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As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.
I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.
These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.
Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.
All I want to say is:
No time was lost.
This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.
Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.
One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.
You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.
You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.
You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.
You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.
Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.
Please, for the love of code...
Start and fail as many projects as you can.30 -
We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
So they were having trouble with the server always being slow and maxed to 100%, so the boss told me when wait times were hitting 5+mins due to server trying to catch up, he complained at me, said if I could get the wait time to 30sec to instant he would raise my pay to 90k a year, then walked away after I agreed, I was quite serious but I don't think he thought I was, so I decided to look over the system, IDK who but they put all the calculations and processing server-side for the CA's on floor then sent the completed view to the CA, so I spent months recreating the entire system except the server only pulled the data needed then the new client would do all the processing on their computer since they weren't doing anything anyways, I did a practice run today as its one of our peak days, wait times went to barely 5secs or "instant" according to CA's, I walked into the office, slapped that hourly report down after just two hours and showed the massive increase in employees production times.
That look on his face...
That look on my face...
That look on my next check...
Bliss10 -
I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.
There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!
27 -
Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom
A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.
Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline
Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file
I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )
First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?
After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up
Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )
Then i had an epiphany
"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )
But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )
Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,
It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore
Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story
TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.8 -
Second semester
Java - OOP Course
We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone
Neat shit
And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.
BUT
Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.
A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.
Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.
3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.
So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.
I loaded that.
The bug is back.
But
REPRODUCIBLE.
OMG.
So I started setting up breakpoints.
And guess what the issue was.
FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS
(Basically the calculations were not as expected)
Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.
Most satisfying night yet.
Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.
Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.18 -
client: the math on this investment calculator you made is wrong.
me: ok, how is it wrong?
client: one of our salesmen sais it not calculating correctly.
me: that's fine. i just need an example, or the corrected formula to use.
client: on this other website we put in the same information and it comes out different.
me: ok, let me investigate... this other site adds a fee every month so the output is different. If i turn that off the calculations are the same. would you like to add a monthly fee field?
clients: no, the calculator is working how we want then.
repeat 5 times at 3 month intervals.
client: the interest calculator is broken again. didn't we just fix it?
me: it was never broken. your people just can't math.3 -
Had to wirte and optimize a C++ program that finds for 1000x1000x1000 grid points the 100 nearest points for each (with an additional factor to make it more complicated).
It had to run in under 18 minutes to pass. No matter what I did I couldn't get it fast enough. I tried kd-trees, caching of certain points, optimizing distamce calculations by ommiting any irrelevant factor, saving points' calculated squares etc etc. When Ibwas down to 20 minutes, I realized, that my makefile had an error and ignored the - O3 flag...
Well, it actually ran 5 minutes with -O3.10 -
Rage..
Boss: 'I've got a PowerPoint presentation with 45 charts in it. Oh, and a huge excel sheet with the data for it. Please build some of the charts in our own software, with the given data.'
Easy, I thought.
Yea, thanks to the person that gave my boss the data.. The half of the important columns were removed (privacy stuff).
And.. Excel? Oh, and his calculations are nowhere documented nor consistent.
I converted excel to postgres, easy.
It took me 2 hours to fkn research what he calculated in one line chart, just to implement it in like 10 minutes.
2 hours, man I could made awesome stuff in that time!
I guess I should write this in CAPSLOCK to make it more interesting. I'm just raging in my head 😂1 -
During the first rocket fly to the moon, they developed a calculator for the rocket scientists to calculate the flight.
Today's smartphones have the power to do the calculations for dozens of rockets at once, and what do I do with it?
I PLAY ANGRY BIRDS4 -
Today, for fun, I wrote prime number generation upto 1000 using pure single MySQL query.
No already created tables, no procedures, no variables. Just pure SQL using derived tables.
So does this mean that pure SQL statements do not have the halting problem?
Putting an EXPLAIN over the query I could see how MySQL guessed that the total number of calculations would be 1000*1000 even before executing the query in itself and this is amazing ♥️
I have attached a screenshot of the query and if you are curious, I have also left below the plain text.
PS this was a SQL problem in Hackerrank.
MySQL query:
select group_concat(primeNumber SEPARATOR '&') from
(select numberTable.number as primeNumber from
(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as number from
(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by number) numberTable
inner join
(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as divisor from
(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by divisor) divisorTable
on (divisorTable.divisor<=numberTable.number and divisorTable.divisor!=1)
where numberTable.number%divisorTable.divisor=0
group by numberTable.number having count(*)<=1 order by numberTable.number) resultTable;
9 -
(Senior level engineering course and our professor used to work for NASA. This can lead to some fun anecdotes during class.)
Professor: “Because the ends have such a small surface area, you can neglect them in your calculations.”
Student: "What would NASA do?"
Professor: *without missing a beat* “They'd probably use the wrong units and crash into Mars."2 -
If a CPU were an employee...
CPU: Hey boss, I'm seeing you are giving me a lot of mathematical tasks that would really profit from splitting into parallel calculations. GPU's are great for that, we should get one.
Boss: But you can still do them, right? If you can do it, I'm pretty sure you can do it at GPU speeds. We gotta save up so I can buy another car!
----------------------
Boss: Why is this taking so long?
CPU: I'm overloaded with work, so I'm overheating. Maybe you could buy a GPU to help me out, or at least a fan...
Boss: You're overheating? Your personal problems should not affect your professional life. Learn to get your shit together or we will hire someone who will
CPU: *melts*1 -
It was a basic java lesson. We had four values that we stored in a array. We had to make some calculations with the values. Then we had to sort those four values. That's the solution our teacher proposed:
if (arr[0] > arr[1]) {
int temp = arr[0];
arr[0] = arr[1];
arr[1] = temp;
}
if (arr[1] > arr[2]) {
int temp = arr[1];
arr[1] = arr[2];
arr[2] = temp;
}
if (arr[2] > arr[3]) {
int temp = arr[2];
arr[2] = arr[3];
arr[3] = temp;
}
if (arr[0] > arr[1]) {
int temp = arr[0];
arr[0] = arr[1];
arr[1] = temp;
}
if (arr[1] > arr[2]) {
int temp = arr[1];
arr[1] = arr[2];
arr[2] = temp;
}
if (arr[0] > arr[1]) {
int temp = arr[0];
arr[0] = arr[1];
arr[1] = temp;
}7 -
So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.
As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.
This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.
One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.
This function had a very peculiar structure:
Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function
But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.
SomeVariable = 1
Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.
And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...7 -
We are devs right?
We have cpus and gpus lying around right?
We are still alive... right? 🤔
How about we do our part and utilise our PCs for helping with COVID-19 research.
I've stumbled across this little tool that not only keeps me warm at night but helps researchers with several diseases.
https://foldingathome.org/iamoneina...
It's like a a bitcoin miner but for research purposes, no it's not a dodgy bitcoin miner.
Oh and feel free to keep yourself anonymous as there are stats that will identify your username - when they work.
There are installers for windows, Mac, and linux distros so everyone can get involved.29 -
An overflow in C, the program was writing 16 Bytes in an array of length 10 due to some mistake.
The problem was this ended up overwriting another place in the memory that was used by another algorithm to perform calculations... So we thought that the algorithm was buggy all along.2 -
Imagine if you will, a fictional world outside our own.
In this world, the requirement for getting a drivers licenses is 4 years of research into quantum mechanics.
- Was it interesting? Yeah.
- Did I learn it because I had to? Yup.
- Will I use the harmonic oscillation calculations of a particle when driving my car. Fuck no!
- Did it cost me an ungodly amount of money? It sure did!
- Will some dumb people still say it was useful because it is the minimum (fictional) barrier to entry for driving a car. You bet your sweet ass they will!!!
It was about as useful as any made up requirement, make-work, self-funding, circle-jerking, waste or time and money to feed the pockets of people who are too scared to do actual work so they teach, can be.
I paid all that money to be taught technology that was old when my mother was in school.
In the first year out of school, with only a $300 subscription to PluralSight some uDemy courses and hard work, I learned 100X as much as everything they put in front of me in school.
-------
School has its place.
Children who don't understand the importance of learning and need their hand help.
Adult children (some of which on on their 3rd or 4th degree) who also need their hand held.
People too afraid to enter the real world.
Doctors.
-------
I would do it again because it is the minimum requirement of entry, but thats nothing more than a bullshit make-work project.
Play their game as long as you need to. Keep your own game in mind. Don't drink the koolaid, just fake a sip. Then when the time is right, play by your own rules.
Peace4 -
Just a heads up - there was a problem with the calculation of the "top" tab day, week and month calculations the last couple of days so there might have been some rants not showing up.
It has been fixed and everything has been recalculated now. -
Mining-Noob-Exp. #1
Just received some ordered ASIC miner from Bitmain. I'm very excited wether I'll reach the ROI or just bought some expensive heaters.
Lesson learned: Don't forget about possible (high) import taxes and fees in your calculations. 😐
Time to piss of my landlord who is paying the electricity bill. 👺
15 -
Urgh, fucking excel!
Why the fuck can't you handle a few thousand calculations you dumb ass piece of shit.
I am this close to... fuck, it crashed. 🤦♂️
I fucking give up.
Time to strap this data to a DB instead.7 -
R is the worst language.
* Indices start at 1, so you have to fix all your calculations by either +1 oder -1. It sucks
* Vectors and Lists are both neither vectors nor lists
* Data frames dont have a proper api. Simple operations like add or remove are a pain.
* The naming „conventions“ suck. Why on earth would add dots in your identifiers? You never know if its an object, a value, a function.
* The namespace is cluttered. If you import two libraries that deal with the same problem domain, it is likely that they define functions with clashing names that will overwrite each other defined on import.5 -
Wk92 makes me realize why maths and coding are thaught together..
The time your prof last wrote a program was when computers were used for actual calculations only.😁2 -
Looking at git blame, I think I broke a feature 8 months ago. Not obviously broken, just one of the data fields is empty in one of our calculations.
I don't know if it's better or worse that nobody noticed...11 -
When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”6 -
When you open a non-minified file with tons of difficult calculations only to see, that every variable is around 1 or 2 letters. :'(2
-
I guess I'm taking the piss.
I just spend half an hour wondering why a unit test failed; turns out all calculations were done correctly, just that -5 + 3 was being calculated and the test expected the solution to be -1.
Well, -5 + 3 does not equal -1 and I'm too stupid to add.
Half an hour. (-_- )2 -
People:
- human brain is imperfect, makes too many mistakes
- let's make a computer that could perform perfect precise calculations
- computers are imperfect, require a set of clearly predefined rules [by human] to operate
- let's create a computer that behaves like human brain - an AI
- ...
Guess what's gonna be the next entry :)18 -
I remember those times when I was a developer for an R&D company, I used to have calculations in my lines of C code determining the bits and the convertions to binary, hexadecimal, decimal...😂
2 -
Dreaming to be an architect as a child, to later discover that the world need precise calculations to work. Moved to 3D modeling, and then discovered Html trying to do a website for my models. From that to Js, Servers, Linux, C#... And the story continues...
-
Just learned how to solve linear recurrence problems with matricial calculations. This is absolutely wonderful.7
-
The first program that was used at a company.
I wrote it on suggestion of my father to help with simplifying calculations for rental machines at his work and once finished it reduced time from start to finished report from 2-3 days down to 30 minutes, and corrections could be done in minutes instead of starting all over.
It also featured saving and loading old reports.
And for context, this was 1987 and excel did not exist and existing spreadsheets was not nearly as easy to use.6 -
I (don't) like how some people say "If your code needs comments, your code is probably ugly and should be rewritten".
Well, asshats. You have never considered complex calculations/functions or "temporary" workarounds, right?
Sometimes, you have to do it in a not-very-readable way for efficiency. There is no way around that in that case, and comments that either explain the code below or provide alternative, slower code that's commented really help others understand your code.
If I ever work with you and you don't bother commenting your code at all (or rather use slow code because more efficient code doesn't appeal to your "muh code dun need comments" approach), I will hate you.6 -
TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.
I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.
When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.
With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].
That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.
I loved it!
However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...
Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).
I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!
little did the naive me knew :)
I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...
Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).
I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)
and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).
A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.6 -
!rant
I just discovered Frink.
A programming language designed to make physical calculations simple.
Funny sample calculations.
See:
https://frinklang.org//...2 -
And once again, Spotify just leaves me speechless.
I guess I don't actually need to talk about this clusterfuck of a mobile app getting more and more slow and unstable with every update. So let's talk about something else.
When I cracked the first limit, I thought it had to be a joke. 9.999 songs can be downloaded at once. But not all on one device. You can download 3.333 songs each to three separate devices - regardless of the fact that there is more than enough space left on the device and you are not even using any other device.
When I read this one [-> https://goo.gl/43YwKm ], I really got angry:
"If you move, or enter the wrong details, you need to create a new account (make sure you cancel the plan on your old account beforehand, and sign out everywhere) and subscribe to Premium for Family on that new account."
I don't even know how to respond to this except with insane wrath.
So now I cracked the next one. My library is full. The maximum number of songs that can be stored in the library is 10.000 and not one more.
If they wanted more money for the additional ressources, I'd even understand that. Yes, the suggestion calculations become more expensive, I do know that. And I would even pay for that. But there is no such option.
Instead, the company is making the most customer hostile decisions I could imagine.
Even though the competition proves that a multiple of such a limit is not a problem at all (Google Music: 50.000 songs / Apple Music: 100.000 songs).
And you have to create a new account when you move? That's hard to beat for impudence, especially wigh regard of the fact that no migration service is provided, so a person like me would spend a long time transferring all the stored music and playlists.
I'm not even sure it's complying with European law not to be able to see your address online, let alone change it.
And all of that because they know they can afford it anyway, since although the competition is a lot better on that score, they simply can't keep up in the matter of spectrum and algorithms.
And if I can only take 70% of my music with me when I change the service, I can just as well delete 3.000 songs from my library and stay with Spotify.
What a fucking wreck. I really don't get it.
8 -
100 weeks is ~ 2 years away.
It will be year 2020 then, the year i thought about in highschool 8 years ago wondering what I'd do then since 2020 sounded like a cool number.
It's time to write a letter to my future self.
Dear holodreamer ( version 2020 ),
This is your old version speaking from 2018. I see that you have upgraded to a better version of myself. I see that you are finally financially independent and preparing to move out to somewhere peaceful and better. According to my calculations, you should be feeling pressure from your family and relatives to get married. Looking from my perspective, it seems you had other plans than to settle for relationship this year, like traveling the world, being in the snow, mountains and living an adventurous lifestyle. I want you to know I'm proud of you if you are following though those goals.
Btw, do you remember that random muslim girl you met on the internet 110 weeks ago? Is she still in contact with you every day?! I hope not. Is she still super religious? She was a good chat buddy for me, a great alternative to a chatbots at my time but I hope you didn't get carried away with her and I hope you don't have to resort to chatbots to cure loneliness.
Did AI replace developers? Is JavaScript still the most popular programming language?
I'm waiting for your response.
Best wishes,
holodreamer (version 2018)2 -
My boss has been begging me migrate a nightmarish complex excel report he made to calculate the payout of a tiered rebates program with compounding rewards. Today I finally decided to make take the time and I sat down with him so he could break it down for me...
Me: *looking at the mess of formula's* it would be easier to rewrite the math than decode this - can you just give me the reward rules... where does that value in cellX come from?
Him:*pointing at the spreadsheet* There! All the rules are in there for you :-)... like it's some big favour...
Me:No I mean when you wrote this, what did you base this off? There must be something...
Him: *Very Gravely* No, no, no it's far to complex! It took me ages to get this sheet right and it balances so just trust me and use it ok?
At this point I will mention he's an accountant so yeah I fucking trust him... fast forward past 15 minutes of digging through what may as well be quantum theory and lo and fucking behold all 2 sheets and 100 calculations are mathematically fucking pointless. Aside from formulas like this:
$X10=+(((O10+P10)-((O10+P10)*$X$3))*$R$4)+T10
which is actually equal to (X10/R4)/L10.
Anyway once you compound and sum the "tiered" benefits the rewards payout is ALWAYS = customerSpend*1.81.
This is why programmers name variables. -
Heads up: if you process a big database and want to do some advanced calculations, do not, i repeat, do not attempt to do so on your pentium home pc.4
-
Working on future projections for the DevRant-Stats Site.
According to the calculations, I have 10000++ in 3 fucking years...
:/11 -
Update: https://devrant.com/rants/4676421/...
I told you all. I fucking told you. Nobody listened to me.
Good people just leave.
This dude who I look upto and is kind of my mentor in the org and has spent a decade here, just resigned.
What the fuck!!!!
And with that, the attrition in product team is insanely high, to the point that it's scary.
My manager is not responsive and is often reactive instead of being proactive.
While the leadership is super excited about the product and everyone says they are hiring more and more people in product team, the design says our product is not a priority for them and we are just left with one design resource.
I was conversing with my colleague and we both are super scared that they shouldn't scrap the product and fire us.
This seems unlikely with all the logical calculations that we did but in a capitalist system we have to be prepared for anything.
I am shit scared right now because there is no clarity on what could happen next.
On the other hand, my skip level manager is taking a lot of interest in my work and is working very closely with me and taking more ownership of our product than my direct manager.
Everyone says our product is a top priority and tech is super agressive about it.
One thing that could happen is my manager leaving and not telling us about it upfront.
In which we would just report to our skip level manager and growth chances would be even better.
But at this stage, this seems super scary to me.3 -
I found this on a wiki with Haskell Humor... it's interesting...
How to Shoot Your Self in the Foot With Haskell: Putting the unsafe in unsafePerformIO!
You shoot the gun, but the bullet gets trapped in the IO monad.
Couldn't match expected type 'Deer' against inferred type 'Foot'.
While compiling your program the compiler produces a type error long enough to overflow a kernel buffer, overwrite the trigger control register and shoot you in the foot.
After trying to decipher the type errors from the compiler, your head explodes.
After you've finally found a way to circumvent the type system and shoot yourself in the foot, Oleg appears out of nothing and shoots you in the foot for coming up with it before him.
You shoot the gun but nothing happens (Haskell is pure, after all).
Your foot is fine, until you try to walk on it, at which point it becomes mangled.
You have a shootFoot function which you've proven correct. QuickCheck validates it for arbitrary you-like values. It will be evaluated only when you end up at the hospital. You hope this doesn't come to pass, as it actually returns a bullet-ridden copy of yourself and you don't want to be garbage-collected.
foreign import ccall "shootparts.h shootfoot" shoot_foot :: Gun -> Programmer -> IO ()
shootSelfInFoot = unsafePerformIO . shoot . foot $ self -- Shoot self in foot 0 or more times depending on evaluation order
No instance for (Target Foot)
arising from use of `shoot' at SelfInflictedInjury.hs:1:0
Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Target Foot)
In the expression: shoot foot
You go to shoot yourself in the foot but the bullet is in the ST monad and the gun is in the IO monad, so you can't.
You ask Haskell to shoot you in the foot but by the rules of lazy evaluation you don't need the result yet so it doesn't happen.
You decide to shoot yourself in the foot but get distracted devising a ballistics algebra and wondering if you can do the calculations in the type system.
You want to shoot yourself in the foot but realize there is no Gun datatype so use Arrows instead.
You shoot in the direction of your foot, but since you are inside the STM monad you can just retry until you figure out what to do.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but you are perfectly fine as long you just don't evaluate the foot.
You shoot yourself in the foot, but nothing happens unless you start walking.
Don't forget about memory consumption! If you don't look, the bullet causes heap overflow. If you look, the bullet causes stack overflow.
You *appear* to have deliberately shot yourself in the foot, and yet your program actually runs perfectly OK due to lazy evaluation. (So long as you remember to not look at your foot...)
You aim the gun at your foot, pull the trigger and remove the clip. When you look at your undamaged foot, the hammer clicks on an empty barrel.1 -
The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.
The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.
It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.
The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.
It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.
This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.
It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.
Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.
It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.
And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.
I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.31 -
2 weeks and i leave my job.
Pro: no more dealing-with-math-msc-students
Con: i want to keep that juicy cluster to run my own calculations ;_;2 -
Last night, after reading one of my computer science textbooks, I couldn't go to sleep because I came to the realization that computers will never be able to think like humans. Because a machine does what it's told to do. It is incapable of thinking outside of the box. What will need to happen is that parts of a human or some biological organism, essentially the squishy stuff, will need to be combined with a computer.
What I mean to say is that computers are good at answering questions in an absolute way. Essentially, you give it a problem and it will click away at it until some output pops out. Yes advanced AI exists, like Alpha Go. But again it's only doing what it was programmed to do. Looking at ways to play a game and answering for that question. In this case, playing a game of Go. I'll guarantee you, that not once did it stop to ask **why** it was playing Go. It was simply__just__ playing Go. But that's it. That's the limit. We give machines data/statistics and we let me them give us an answer based off of that data or input.
This is how I imagine intelligent machines will come about. A biological brain will be combined with a machine. The brain will be doing alot of the questions, and the machine will do a lot of the calculations. Together, they'll be able to answer hard questions. The heavy calculations will be left to the machine, and the heavy thoughts will be left to the brain.
I mean technically we're already doing that. But imagine a machine/brain computer that does not sleep, can't get sidetracked and will never procrastinate. That would be a scary machine.
25 -
Automation always fascinated me. Not only it looks and behaves like a life form, it also can perform billions of calculations without making a single mistake while I can’t even multiply double-digit numbers with my double-digit IQ.
If you pick the right components, you can make an immortal, perfect machine that can do its job for centuries, even millennia without a single mistake. There is nothing else on earth that can do this.
There is a robot surgeon and its hands never shake. It’s just flawless. If it fucks up, there is only you to blame, the flawed, pathetic operator.
And now it’s time to remember that it was just a 40s technology all along. And now it’s time to remember that now there is machine learning. A whole new perspective isn’t it. All the mistakes that machines make are sitting in front of the monitors.
No wonder I decided to be an engineer.17 -
Almost burnout story? What about right now...
Customer was really positive about the new site we are creating for them then, out of the blue panic, they complain about features (calculations) which aren't implemented yet (they didn't provide any information for the calculation until 1 week ago.) And they complain that the site does not has any content
THAT IS RIGHT YOU DUMB FUCKS...
I can't magically create content for YOUR site... -
2020 seems to be the year of the "dev who has never seen scale."
TypeA -> "Here's a reasoned explanation for a change I think we should make. Here is the current deficiency analysis, here is the desired resolution, here is the course of action and all calculations leading to the resolution + data. This will have x,y,z beneficial result according to our operational metrics."
TypeD -> "Those were words. Why do you need that? Change is bad, learning is worse. This will just slow me down, development speed is all that matters; there is no chance that a poorly considered/factored/checked design could ever require a ground up rewrite or fuck us utterly in the long term. Why do you make my life harder? We could x -> y -> zBUTI haven't done the math and I really don't see the benefit in x, so z is pointless. What even is scale?"
The consequences of the war caused by the ever-widening gap between engineers and developers is low key terrifying.12 -
Sitting in a board room with about 20 people all who have flown in from different parts of the world to discuss the project plan for a web app with an international user base.
We are discussing a web form with a dynamic layout based upon the users profile. Users enters a ton of information, calculations, are made, and info in stored into a db. Info can be updated and will be reported upon later.
One of the project leads representing Europe suggest that the form be exported into Excel so that the user can fill it out in Excel only to be imported via the application. WTH!!!! Later I found out this was that leads 2nd week with the company. Why were you even at the meeting and why did you have input?3 -
-- This is my first rant so sorry if it's bad--
We have a nice project that I am working on that needs to store and interact with location data. It is a .NET Core API using Entity Framework Core to interact with the database. All good and well. Until today when I started working on the implementation of storing location data we retrieve from mobile devices.
SQL has a nice data type named: "Geography" which can store a location and do calculations on it with queries. Such as proximity and distance which is what we need.
But then it turns out that EntityFramework Core does not have support for the Spatial data types. even though version 6 did have Spatial support.
Then i found the following issue on GitHub: https://github.com/aspnet/...
Turns out this feature has been requested since 2014 and is even on the "High-priority" list and is still not implemented to this day. Even though in the issue many people are asking to have this implemented.
WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG MICROSOFT!!
So now i have to figure out how to work around this. But that is an issue for tomorrow.1 -
This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.
The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...
Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.
The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.
It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.
There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.
The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.
They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.
Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.4 -
I recently discovered, that Python is much better tool for scientific calculations then MATLAB. If only I had figured this earlier, my studies could be so much easier...2
-
An Apple Watch on a girl's wrist.
A smartwatch is a computerized wristwatch with functionality that goes beyond timekeeping. While early models can perform basic tasks, such as calculations, translations, and game-playing, 2010s smartwatches are effectively wearable computers.
3 -
RANT
We use Exact for our time sheets/hour tracking. How it's supposed to work:
-Manager plans my hours in Exact.
- I work those hours on the given projects
== All fine till here ==
But then ... there is a button (don't know the correct translation) "realise" which books the planned hours for me. So I don't have to do it manually.
This simply didn't work!! No one seem to know why not... Not even the guys at Exact.
Since it's web based I opened the developers window and looked for the call behind the button. You would think it would be at least an Ajax call thingy (I'm not completely into JS)
Turns out it's a readable JS function!
It doesn't stop there... It first makes all calculations on what to display, at last, at the fucking end, it checks a setting whether to proceed the booking or not!!!!
So I found and switched the setting and tried the button again.... Now it fucking works...
No fucking way I am going to tell Exact what the problem is 😫2 -
Background story:
One of the projects I develop generates advice based on energy usage and a questionare with 300 questions.
Over 400 different variables determine what kind of advice is given. Lots of userinput and over a thousand textblocks that need to show or not.
Rant:
WTF do you want me to do when you tell me. It's not giving the right advice for the lights.
Why the for the love of.. do I need to ask you everytime. If something is not working. Tell me what and for wich user. Don't tell me calculation whatever is not working, I don't know that calculation. Your calculations are maintainable in your cms.
And how, like I really wonder, do you expect me, when not telling me what user is having this problemen to find and fix it, You just want me to random guess one of the thousands users that should be given that specific advice?
FCK, like 80% of my time solving problems is spend trying to figure out wtf your talking about.
And then what a miricale the function is doing exactly what is it doing but you forgot a variable. It's not like the code I write suddenly decides it does not feel like giving the right answer.3 -
The Matrix. Then use the brains of the people plugged in like a computer cluster for large calculations.3
-
My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.
So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.
Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.
I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.
Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.
Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.
Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.
I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P
Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.5 -
So for a while I have wanted to build a raspberry pi cluster. In the spirit of shia labeouf I got started last saturday.
I had two pies lying around so I figured I'd run some experiments before I invested in a lot of hardware. After about a day I had turned the two pies into a shared cluster when disaster struck....
I had completely ignored the fact that you cannot run 32 or 64bit software on an arm processor (I know... I'm a java developer). So when I booted my service and the load balancer, I found that nothing worked. So pretty bumbed out, I quit the project.
Later that day I found a crazy guy who had bought a batch of 400 small form factor PSUs (300W) and internally I laughed at him a little. I mean, who's gonna sell 300W irregular power supplies. Then, just as I was about to go to bed I found this guy, he was selling from a batch of CPU-onboard motherboard for 10 bucks each and everything clicked!
I did some quick calculations and decided I could probably gather enough cash to get: 10 motherboards, 10 2GB ram dimms, 10 Sata disks and 14 PSU (in case some fail) and some misc hardware for networking and such.
So... Long story short, I am going to build a cluster computer, the first version is going to have 10 nodes and I am waiting for delivery right now!12 -
[story of your first dev project] - i really think there should be a headline like that for wk rants
Anyways, it was a while back, le college teacher approached my friend and me asking if we wanted to do a project. We said sure, it was a medium sized data analysis project. We got the specs with a lot of formulas, basically implement them all and make a web frontend, thats it. Took like a year but we did it. Few months later teacher is furious because the calculations didnt give him data that he expected (by expect i mean he thought that a distribution formula would accurately yield 200+ data fields from around 4) and blamed it on us. Not the retard other professor who fucked up half of the formulas. Ok.1 -
A Rant that took my attention on MacRhumors forum.
.
I pre-calculated projected actual overall cost of owning my i5/5/256 Haswell Air, which I got for $1500.
After calculations, this machine would cost me about $3000 for 3 years of use.
(Apple Care, MS Office Business, Parallels, Thunderbolt adapter to HDMI, Case... and so on).
Yea... A lot of people think it's all about the laptop with Apple. nah... not at all. There's a reason Apple is gradually dropping the price of their laptops.
They are slowly moving to a razor and blade business model... which basically is exactly what it sounds like - you buy the razor which isn't too expensive, but you've got no choice but to buy expensive additional blades.
I doubt Apple is making much money from laptop sales alone... well definitely not as much as they were making 5 years or so ago (remember the original air was about $1800 for base model, and if i remember correctly - $1000 additional dollars to upgrade to 64GB SSD from the base HDD.
Yes, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR 64GB SSD!
Well, anyways, the point is that Apple no longer makes them BIG bucks from the laptop alone, but they still make good profits from upgrades. $300 to go to 512GB SSD from 256, $100 for 4GB extra ram, and $150 for a small bump in processor. They make good profits from these as well.
But that's not where they make mo money. It's once you buy the Macbook, they've got you trapped in their walled garden for life. Every single apple accessory is ridiculously overpriced (compared to market standards of similar-same products).
And Apple makes their own cables and ports. So you have to buy exclusively for Apple products. Every now and then they will change even their own ports and cables, so you have to buy more.
Software is exclusive. You have no choice but to buy what apple offers... or run windows/linux on your Mac.
This is a douche level move comparable to say Mircrosoft kept changing the usb port every 2-3 years, and have exclusive rights to sell the devices that plug in.
No, instead, Intel-Microsoft and them guys make ports and cables as universal as possible.
Can you imagine if USB3.0 was thinner and not backwards compatible with usb2.0 devices?
Well, if it belonged to Apple that's how it would be.
This is why I held out so long before buying an apple laptop. Sure, I had the ipod classic, ipod touch, and more recently iPad Retina... but never a laptop.
I was always against apple.
But I factored in the pros and cons, and I realized I needed to go OS X. I've been fudged by one virus or another during my years of Windows usage. Trojans, spywares. meh.
I needed a top-notch device that I can carry with me around the world and use for any task which is work related. I figured $3000 was a fair price to pay for it.
No, not $1500... but $3000. Also I 'm dead happy I don't have to worry about heat issues anymore. This is a masterpiece. $3000 for 3 years equals $1000 a year, fair price to pay for security, comfort, and most importantly - reliability. (of course awesome battery is superawesome).
Okay I'm going to stop ranting. I just wish people factored in additional costs from owning an a mac. Expenses don't end when you bring the machine home.
I'm not even going to mention how they utilize technology-push to get you to buy a Thunderbolt display, or now with the new Air - to get a time capsule (AC compatible).
It's all about the blades, with Apple. And once you go Mac, you likely won't go back... hence all the student discounts and benefits. They're baiting you to be a Mac user for life!
Apple Marketing is the ultimate.
source: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...3 -
I was an introvert while growing up hence I found interacting with non-living things easier. When I was 11 i.e. like 17 years I told my parents to enroll me into computer classes. They didn't see much of a future in it so they refused. I fought hard and finally they agreed. Hence started my journey with computers.
First week all students were allowed to explore the computer we were assigned and also were taught to play basic Windows 95 default games to make it interesting. It was all fun. Next week the teacher said he would be teaching us how to tell computer to do what we want i.e. programming. Hearing that I could make my computer do what I want excited me a lot. I felt I could finally communicate to a computer. This is how I learnt BASIC. I was so amazed I could do so many things like take input and do calculations etc. I decided I would do this kind of job in the future if it exists.
So now I am actually doing what I wanted to do when I started programming i.e. coding job!1 -
Not sure if a rant but.
How many of you guys gets so bored durning meetings on all the none important stuff or not related to you that you just start codeing instead?
I have these hours long meetings with analist that can talk calculations all dat long, how usefull they are, wich analyses you can do for them. I really don't care. Just tell me the formula and I will make it. Do not care whether A is voltage or the amount of pink clouds on sunday.3 -
So today's the day the child leaves the babysitter.
Today's the fucking day that I learn why the fuck everybody says date's are a fucking headache. Or was it yesterday? I don't know.
Fucking dates, timezones, time calculations...5 -
!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/1 -
!story
I finally joined uni. With all of its fucking bureaucracy. But I love the feel I get being there with people I know wants same stuff as mine. I picked Math.
It's equally ambitious and crazy as 1) My previous school didn't prepare me at all, (not even limits for fuck's sake) 2) it has given me an antidepressant boost, but I'm also a person that yes goes on anyway but at the first difficulty I second guess my own ability in first place to overcome what's ahead (so, depressive rebound). 3) I have dyscalculia and adhd. Lucky me, not the kind of dyscalculia that makes you unable to grasp logic, it's more like I can't do calculations in my head and 8x7 is HARDER to me than explain graph theory or some stuff about riemannian geometry.
What did you all feel when you went to university? Because I'm feeling a lot ignorant, but worse, stupid, very stupid.
Any advice?2 -
Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.
Little backstory. Starts with a question.
What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?
Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.
Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.
Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.
I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.20 -
Ugh. That may have been a mistake.
I'm deep in a large effort to refactor my project. It's a one man deal and something I've been working on pretty much every day in some fashion for nearly 10 years (five years ago I started a scratch rewrite to move from a fully CGI server rendered application to a browser rendered asynchronous version built around JS) and that took me three years.
I started this refactor about 8 weeks ago. Turns out I've been tackling the largest modules and progress has been decent. So that's good.
But I got to wondering ... Just how much code is there?
So I whipped up a quick script to do some calculations. Read each file and get a line and word count, skipping empty lines.
In JS it turns out I have 83,973 lines and 467,683 words.
On the back end, 86,230 lines and 580,422 words.
Average publishing stats say the are about 250 words/printed page.
That means I'm confronting refactoring 1,870 pages of JS. That's the size of several decent sized novels. (I think I've done the equivalent of Maybe 400 at this point).
Makes me feel like the walls are creeping in to know how much is left to go ... -
I found out today that my company is going to make a huge deploy to implement non-binary genders on our platform, well, they see woman as 0 and man as 1 (insurance company), and they make calculations with the NUMBER, like, value = gender x risk.. The funny part is that this way to interpret gender is going to be awesome when the "2" be deployed, the non-binary genders.. well, fuck, all calculations will be refactored (20 years of development)6
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Why are you trying to multithreaded c++ file i/o? If you can't write c++ code that's faster than your hard drive, please just don't write c++.
Literally no complex calculations, just some insane string formatting.10 -
So, I produce a monthly report for our customer service department each month, and this report includes various statistics related to our company's support performance. Two of the included statistics are the "Average Speed of Answer" (ASA for short) and the "Abandoned Call percentage" (ABD % for short) that are derived from client calls to support.
The formulae for these values are:
- ASA = time in seconds all calls that were answered spent waiting to be answered divided by the number of answered calls - displayed as hh:mm:ss
- ABD % = number of abandoned calls minus those that were abandoned in under 10 seconds (referred to as "short abandoned") divided by the sum of total calls that were offered minus the sum of short abandons & transfers
These statistics are also included in a daily version of the same report that all Customer Service leadership personnel have access to.
Now, every single fucking month the same Sr. Manager always has some kind of "discrepancy" with the monthly report that ALWAYS boils down to his dumbass trying to average shit on the daily Excel reports for that month and it being different than what the monthly report is showing. Now, these reports ONLY display the calculated value for any calculated fields mind you - not the raw values of the DB fields used in said calculations.
This month I have to tell this shit-for-brains that you can't just take an average of ASA & ABD % from the Daily's and compare them to the Monthly numbers because their calculated fucking fields!!!
Come to think of it, this has been his issue for like the past 5 months, and I seriously can't fix stupid!
Sometimes I just wanna reply to his snarky ass, corporate bullshit emails like, "BRUH!, The only motherfucking discrepancy I can locate is your IQ and your fucking title - that shit don't correlate homie! Need to take that ass back to High School statistics or something!"
But I digress...
TL;DR
I have to deal with a Sr. Manager who doesn't fucking realize you can't average a calculated field from a daily report and think it's gonna match up with the monthly report. I believe he is borderline retarded, and I often wonder how he got the "Sr." In his title let alone "Manager".
Oh wait, this is corporate America - you just gotta kiss the most ass... never mind.4 -
I'm covering for a colleague who has 2 weeks of vacation. Everything is made with Drupal 7, and it's a backend + frontend chimera with no head and 50 anuses.
So, last monday i get told i have to show a value based on the formula:
value * (rate1 - rate2) / 2
On thursday, every calculation in that page is suddenly wrong and I get balmed for it. Turns out, now it has to be:
value * (rate1 - rate2) / rate1 / 2
Today, I get told again the calculations are wrong. "It has to be wrong, the amount changes when rate1 changes!". There'll be a meeting later today to discuss such behaviour.
All these communications happened via e-mail, so I'm quite sure it's not my fault... But, SERIOUSLY! Do they think programmers' time is worthless? Now I'll have to waste at least 1 hour in a useless meeting because they cba to THINK before giving out specs?!
Goddammit. Nice monday.2 -
!rant
Today I found a huge performance bug of a coworker which brought our production servers to the limit.
Some heavy calculations were made 3 times when visiting some special pages... Instead of eg. 5 seconds the load needed 15 seconds.😮
So happy that the servers will run smooth again!1 -
Trying to explain a game developer in a community, why its a bad idea to only make client side patches for equiptment to appear correctly..
me: because the server needs to be aware of the changes made to avoid faulty calculations, for instance if the client calculates a fatal but the server disagree..
dev: but it works...
me: yes, but not optimally.
dev: Working as intended (TM)
me: ... teh fuq?
not sure if he's a bad troll or wut..1 -
Tired of all those timetables, application, motivational quotes ...
Coded my own assistant : Robo1100
Still full of ifs but properly understands what I mean (I don't have s very wild vocabulary )
Can I call it artificial intelligence?
Some of his features:
- determining current tasks according to date and time
- tracks the task and show you how many percent you've done
- plays different musics according to your mood (if you start nagging he'll play motivational rock and so on)
- does simple calculations for you
-gives you simple informations like time , whether,...
- remind you the events of the day
- reads a rsnfom cool quote at startup
- most importantly speaks with s human voice
-...
Any recommendations?7 -
Started out with python, while meaning to learn javascript.
I am now competent in python. Im still not sure how it happened.
Started python because I got tired with doing repetative calculations by hand. I think I had like a phobia of problem solving with nested loops. any time I thought a problem would require nesting, especially more than one nested loop, I would just avoid doing it, or end up doing it by hand.
Wrote so many goddamn loops though in the process of exploring graphs, doing things by hand seems like a nuisance. Thinking in loops has its own zen or something.
Now I just need to get over my fear of json-based CLI-enabled configuration-over-convention.1 -
So to test my server code that do calculations on large numbers that get above 10 digits 90% of the time.
The end users found a custom web page with basic javascript doing the calculations.
Now I get to explain why that doesn't work. -
!dev
So, this lecturer had a consistent set of question types every fucking year for the past 5 or so years. But now, even while covid and all the other shit that has been happening, he decides to change his question types, all of which used to be calculations.
I mean, really, which dumbass told him it's a good idea?
Aaaaaaauuuuuurghhhhhh 😡😤😠😫😩😖😭😡💀 I'm gonna fail 😭3 -
>First day back at work.
>Boss tells me something is totally fucked up on an app we've been developing for the past 2 years
>see the bug, can't really understand why, but looks like it's a conversion issue (from string to float)
>realize that on some phones, the conversion of the number "9.1234" becomes "91234" and then after calculations, becomes "9123,4" which of course fucks everything up
>looking through it and realize that from the latest version on, unity convers string based on current culture
>still trying to figure out how to fucking specify that it must use english culture all over the place1 -
Rough start for a week. The coffee machine nearest to my office went broken and now I have to do serious analyzing when picking up coffee. If I miss my calculations, I'll have to engage in a conversation and coffee + conversation is usually a waste of perfectly good coffee.
All this brain work is reduced from my mental capacity I should be using for actual development work.
Evolution - give me a coffee gland! NOW!2 -
My last week of 2017 sucks! The function that been assigned to me has been 7 months until i doing it without any priority tasks. The bad for this, is becoming worse for the clients and they really want it until the end of 2017, so happy new year motherfuckers.
Here's the story, the function i am doing requires a heavy calculations, and i am no brainer in math, though my logical skills, hopes me up to made it quickly as possible. However i am full of workloads/to-do for the past 3 months, that i am unable to comply my documents regarding my employment!!
Much worse for this is the coding guidelines. There no fucking guidelines at all, like do what i want just to make it work, but my team lead ironically speaking that never touch that because it's already working. Dude, the server response was the real issue there and i was supposed to handle that function because your fucking json was not formatted well! Shout out to git for giving me a saving grace not to fire me.
Lastly, the leader's attitude. You're so sarcastic as fuck! Of course i won't get mad at you on personal matters, i understand. But on work, the way you communicate was not like my any mentor/prof that i ever met!! I hate my fucking work. Hope my 2018 would do my best, AND I AM GONNA MAKE MY OWN GUIDELINES ACCORDING TO YOUR ASSES!! HAPPY NEW YEAR, GODDAMNIT!! -
Managing a small team - poorly.
I was in charge of testing a legacy calculations engine together with two scientists, for whom I set up a python and interop environment so they could test the engine easily.
The two were very excited at the thought of validating the calculations and in fact found many bugs.
I was very supportive, told them to fix the bugs and gave them a pet on the back.
All three of us were happy the legacy engine is shaping up, that's until my boss heard of it, and boy did he grill me hard for it.
Turns out our efforts were highly unappreciated by the client, whose only request was that we test the engine and report the bugs. Not to fix them. My goodwill cost the company a lot of money, since the client paid by the hour, and was now due a refund. Crap.
It took me a year to finally understood the moral of the story. Which is to always respect the client's wishes and convey maximum transparency to him. -
I almost everytime these days start counting from zero in real life and f**k up the calculations and recalculate and do the same mistake. I hate programming.
Happy programmers day -
So I started a new job back in April with a the developer on a government project being developed by a reputable international organization, lets call them R. Once the project reaches a an acceptable release stage, maintenance, changes and integration into the eco system falls to me. This project started about 3 years ago and the original team from R was "changed" because they claimed the product was ready for go live when it wasn't.
My job since then has mostly been analyst and QA work identifying issues with conversations like this:
Me to Client: I don't think this feature is working as it should be.
Client: You're right.
R.dev: This feature is working according to signed off SRS and assumptions register.
Client: Yes but the SRS and assumptions are wrong.
Me: Facepalms. Oh this other feature isn't working correctly either, this should generate A according to SRS but I'm getting G.
R.dev: Yes but that would take a major change to the system.
Me: [Blank stare]
R.dev: Ok, we can give you E.
Client: OK we corrected the errors in the SRS and the assumptions register we've signed off on this, please use these going forward.
R.dev: OK we reviewed and made changes.
Client: Um, these are wrong the calculations are off.
R.dev: We did it according to your SRS and assumptions register.
Client: Oh, wait, these formulas are wrong.
Me & R.dev: [Blank stares furiously]
Client: The sponsor won't pay the next stage until you reach an acceptable release. Fix these critical issues and we can worry about the rest in support.
R.dev: ... OK, we will deliver by X date.
[7 Days to delivery of changes]
R.dev: We postponed development till (deliveryDate + 8) when we meet with the sponsor.
Me: But that's when we should start the next UAT for go live for the New Year...
I left a management job for this so I could code more. 180 issues later I still haven't seen the source code... fml
Silver Lining: Still gettin' paid though -
Fucking hell my insights are late ones...
So I am working with fluid dynamics simulation. I went home fired up the laptop and started the calculations. This is how the events went:
9 PM: starting the calculation
10 PM: checking on the graphs to see whether everything will be alright if I leave it running. Then went to sleep.
2 AM: Waking up in shock, that I forgot to turn on autosave after every time step. Then reassured myself that this is only a test and I won't need the previous results anyway.
5 AM: waking up, everything seems to be fine. I pause the calculation hibernate the laptop and went to work.
6:40 AM on my way to the front door a stray thought struck into my mind... What if it lost contact with the licence server, while entering hibernated state. Bah never mind... It will establish a new connection when I switch it back on.
6.45 AM Switching on the laptop. Two error messages greet me.
1. Lost contact with license server.
2. Abnormal exit.
Looking on the tray the paused simulation is gone. Since I didn't enabled autosave, I have to start it all over again. Well. Lesson learned I guess. Too bad it cost 8 hours of CPU time.2 -
We are being run in a simulation. But the simulation is physical. We exist as humans being run on the simulation called Earth. Our brains are designed to interface to a hub. This brain power is used to do calculations for a much larger system. The benefit to using biological systems is they self repair and reproduce. This allows the simulations to scale over time.
Another benefit is we are creating all terrain vehicles (humans) for alien consciousnesses. Big foot is an upgraded atv for high mountain ranges.9 -
just saw MS' presentation on bing+chatgpt. It could actually lead to something.
If someone could make a kanban-to-slack bot that can answer my Sprint status, it could vastly reduce my time spent answering the same question over and over to different people.
That is yet again AI doing what it was born to do: creative, artistic and engaging personal connections so that humans can focus on tedious calculations and repetitive labour.
If someone could make a bot to answer my emails for me I could spend the whole day without having to interrupt my workflow to interact with a single "professional" human!7 -
Just saw BigInt in chrome 67. Seems very useful in currency calculations. Searched on Mozilla, found nothing. Is it a V8 only thing, or another browser will catch up soon? Anyone have any idea? 🤔9
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2017. Because 1st January is Sunday and it fucked up all my code for business days calculations.
We are in 2020 (almost) and I'm STILL fixing some of data problems caused by that.
strangely enough my SQL function works perfectly, only my C# equivalent has problems. I would’ve suspected opposite from myself -
How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:
Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.
Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....
Drinking the first beer.
Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...
First beer poof.
Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...
Opening next beer...
Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...
Oh. Another half bottle gone...
Filling in the columns...
Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...
*burping*
*cracking finger joints*
Now let's get to the sad part...
Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...
Cost and description as columns.
Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.
Another beer...
Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.
Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...
SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.
Now we can add another sheet.
Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.
Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...
Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.
Why do I want to get even more drunk.
Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.
Let's add some colored highlighting ...
Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.
Too much red.
More beer.
Don't give a fuck.
Hm.
Time for some whiskey.
What else is there to do....
Oh yeah.
Diagrams.
The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.
Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*
Hm. More whiskey...
Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.
Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....
"Copy paste the last mail from last month"
Hm.
Ah.
*sipping whiskey*
Spell check extension - to the rescue.
Thesaurus *burps*.
Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.
Uh....
Trying to attach file...
*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*
Done.
Damn.
Need to press send button.
*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*
Done.
*Pressing computers power button*
Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.
*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*
Couch ... Where Couch...
After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.
(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey) -
Coding would be fun right now.
But seems like i gitta do a night shift to rock network technology test tomorrow. The most annoying thing about this test is, that we have to calculate ip addresses by hand. Not too hard, but damn.. We are not allowed to write it down in hex, only binary (while calculating). And he wants to see interim steps in our calculations.. Even with IPv4 addresses it will be a great amount of 0s and 1s to write.
I better look for a second pen to take with me..1 -
How do you implement TDD in reality?
Say you have a system that is TDD ready, not too sure what that means exactly but you can go write and run any unit tests.
And for example, you need to generate a report that uses 2 database tables so:
1. Read/Query
2. Processor logic
3. Output to file
So 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward, they don't change much, just mock the inputs.
But what about #2. There's going to be a lot of functions doing calculations, grouping/merging the data. And from my experience the code gets refactored a lot. Changing requirements, optimization (first round is somewhat just make it work) so entire functions and classes maybe deleted. Even the input data may change. So with TDD wouldn't you end up writing a lot of throwaway code?
A lot of times I don't know exactly what I want or need other than I need a class that can do something like this... but then I might end up throwing the whole thing out and writing a new one one I get a clearer idea of what i or the user wants or needs.
Last week I was building a new REST API, the parameters and usage changed like 3 times. And even now the code is in feasibility/POC testing just to figure out what needs to be used. Do I need more, less parameters, what should they be. I've moved and rewritten a lot of code because "oh this way won't work, need to try this way instead"
All I start with is my boss telling me I need an API that lets users to ... (Very general requirements).10 -
hard choice guys help me out
AI development needed, but little to no resources, also should a use a gpu or a cpu for this calculations
tesla k70 gpu -
google cloud - $0.7/hr
aws - $0.9/hr but full support upfront if any device issues and device switch instantly
dwave 2000q - don't know because too extreme for medium to large scale apps, also it's a qauntum computer , prices might not be by an hour but by month/year3 -
The worst documentation I've ever seen:
/*******************************************
$NAME CODE UPDATE
********************************************/
// CALCULATIONS
Followed by a dozen of of poorly named functions for complex calculations, with no comments whatsoever (save for the commented out debug statements) -
Long time, no rant, even though this isn't very much of a rant. Just started the second course that follows the one I've ranted about previously (thankfully with a different school and teacher this time) and THE TEACHER KNOWS PROGRAMMING!! BLESS!!!! I'm so happy I could cry.
This course is in C# instead of C++ though, but I still know more of that than I did C++ when I started the other course.
Yesterday was the first day of the course and he responded within an hour, explaining how mathematical calculations with chars work. (Which is unfamiliar to me still as I've mostly coded in Python.) Even though I'm not very familiar with C# yet I'm so looking forward to this course.1 -
Area: oil & gas
Full time job: SCADA apps, network comms, real time database;
Part time job: drilling app for geologist engineers, real time data acquisition, lots of math calculations and simulations;
I'm loving both jobs, because of working with external acquisition devices, because of freedom of work and complexity of the field. -
I just realised I have 1TB of MS OneDrive Cloud space lying around unused. DAMNNN!!!
Just yesterday, I was thinking of backing up all my content to cloud (because just in case and past experiences of losing data).
I did a quick fact check and figured that I have ~450 GB of unbacked data.
After quick calculations, I came to a number of how many Google accounts I'll need for 15 GB per account of drive space.
Today, I was playing around with my Microsoft Developer account and saw OneDrive. I thought let's check how much free space does MS Dev subscription offers.
It showed 1024 GB. FUCK! My balls dropped.
Now here's what I did...
I have a local drive of 500 GB, which holds all the unbacked data. Now I setup my local OneDrive there and put everything into OneDrive.
And then, I moved my local Google Drive into OneDrive. A nested setup for important stuff.
So this way, less important stuff is backed up on cloud and accessible everywhere.
And more important stuff gets synced on Google Drive and OneDrive, both.
Did I do the right and sensible thing with this kind of setup?
MS Developer subscription says they expire it in 90 days but until today, they have auto renewed it always.
I still have ~500 GB of space which can be consumed.
Also, overall MS ecosystem seems much better to me than Google. Moreover, MS allows custom domain mapping which Google doesn't.
Let's see how can I entirely migrate to MS ecosystem in near future.18 -
Why the fuck is it so hard to write a simple bash script. Syntax so strange and so many symbols you need to know. If you need to do calculations with floating point numbers, the mess is perfect.11
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jinja templates make me look towards html in a whole new light. are we 'inserting' data to an already rendered page? am i really mixing server code with ui ? It doesn't feel so. there are if else and loops being executed for html code, like wtf?
I don't know but everything feels so good. like i was literally hating every piece of website i was writing in php. everytime i wrote <div>....</div> followed by <?php ... ?> followed by another html tag /php tag in a fuckin php file, i wanted to kill someone from w3c.
WHY THE FUCK ARE WE ALLOWING THE MIXUP ?WHY IS PHP FILE HOLDING HTM TAGS? WHY?WHY?WHY?
But this... this is beauty. their is separation of concerns. jinja has some big powers, we can loop, repeat, make clauses, inherit other html classes, load html content into blocks, set variables,
but main concepts like file handling, response/request handling,calculations,etc are all being done in separate python files. I know that these jinja templates also might be running python in background, but atleast a developer cannot fuck up that code.
we can be sure that if correct jinja codes are written in html, then it would load correctly. And wherever devs doesn't fuck up, the output is better to understand and more maintainable/scaleable3 -
Struggling to write my Engineering Thesis code. Not because I'm afraid of tech, but because I have no idea what it should do.
I'm testing mobile apps performance, but getting the right idea is pain in the ass. :(
Never been too creative, but always have been over ambitious and lazy.
So the deadline is coming slowly, I have specified my 'tests' (authorization, API connection, heavy calculations, graphics, database handling) and still don't know what my app should do.
And ideas or suggestions what else is to test? -
I was looking for the largest known mersenne prime and tried doing this. I guess these are language limitations and don’t know what type of computers can give instant answers for such mathematical calculations. Is this complex than bitcoin hash? May be
4 -
That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.
I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.
Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.
It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.2 -
Should I use C++ and WebAssembly to do heavy calculations on client side instead of buying heroku workers? Is it wise?3
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So, I just (few hours ago)made a new variable that's either brilliant or innately flawed... not sure yet. It's an oddly unique var...
__bs__
So far I only made it in python and windows env (i script like the methodology of css).
I bet you're wondering how I've defined __bs__ and the practicality of it.
__bs__ is derived from a calculated level of bullshit that annoys me to tolerate, maintain, etc. as well as things that tend to throw nonsensical errors, py crap like changing my strings to ints at seemingly random times/events/cosmic alignments/etc or other things that have a history of pulling some bs, for known or unknown reasons.
How/why did this come about now?
Well I was updating some symlinks and scripts(ps1 and bat) cuz my hdd is so close to death I'm wondering if hdd ghosts exist as it's somehow still working (even ostream could tell it should be dead, by the sound alone).
A nonsense bug with powershell allowing itself to start/run custom ps1scripts with the originating command coming from a specific batch script, which worked fine before and nothing directly connected to it has changed.
I got annoyed so took an ironic break from it to work on python crap. Python has an innately high level of bs so i did need to add some extra calculations when defining if a py script or function is actually __bs__ or just py.
The current flavour of py bs was the datetime* module... making all of my scripts using datetime have matching import statements to avoid more bs.
I've kept a log of general bs per project/use case. It's more like a warning list... like when ive spent hours debugging something by it's traceback, meticulous... to eventually find out it had absolutely nothing to do with the exception listed. Also logged aliases i created, things that break or go boom if used in certain ways, packages that ive edited, etc.
The issue with my previous logging is that it's a log... id need to read it before doing anything, no matter how quick/simple it should be, or im bound to get annoyed with... bs.
So far i have it set to alert if __bs__ is above a certain int when i open something to edit. I can also check __bs__ fot what's causing the bs. I plan to turn it into a warning and recording system for how much bs i deal with and have historical data of personal performance vs bs tolerance. There's a few other applications i think ill want to use it for, assume it's not bs itself.
*in case you prefer sanity and haven't dealt with py and datetime enough, here's the jist:
If you were to search any major forum like StackOverflow for datetime use in py, youd find things like datetime.datetime.now() and datetime.now() both used, to get the same returned value. You'll also find tons of posts for help and trying to report 'bugs', way more than average. This is because the datetime package has a name conflict... with itself. It may have been a bug several years ago, but it beeb explicitly defined as intentional since.2 -
What is your favorite method of debugging?
Mine is a debug log. I like a key value setting for enabling/disabling, and logging most transactions, calculations, and variables, even if they seem trivial. I've been able to locate bugs much quicker with detailed logs while some coworkers are still stepping through the process line by line. I don't fault the step method as I use it when logging uncovers nothing (it usually means I didn't log something critical :p) or when logging is not possible.1 -
current language vba.
(14 / 24) - (8 / 24) > (6 / 24)
compiled to true. apparently rounding to 8 digits did the trick. quirky was that debug.printing each calculations showed exactly '0.25' for both not giving a hint about some float issue in the first place. ah, and rounding to 4 digits wasn't right either. -
I made this: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1992288
Spare me if the title makes no sense grammatically, not a native speaker.
I'm building a microservice that keeps a check of the subscribers on my product, I wanted to keep an eye of those subscribers that may be missing the latest payment.
One way to do that is to make it work with my code and some ORM magic, but that may become unsustainable as the customer base grows, another idea that occurred to me was doing it fully inside (?) the database. The solution is to compare how many days have passed since the last payment and right now, if 'right now' is larger than 'last payment' then the subscriber is late with their next payment.
I did this as a PL/pgSQL function with an example usage accompanying that code.
Now, I just need to figure out how to use the result of those calculations in a WHERE statement...2 -
How to start learning iot?i mean, here is what i understood after searching for a while: iot consists usually the hardware devices/sensors/robos which generate data/do something ; transmit this data to some server where calculations are performed and then show it to user.. And there are some kits worth a big amount which you gotta buy... is that all right?
Guidance please .:)2 -
Why on earth can one perform calculations on pointers in c++? I can think of a dozen ways this could go wrong, but none where this is useful.
Following example:
int t = 1234;
int tt = 5555;
int* p = &t;
int* pp = *(p + 1):
Here pp will give me 5555...5 -
I could calculate the percentage of a value from a total set right from the top of my head. This includes large numbers like for example; finding the percentage of 1040 from 75000 = 1.377%, 344 from 5400 = 6.37% and so on...
But most times when I come across scenarios to apply such calculations on code I find myself googling for formulas and then I wonder; how am I able to come to a valid result when faced with similar challenge but could not recall or tell the formula my funny brain is deriving it's results from.
Maybe my brain isn't even using a formula. :/
So I guess because from pondering on how I arrived at results, I could tell I'm starting from an "if"...
Like:
If 25 of 100 = 25%
and 45 of 250 = 18%
Then 450 of 2400 will equal 18.7...%
Ask me what formula was used in the first "if" condition and I can't tell because that's common sense for me.2 -
Set myself a fun JS project, but now it's just annoying the hell out of me with calculations I can't figure out.1
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The feeling when you choke your code with cython so much that you manage to get under a single second from almost 2s per quite a lot of calculations with already optimized code.
Another X-mas came! -
- Have the app running perfectly on heroku.
- App does some serious calculations which, depending on amount of data, takes a long time to process
- Heroku timesout after request takes longer than 30 secs...
- Need to move from heroku to aws... No devops experience...
- Damn... 🙃
Any suggestions? The procedure cannot be put into a worker queue so thats out of the equation.2
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