question about image processing and machine learning.
I post random images of the Earth to Twitter. I would like the bot to detect if the image is bad one. How can I do this? Here is an example of bad image.

a discord bot i wrote for the game supraball probably takes the cake.
lots of functionality developed over years, unpaid and even a bad attitude by the other devs...
did it for the community tho...