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Search - "bit rot"
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The Manager kept masturbating over "low hanging fruit".
The apples on the bottom of The Product have all been picked.
The apples at the top are starting to rot.
The Manager masturbated a bit more over the low hanging fruit.
The bottom of The Product is now so slippery with Manager Cum that the brave engineers can't reach the top anymore.
Time to bring my axe to work.13 -
Bit rot under scientific research: using a very high-end microscope, I was able to take a picture of bit rot in action. It's microtrolls eating the bits!2
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Late night ramble warning.
I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.
I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?
Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.
Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.
While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.
Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.
Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.
Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.
I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.
Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.5 -
Let's face it: I am and will always be a tinkerer. Yes, I know my ways around, I can sneak into legacy code bases easily and throw new stuff in there, I've seen software stacks. But scarcely sound design, really modular. Even from the cleverer, experienced ones. They can master more complexity, so they can handle more spaghetti. Some essay from the 80's had this grand idea to organically 'grow' software. That's how it looks like most of the times: cancerous, parasitic super fungi (armillaria). Yeah, we all know have to fight bit-rot and entropy, but it was all lost before already. We'll never get rid of legacy protocols, legacy code.
And even when we go green field, start a fresh. Yeah, take a great design, make everything new, after some months of throwing features and outer constraints at the thing, it's the same old mud again.
But we can still dream on: some day I will design great APIs, I will have great test coverage, documentation, UML design, autometed tests, fuzzing, memchecking, I'll work professionally, clean coder style.
Pfft forget it. Maybe change for consulting, because we'll continue to dream of the 'clean' code, so you can sell the next 'recipe', development method. It's like diets. As effective. For the one selling.2 -
I was just begged to play 30 minutes of monopoly with my family
With all those versions of monopoly I'll have to be more precice, it's the worst of them all
It's monopoly fucking zapped, you need an ios device to play it, it's been developed for the iPhone 4 and maybe a tablet because they didn't even update it for current phones, not even iPhone 5
The credit cards are a fucking joke, they work by touching certain parts of the touchscreen and don't work 85% of the time you try to use them, 5% of the time just choosing the wrong person
At least your relieved when 10% chance kicks in where it works for once
Instead they could developed for Android and used nfc tags making it reliable and fun, no it has to be shitty, cheap and frustrating
Like seriously, they could've also used qr codes instead, or just have fucking buttons on the screen because you need the fucking ios app anyway
The minigames are at least a bit of thought, but don't really make sense either
Money doesn't seem to matter, sometimes paying another player when it shouldve been pay to the bank (yeah, not only the credit cards are fucked, the whole money system is shit)
It's a fucking abomination of a game
Halfway through I searched for the company name on the board...
...
....
ITS FUCKING HASBRO, OF COURSE IT'S FUCKING HASBRO THAT FUCKING PEACE OF SHIT FUCKING COMPANY THAT DESERVES TO ROT IN HELL HAVING CREDIT CARDS STUFFED UP THEIR FUCKING ASSESundefined never again fuck them all to death bullshit hatred fucked up devil profanity i fucking hate hasbro hasbro7 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.7 -
If anyone has read any of my posts before you may know, they're usually of a certain... Shall we say, dark, nature?
Well this possibly represents one of the darkest things I've imagined (with regards to technology and programming) I've had.
I was asked if I want to be buried or cremated when I die and they seem so... Pedestrian and I thought long and hard about what would be a fitting way to honour my life and what to do with my remains and it came to me...
I want my flesh to be only partially treated with formaldehyde so chunks of me rot away and others don't.
I want my skeletal structure to be replace with titanium rods with actuators and servo motors where my joints would have been with an internal gyroscope to assist with balance and my corpse will be installed with some sort of IOT controller board with on board wifi.
The companion smart phone app will allow my partially rotting cybernetic zombie corpse to be driven around by a bored grave yard grounds keeper while kids are doing LSD pretending they're all that.
Make them really believe the apocalypse has begun and the dead have risen.
I could be a whole thing for future corpse disposal too.
"Smart corpses, for the loved one who will be more intelligent in death than they were in life."
Although that's probably a bit too harsh...7 -
The older I get the more vindictive and intolerant of other people I get. Especially on the road. My passive aggressiveness is off the charts. Tailgaters piss me off the most. They can rot in hell. If you tailgate me I am going to take longer to pass. If you don't, I will speed up a bit and attempt to get out of the way faster. It is petty, but I am fucking done with these pieces of trash. Fuck you and the shit hole you came out of.
I have also found that smiling at the other driver is the worst thing you can possibly do to them. They can't say anything because you didn't flip them off.26