Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.

Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”

Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.

So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.

Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.

Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”

Client: “Nah”.

Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”

Client: “Yes, but minimal”.

Me: “So what do you want from me?”

Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).

Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”

Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).

Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?

Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”

Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”

Me: “...what, a month?”

Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”

*a long silence*

Client: “So... what do you think?”

Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.

I wasn’t even looking for a job, I just went out for drinks with friends and I met this random dude. I complained to him about work wanting us to go back to the office, to which he replied that I should go work for them because they’re remote and looking for people. I had a look at their openings and they had a role with fewer responsibilities and a lot more money, so I applied. It’s been 3 months and I’m so glad I switched.

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Holy fucking hell!
Who the fuck sets up a local network with an 255.255.0.0 subnet mask and then lets the dhcp-server distribute clients onto the 192.249.x.x., 192.2.x.x and the 192.22.x.x networks AT FUCKING RANDOM???
I need to SSH onto 40 routers distributed across the entire campus and have a WORKING internet connection while doing so and you make me spin the connect-disconnect-wheel. Fucking hell dude, don't give me that "Uh, it wasn't intended for this size"-bullshit. You have about 200 active devices. And in one subnet you have space for more than 60 000. Fuck you, dumbass! OH, YOUR FUCKING LIST IS FUCKING WRONG AND YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE IP OF THE ROUTERS? OH FUCK YOU EVEN HARDER!!!
Goddamn people why does legacy maintenance always suck so much?😭😭😭

HP Virtual Agent, you're about as useless as the fucking hardware that I'm troubleshooting. What part of fucking "Arch Linux" do you not understand?! Not everyone runs your fucking assumed OS choices - WanBLowS 7, 8 or 10. What's more, the hardware that I'm troubleshooting doesn't even support those bloody operating systems.

Long live HP and its random freezes due to poor thermal management. And long live Intel's fucking wireless drivers, that for no good reason disconnect after half an hour and require me to restart NetworkManager to (hopefully) get shit connected again. And long live those useless fucking "virtual assistants"!!!

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

So... I just remembered a story that's perfect for devrant.

My brother got into engineering in university, and during the second semester they had their introductory class to programming. They had weekly homeworks that the lecturer would check and give grades accordingly.

The factors that could influence the grading were: execution (meaning that the code would excecute as intended), efficiency and readabilty. The weeks passed and everyone was doing well, getting fairly good grades. Everyone was happy.

Until one day a random guy we'll call bob got the worst grade possible. Bob wasn't a bad student. He had over-the-average grades in all the weekly homeworks and even impressed the professor in some. Naturally, he was baffled when he saw his grade on the google spreadsheet. He was pretty sure his code ran well. He always tested it on different machines and OSs. So, at the end of the class, he went straight to the helper of the class, in a pretty imperative manner, to demand to know how the fuck he got that grade. It's impossible he got excecution, efficiency and readabilty, wrong. All three wrong? Impossible. Even the stupidiest kid in the class had some points on readabilty.

"Oh, so you are Bob. Huh?" said the helper in a laid-back attitude. "Come with me. Prof. X is waiting for you in his office."

This got Bob even more confused. As they approached the office, the courage he had in a first moment banished and gave way for nervousness and fear.

The helper nocks the door. "Prof., Bobs here"

As soon as Bob sits in the chair in front of Prof. X's, he knew something bad was coming.
"In all these years of teaching..." said Prof. X hesitantly. "In all these years of teaching I have not come even close to see something similar to what you've done. You should be ashamed of yourself." Needless to say, Bob was panicked.

"In all these years I have not seen such blatant mockery!" added the professor. "HOW THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DARE TO SEND A HOMEWORK WITH SUCH VARIABLE NAMING" That's when Bob realised the huge mistake he made. "NEVER IN ALL THESE YEARS I HAVE SEEN SOMEONE NAME HIS VARIABLES *opens the file on his desktop *: PENIS, SHIT, FUCKSHIT, GAYFUCKING<insert Prof. X's name>MAN, GOATSE, VAGINAVAR, CUMFUNCTION, [...]" The list of obcenities went on and on. In each word, the professor hit the table harder than the last time.

Turns out Bob felt so in comfort with the ease of the course he decided to spice things up by using "funny naming conventions" while coding, and then tidying everything up before uploading the homework. This week he forgot, and fucked it big time.

So remember folks, always check your code before committing/giving it in/production. And always adhere to naming conventions.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

Me: *listening to some random semi-obscure track on spotify, liking it, add it to playlist*

Come home, girlfriend playing the same track. "Yeah I've had that in my playlist for two weeks now". Our accounts are not linked in any way, and I only use Spotify on a PC at work, while my girlfriend only uses it at home.

It might just be coincidence, or us having similar tastes.

But the issue is that it's getting more and more difficult to know whether me and my girl are spiritually linked unique snowflake soulmates who are so perfectly in sync with each other, or whether an algorithm suggestively linked us both that song based on scraped location and behavior data.

And whether it matters. Maybe it matters. I don't know yet.

In twenty years maybe humans will be unsure whether it was a wonderful coincidence bordering on cosmic fate that you ran into your new love, or whether Google purposefully drove you towards the same lunch cafe at a specific time because it calculated that she was the perfect candidate to strengthen your susceptibility to advertisements over the coming decade.

Malicious AI will not come into lives bearing guns.

It will not instantly take all of our jobs and enslave us.

It will just know you better than you know yourself, it will know everyone around you better than you know them, and it will play incredible mind games. It will not be designed with malicious intent, just perfectly execute on top of the malicious systems we already have, and even arise as an emergent property within new systems.

It will rarely be clearly visible, but you will increasingly say to yourself: "That's odd, I was just thinking about that". It will detect depression from a smile, physical attraction from a glance, reliability from patterns in your voice and illness from the bloodflow in your cheeks.

It will not just make our cars autonomous, it will make our lives autonomous. It will protect us, decide for us, keep revenues and human satisfaction in a "balanced maximized" state, it will make everything feel easy, slightly abuse us, and when one of us suddenly crashes at 140 mph into depression, debt or addiction it will prove impossible to know whether the humans or the algorithms were at fault.

I'm incredibly afraid and excited about the coming 10 years.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

Crap.. got myself into a fight with someone in a bar.

Hospitalized, turns out that my knee is bruised and my nose is broken. For some reason the knee hurts much more than the nose though.. very weird.

Just noticed that some fucker there stole my keychain USB stick too. Couldn't care less about the USB stick itself, got tons of those at home and hard drive storage even more so (10TB) but the data on it was invaluable. It held on a LUKS-encrypted partition, my GPG keys, revocation certificates, server backups and everything. My entire digital identity pretty much.

I'm afraid that the thief might try to crack it. On the flip side, if it's just a common Windows user, plugging it in will prompt him to format it.. hopefully he'll do that.

What do you think.. take a leap with fate and see how strong LUKS really is or revoke all my keys and assume my servers' filesystems to be in the hands of some random person that I don't know?

Seriously though.. stealing a fucking flash drive, of what size.. 32GB? What the fuck is wrong with people?

Got basically nothing done yesterday because I was absolutely exhausted the entire day. Thanks, doxxing thread. But I couldn’t sleep anyway so whatever.

Told everyone at home that I wanted a really productive day tomorrow (today) because of it.

Guess what happened?
Endless fucking distractions.
Because of course.

• Cooking since apparently it’s my job.
• Extended computer repair and maintenance, since that’s apparently my job even when it’s not my computer.
• Conversations.
• Children following me.
• People paraphrasing politics.
• People summarizing stupid fail videos.
• People relating stupid prank videos.
• More conversations.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• Endless noises from children’s toys, tablets, playing, etc.
• Children following me when I leave.
• Taking half an hour to order food instead of five minutes.
• Cleaning since nobody else ever does.
• Picking up toys since nobody else will and I’M FUCKING TIRED OF STEPPING ON AND TRIPPING OVER THEM.
• More fucking food prep.
• Endless random nonsense comments from children.
• More conversations.

Is it any wonder I’m so fucking pissed off every workday?

I can’t wait to move so I can have a fucking office with a fucking door and a fucking lock. And you know what? I’m going to splurge and install some fucking soundproofing, too.

WHY IS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!? I’M PAYING FOR YOUR FUCKING EVERYTHING. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

The gift that keeps on giving... the Custom CMS Of Doom™
I've finally seen enough evidence why PHP has such a bad reputation to the point where even recruiters recommended me to remove my years of PHP experience from the CV.

The completely custom CMS written by company <redacted>'s CEO and his slaves features the following:
- Open for SQL injection attacks
- Remote shell command execution through URL query params
- Page-specific strings in most core PHP files
- Constructors containing hundreds of lines of code (mostly used to initialize the hundreds of properties
- Class methods containing more than 1000 lines of code
- Completely free of namespaces or package managers (uber elite programmers use only the root namespace)
- Random includes in any place imaginable
- Methods containing 1 line: the include of the file which contains the method body
- SQL queries in literally every source file
- The entrypoint script is in the webroot folder where all the code resides
- Access to sensitive folders is "restricted" by robots.txt 🤣🤣🤣🤣
- The CMS has its own crawler which runs by CRONjob and requests ALL HTML links (yes, full content, including videos!) to fill a database of keywords (I found out because the server traffic was >500 GB/month for this small website)
- Hundreds of config settings are literally defined by "define(...)"
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests
- .......

I could go on, but yes, I've seen it all now.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

Linux: the weather applet in the panel displays the weather. When I open it, it displays more weather details.

Windows: the weather applet in the task bar displays the weather. When I open it, it displays random news and stock prices.

Microsoft can't even do a fucking weather applet right. Everything has to be an incoherent mess.

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

Its so weird working in this company. No onboarding, no micromanaging, noone to track your progress or performance. U can basically do what u want and ask what u want and requests will be fulfilled.

Initially was assigned to a random team and started fixing stuff. I hated the scope so after 2 months in requested to switch teams, request approved.

3 months in realized I lowballed myself during the interview and actually am doing better than half of the team, so I asked for a 43% bump, request approved.

4 months in I realized that I did atleast 100hrs overtime in a month during crunchtime, burned out. Asked for a paid week off to recover, request approved.

5 months in realized that we have many MR's piling up in the team and I could help with approving some of them, but they grant MR approval rights only when u work here for a year or are a decent dev from the get go. Requested for MR approval rights, request approved.

Again it feels so weird working on a big product with 6-7 scrum teams. Its like there is no bullshit, just ask what you need you will get what you asked so you can continue working.

On the other hand its kinda weird to keep asking everything, in other companies a good teamlead/manager shows more initiative takes care of stuff like this without even asking.

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

Because of the pandemic and how most of the people in my institution's I.T department are working from home we were asked to route calls from our work extension to our home phones. I did it to my cellphone and some of the calls that I get are hilarious, yet annoying. Annoying because we have a bunch of boomer ass people making the most ridiculous calls.
Being that the calls are not registered into our phones they just show the random number from which x person is calling.

Just right now my phone rings aaaand:
Me: "Hello?"
Boomer: "YES <tech support technician's name which is obviously not mine> I NEED YOU TO FIX MY EMAIL IT IS NOT WORKING AND MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING"

Me: "I am sorry, I don't know how did you get this number, but what we can..."

BOOMER: WELL CAN I PLEASE SPEAK TO THE TECHNICIAN? I NEED THIS TO GET FIXED RIGHT NOW

Me: As I was saying, we can attempt to send an email through your phone's outlook app if you have it installed or I can send an email asking them to contact you since you are reaching an entirely different dep..."

Boomer: "DID YOU NOT HEAR ME! MY LAPTOP IS NOT WORKING AND I CAN'T SEND EMAILS AND I DON'T WANT TO USE MY PHONE, I WANT TO USE MY LAPTOP"

Me: Did YOU not hear me? I just said that I can send an email for you since my computer is working properly, at the same time, not wanting to use your phone to send an email when you have no other option available is more of a YOU problem, it is not mine

Boomer: EXCUSE ME! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO? i AM THE MANAGER OF <X> DEPARTMENT

Me: nice to meet you I guess, I am the MANAGER of X department as well, i have been told that for issues with my attitude I can just toss you over to <Director of IT> if you wish.

Boomer: Oh....no...thank you, I will send an email through my phone and see if that works.

Some background: The Head of my department is a hardass that is not scared to tell people to fuck off when they are messing shit up and he is very protective of all of us. I love this man and have personally followed the dude through hell when no one else came through. If they think I am bitchy that dude would throw down an entire house over people being dense, and even though he is a boomer himself (age terms) he despises the general attitude of entitled people from his generation.

10/10 I love my boss and hope to heaven that all of you find similar leaders.

Wow my job sucks right now. Un fuckin believable.
I got hired a month ago as a programmer. Everything went fine at first, then my Boss asked if I could do 3D modeling, and I could, I used Maya for 4 years, but I told him I only can do simple low poly models. A partner company of ours needed some help in their 3D department and I had to help.
Well, I thought, a small 3D project from time to time would be nice and refreshing, especially since it was very easy geometry, my Boss even showed me some previous projects and That was totally doable even for me.

So i started out making the first few models in blender, because we dont have anything else. After a day of getting used to blender i sent off the first models and it all began.

They wanted detailed, high poly models of some mechanical parts, my Boss originally told me it was just an abstract visualisation... fuck me...

Well I agreed to it so had to do it. The partnering Company started to change things, seemingly at random. Had a model completely modelled, textured and animated, now they want to change the model so I have to redo the UVs, the texture and the Animation god fucking damnit.

But still I thought ok, its only for a bit. Now my boss accepted even more work. Because of endless reworks I couldnt finish even one model and have to already make the new ones.

Now my boss is pissed because that company is pissed that i cant know what they want.

Big pile of misscommunication.
I hope this is over soon but I overheard that more is coming...

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

Whatever you do, just keep going.

If you don't have mental capacity to do all tasks today, do one or two. If you want to do that side project you wanted, but lost motivation in the moment, do at least something, like a sign up form. Just keep going. Put some work in, make this day's net impact positive. And it's not all about work! Wanted to play that game you bought on a steam sale but never opened? Play the first level today. Wanted to learn how to make music? Download Ableton or Fruity Loops, watch a tutorial video on YouTube, replicate the steps. Just keep going.

Wandering directionless and letting yourself go is the sure path to misery. Remember — every figment of human behavior has a reason. It is important to identify reasons behind seemingly random behavior patterns and comprehend them in a non-judgmental way. Then, starve what holds you back, and feet what keeps you going.

I have bipolar type I + autism. Using this approach and remembering that everything has a reason helped me debug my low productivity. And no, I don't mean my job, I mean my real goals I want to pursue even if I had a billion in the bank today and never had to work a single day in my life.

Aaand, the reason was?… fear. I discovered I had PTSD all along that manifested when I was misdiagnosed and prescribed strong neuroleptics. In a way, it's a chemical lobotomy, just less invasive and more reversible. My intelligence came back, but it came back together with PTSD.
Now, instead of chasing mythical productivity, I know the reason behind the lack of it — PTSD. It is hard to fight what isn't defined, but it is real to win a fight with a thing with a name and a face.

Just keep going. That's my message to you.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

Companies/Managers be like:
No, you cannot get a significant raise for being the best dev on the team. (EoY reviews from colleagues)
We would rather hire someone for more than you are asking for to do the same thing, then wait 3 months for them to become productive again.
So you can leave for some random position in another company that will pay more than you'd get here, even after the raise you've asked for.

Why?

Two days ago I went to change an Nvidia driver on my Linux mint partition and it ended up breaking everything, all my fault because I'm so new to Linux, anyways to dig that hole deeper I looked for ways to fix it, found some random command that managed to destroy mint even more lol. I had no start menu and cinnamon kept going into recovery mode.

But the next day after spending time working through what to do I managed to fix it, I basically downloaded mintmenu again and uninstalled the graphics driver

All in all I think I've come closer to learning how fun Linux is, it was fun fixing what I broke rather than actually clean installing mint again.

Morale of the story: don't randomly use commands found on the net that has 3 upvotes lol

I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.

Small random update regarding my ISP and how they call your speed if you use all of your data.

I actually sent them a small complaint (more of a suggestion but) that 256 Kbps is just too slow even for a capped penalty speed and that at least 1 Mbps so that the internet is still usable but still slow... And mother fucker if that isn't exactly what they did!

It's nice being able to sync my code and have more than 1 device connected to the wifi at once... It's a strange feeling when a company actually listens to feedback and takes measures on them...

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

So yesterday i went to this live theatre drama and i had an extra ticket. I asked this random guy the way to that theatre and apparently he was looking to get ticket for the same show. I offered him my other ticket for free.

We introduce ourself to each other and i came to know he worked as salesman or something. As i talked about my job, I told about me leaving job in hopes of self employment.

*Cue the sales pitch*

He started talking about some scheme kind of thing to have financial freedom. He talks about how we can get products at upto 15% discount and we have to sell them to others.

I was skeptical about it and he talked they have website as if that will pimpress me or something.

I visited the site and i was not surprised at all. It was nothing but an halfassed e-commerce store. I knew it was halfassed and probably setup by the "CEO" himself.

And the products in that site are nothing but stupid cosmetic products!

And to top it off, you have to spend around $200 to join this scheme. This poor guy doesn't realise he is just being a talking puppet to that halfassed e-commerce business BY PAYING THEM!!!

He even said one of his friend in London took leave to join this scheme or whatever... What a stupid friend.

Anyway, i just regret giving away a ticket to some stupid people like him. I'd have been much more happier if i had just thrown the extra ticket in the trash.

People suck!

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.

YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.

But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?

YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.

A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.

It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.

TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general

Computer Science student here, and it looks like my group partners have no idea what keeping classes short and straight to the point means.

The project is in C++, and I'm trying to understand this mess that they made, when they have a class called "Manager" that basically did EVERYTHING, whose header file has only the declarations of functions. 50+ functions. Only half of then documented, and most of them with apparently random names. The file has more than 200 lines of reading.

I've never worked with so much Spaghetti in my life yet.

Worst part: I spent time and effort organising some other classes, breaking down methods, untangling code and all that tedious stuff. But one week before delivery, they decide to delete all of my work, because they "didn't understand it" and didn't even think of asking me to explain the changes.
And if that wasn't enough, they refused to give me some percentage of the grade due to that code not being in the delivery.

I am so freaking done with those guys -_-

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

"four million dollars"

TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.

That's all the management really cares about, apparently.

It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).

Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.

Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".

"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"

I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"

1st motherfucker.

Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?

Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.

Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.

This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.

I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!

Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.

Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?

Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.

Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.

Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.

I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.

Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.

Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).

In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.

Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.

4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

My first contact with a computer was in 1997, I was close to 9.
My parents bought it together with a 17" screen and a color inkjet for about 6000.- CHF if I remember it correctly.
It had Windoozle 95, Pentium 2 233MHz, Radeon Rage 128 something.
At first I was not allowed to use it, but after watching them write documents for some time, they allowed me to draw random stuff in MS Paint and use Word.

It did't take long until I figured out to do more stuff on the system.
I think I crashed Windows a few times by installing some random demo software or shareware and execute just anything to see what happens.

When I turned 10, my godmother gave me Age Of Empires 2 as a present (I wished it so badly) and since this gift, I was somewhat addicted with computers and gaming.

My mother forbid me a lot of times to use the computer for weeks. 😄

But it all made me know computers better and even start programming with Quick Basic! (later VB, C++ and C#)

WTF Woke up this morning and found my email used to register to a website called fiverr.com!!

What is even worse is that at the end of the email where they have that section of: this email was sent to ..., the name is random letters

Even more ironic that website does not allow access from Lebanon ....

I think it is time to change my email, been getting a lot of spam into my inbox lately, though Gmail has a good spam filter :\

//Random Mr. Robot thought//
So this picture and this quote in general has been in my mind quite recently. The first time I saw this scene it just passed through my mind as just a wierd quirk of elliot. But upon further thinking, I question that given Elliot is someone who specializes in network security in a sense. A part of which focuses on finding exploits in networks or even software in general( basically finding the worst in them). And the more I think about that,the more I come to realisation that just like most programmers mix together logic in their life in dealing with people, this scene stands out as an example of just that happening with Elliot and what perhaps, makes him such a good hacker. Perhaps we could all learn from this, or perhaps I'm just looking too much into this. Eh.

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

Katie, we get it, you know and like Scala. You mention this often.

It doesn't make you superior to everyone else. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to pretend every language is Scala, ignore any language-specific paradigms and conventions, and bastardise every bit of code you write until it's done in the most weirdly Scala-ish functional way possible even when it makes zero sense to do so.

Stick with the conventions of the existing language & codebase you muppet. Yeah, it's boring and won't turn you on, but it's a hell of a lot more readable than a random bastardised mixin in the middle of another existing inheritance hierarchy.

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

I'm getting more and more triggered by my colleagues overusing words in seemingly random fashion.

The word 'perspective' comes up at least 6 times during a meeting, from an x perspective, from a y perspective. It would be fine in a design meeting but it's used _so fucking much_ I cringe every time I hear it.

Another one is 'standard', that gets put in front of every word nowadays, standard process, standard protocol, standard machine, standard pipeline. What does it mean? No clue, what does it add? Nothing.

'Please put this add the standard location.'

Where?

'The default one'

What?!

I remove it from documentation every chance I get.

Furthermore, some documentation changes make small pieces of information super long. A nice summary list of features? Make it at least 3 sentences for every bullet point. 1-sentence info with a reference link to more info? Scratch that let's include all information in that reference paragraph anyway. Sometimes they even expand English expressions for no reason, making them longer and harder to read.

WHYYYY

We always complain about shit documentation and yet we're oblivious to the fact that our own docs are so bloated. Stop repeating information, stop using useless adjectives, just put it all in 1 sentence and add dozens of code examples. One piece of code says more than a billion words.

I'm not innocent either. As a teen I was great at writing long pieces of text that seemed like a great read but were actually way too bloated for the information I needed to convey. It was great for reaching word limits.

Now I'm trying my absolute best to be as concise and to-the-point as possible because I know that nobody likes reading and people just want the information that they're looking for.

Even this rant is overly long, but thank god that it's just a rant and I can let off some steam.

Btw same thing goes for diagrams, too many icons, too much text, too many lines. When I try to submit a clean-as-fuck diagram I get asked to add more info/features to which I say No, we're already at the max.

I even got a PR for review that made some changes to add unnecessary information, I pointed it out and never heard anything from them again. I rejected the PR, and never saw a new one.

* Sigh *

It's just so strange to me, it's never clear to me why these things happen. I'm too much of a coward to point these things out unless they endanger the quality of the product. But maybe they just need somebody to tell it to them.

As you can see from the screenshot, its working.
The system is actually learning the associations between the digit sequence of semiprime hidden variables and known variables.

Training loss and value loss are super high at the moment and I'm using an absurdly small training set (10k sequence pairs). I'm running on the assumption that there is a very strong correlation between the structures (and that it isn't just all ephemeral).

This initial run is just to see if training an machine learning model is a viable approach.

Won't know for a while. Training loss could get very low (thats a good thing, indicating actual learning), only for it to spike later on, and if it does, I won't know if the sample size is too small, or if I need to do more training, or if the problem is actually intractable.

If or when that happens I'll experiment with different configurations like batch sizes, and more epochs, as well as upping the training set incrementally.

Either case, once the initial model is trained, I need to test it on samples never seen before (products I want to factor) and see if it generates some or all of the digits needed for rapid factorization.

Even partial digits would be a success here.
And I expect to create multiple training sets for each semiprime product and its unknown internal variables versus deriable known variables. The intersections of the sets, and what digits they have in common might be the best shot available for factorizing very large numbers in this approach.

Regardless, once I see that the model works at the small scale, the next step will be to increase the scope of the training data, and begin building out the distributed training platform so I can cut down the training time on a larger model.

I also want to train on random products of very large primes, just for variety and see what happens with that. But everything appears to be working. Working way better than I expected.

The model is running and learning to factorize primes from the set of identities I've been exploring for the last three fucking years.

Feels like things are paying off finally.

Will post updates specifically to this rant as they come. Probably once a day.

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

A linux distro with all popular apps rewritten from scratch to use a single UI toolkit and consistent default keymaps, for a smoother desktop experience.

It's one of the reasons I have a tough time switching full-time because all the apps I need use so many different toolkits/versions/random keymap variations (inconsistent font-sizing, ctrl+tab vs ctrl+pgup, etc) that even the thought of switching makes my head spin.

Love the way GNOME's been going though (Except for their default keymaps. Ctrl+PgUp for Next Tab? Srsly?), and KDE is getting more consistent.

And yes, I know you can modify keymaps, but just wish they'd stick to widely used ones by default).

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

So recently I completed side gig from random freelancing site where I had to shadow troubleshoot performance problems over teams call with random Indian guy on his client's AWS account. Long story short you can autoscale new instances all you want but it's not gonna help if your FIFO sqs has only one message group ID. This architecture is running an online game, which is basically limited to processing ONE event at the same time for ALL players xD
What's even better, basing on naming convention I realized it's a company that I interviewed for like 4 months ago and they told me "we need someone with more experience". Well good luck, thanks for quick cash

Years ago at school I recreated the UNIX logon screen. With this, I collected login credentials and then displayed a message that the dish gets formatted now. To make it more realistic I had a progress bar and generated random file access in the disk, so the LEDs flashed. Loved it and even the sysadmin could see the fun (and educational background :P)

Sorry, long since my last post...

I have quit my job recently at DERP & CO.. The level of anxiety was already somewhat of medical severity.

For months I had been in a project that not only did not progress, but that it was getting worst day by day.

A bit of Context

November: "Dev, junior anon needs you to help him on the SHIT project because they are running out of time, it is mainly doing unit tests."
Well, the code was a mess, there was a LOT of copy paste and it was all bad quality (we talk about methods with complexities between 80 and 120 according to SONAR QUBE).
Dev: "Anon, you know this is wrong, right?"
Anon: "Why? it works"
Dev: after long explanation.
Anon: "Oh well, yes, from now on I will take it into account." And he did it / try his best.

Dev does the unit tests and do extra work outside of the reach of the sprint (y than i mean work after hours, classic) and alerts the boss of the mess.

December: After a project of approximately 6 or 8 months of development, the boss discovers that the junior anon have been doing everything wrong and/or with poor quality (indicating that throughout the whole development the quality of the code was NEVER checked nor the functionality).

Boss: "This is a shit. Dev, you have to correct all the errors and warnings marked on sonar", which are around 1200 between smelling code, high risk errors, etc.

Dev fixes something like 900 bugs... lots of hours...
Boss: "This still is all wrong, we have to redo it. We will correct the errors leaving something stable and we will make a new repository with everything programmed as it should be, with quality and all"
- 900 corrections later, now are irrelevant -
Boss: "Dev, you will start to redo it, anon is out on other project. First you must leave the existing one working properly"
Dev: "ok ..."

January: How can I correct the mess if the client asks for more things. I am just fixing the mess, doing new functionalities, and when I have free time (outside the work) I try to advance the new repository, poorly I must say because burntout.

Boss: "Everything should be arranged at the end of January, so that you can redo everything well in February."
I can't handle everything, it starts to fall further behind. Junior Anon quits the job.

February: Big Bad Bugs in the code appear and practically monopolize the month (the code is very coupled with itself and touching in one place sometimes meant breaking other stuff).

Boss: "It can't be, you've been with this since January and you haven't even started correcting this mess in the new repo"

Dev: "It is that between the new things that are requested and the bugs I cannot put myself with that"
Boss: "Do not worry, you will be helped by random dev if you needed. SPOILER ALERT: random dev is allways bussy. Not made up bussy, He had a lot of work by itself, but it can't help me the way I need it.

High anxiety levels, using free time to try to reduce the work left and gradually losing the taste for develop.

March: So far, not only do they add new things day and day, but now they want to modify things that were already "ok", add new ones and refactor everything in a new repo. I just did not see an end of this nonsense.
Dev breaks, the doctor says it's anxiety, so I just know what I have to do.
Dev: "I quit my job"
Cool Manager: "Damn, why?"
Explain everithig
Cool Manager: "Do you want to try if I can change you to other project or anotjer scope on the same project?"
Dev: "Thanks, but no Thanks. I need to stop for a while".

End. sry for long sad post and maybe poor use of English (?) Not my native language.

I was bored at my workplace and thought to put curl code to GET a random dad joke on opening terminal everytime

Fuck, now I'm having a migraine

but i have an idea to expand this project even more

Oh man don't you just LOVE the weekend? I have no fucking idea but I have so much energy and motivation now... I might even try to pull a all nighter on my personal project !

Anyway have a nice weekend everyone! 😁

I used to do some freelance work for a nonprofit. I’d do some website stuff and gallery sitting.

My friend was the gallery director. When she left, I decided to stop freelancing there and I dropped off the keys with the new director. I told them they could contact me later if they have questions about some things I implemented on the website. The new director thinks I’m a random freelancer and starts to BADMOUTH MY FRIEND, the former director.

Over a year later, the gallery assistant emails me asking about SSL warnings and cc’s the new director. WTF.

1) Those warnings were happening long before I left and long before I even started. 2) I am not your website support. I only invited contact for things I worked on. 3) The assistant already contacted Squarespace and Go Daddy for help and they gave her instructions.

I told her I didn’t set up their website and it sounds like she has the resources to resolve this on her own and she should contact Squarespace and Go Daddy if she needs more help. After all, you pay those companies for their services support and my time isn’t free.

This new trend of platforms spamming with content discovery fucking suck. Nobody wants to follow multiple profiles with the exact same fucking content, especially when most of them are just people jumping on the bandwagon with more generic content and nothing to make it distinguishable. Also if 10 million people saw something on your platform, the it's pretty fucking sure already been posted and shared on every single platform out there, why the fuck would you still keep recommending it weeks or even months later?

I know spamming users with random (statistically more engaging) content leads to improved customer engagement as people sooner or later click these thing out of curiosity or boredom, but eventually they get tired of it altogether and leave for good. What happened to Netflix will also happen to YouTube, Instagram, and all other platforms unless they significantly improve the balance between content discovery and content continuity (i.e. the content each user follows and is coming back for).

Depressed since yesterday.

Updated all our clients Dialers. Stellar performance. Suddenly one of 15 can’t hang up three way calls.

It’s one of our biggest clients. And they just started. We upgraded the dialers so the answering machine detection would improve for them and it did, along with vast performance upgrades as well. Suddenly, this issue.

2 days in they pull the plug until we fix it. The issue is sporadic and we cannot reproduce. No one else is having the issue. I can’t even debug it properly as it’s a third party dialer with no customizations on it. I found out where the error is, but no idea the workflow they got it to happen with or why. It’s so frustrating. It happens using the dialer native interface, and our integration via api calls. The channel doesn’t get sent to the command for some random reason, and only sometimes.

So even if it’s fixed they don’t trust the system. Now they are losing the full integration we have with the crm and dialer and it’s going to be a mess of data for them. All because of this one issue. They love the CRM though...

If they had just stayed on one more day I’m sure I could have found it. Now I have to play forensic scientist and look through old data, without being able to see the client code that was causing the issue.

Just threw some cash down to be able to talk to the dialer engineers and hopefully see what’s up. What a nightmare. And I have so many other projects for the platform due so soon...

Sigh. Super depressing.

My new favourite commit message:

"All changes as of 18th Sept"

How tremendously useful? There I was looking to know what changes were made to enable a feature / service, thought I could look for that in the commit message, but no you've given me a much more efficient way of finding out.

I simply need to download the contents of your memory, find out what date you made a change, and then dig through the massive commit to find the piece of info I need.

Forget experience using Git features, managing merges, following Git flow, or even any other SCM ... how can people be so tick when it comes to recording what they've done.

Heres a little cheat sheet for those struggling:

- Commit message
Describe what you actually ****ing did. Don't tell me the date or the time, thankfully Git records those. Don't tell me the day of the week, if I need to know I can figure that out, just tell me what ... you ... did.

- Feature branch names
Now this is a tricky one. You might be surprised to know that this isn't in fact suppose to be whatever random adjective or noun popped into your head ... I know, I too was shocked. The purpose of this is to let other people know what new feature is being worked on in this branch.

- Reusing feature branches
Now I know you started it to add some unit tests, and naming it "testing" is sort of ok. But its actually not ok to name it testing when you add 3 unit tests ... then rip out and replace 60% of the business logic. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create a new feature branch, given you are now working on a new feature.

!rant
if you're someone who grades code, fuck you, you probably suck. Turned in a final project for this gis software construction class as a part of my master's degree (this class was fuck all easy, I had two weeks for each project, each of them took me two days). We had to pick the last project, so I submitted final project proposal that performs a two-sample KS test on some point data. Not complex, but it sounds fancy, project accepted. Easy money.

I write the thing and finish it, it works, but it doesn't have a visualization and that makes the results seem pretty lame, even though its fully functional. SO I GO OUT OF MY FUCKING WAY to add a matplotlib chart of the distribution. To do that, at the very bottom of the workflow, I define a function to chart it out because it made the code way more readable. Reminder, I didn't have to do this, it was extra work to make my code more functional.

Then, this motherfucker takes points off because I didn't define the function at the very beginning of the code... THE FUCK, DUDE? But, noobrants, it's "considered best prac--" nope, fuck you, okay? This class was so shit, not once was code style addressed in a lesson or put on any rubric - they didn't give a shit what it looked like - in fact, the whole class only used arcpy (and the csv mod once), they didn't teach us shit about anything except how to write geoprocessing scripts (in other words, how to read arcGIS docs about arcpy) and encouraged us to write in fucking pythonwin. And now, when the class is fucking over, you decide to just randomly toss this shit in, like it was a specific expectation this whole time? AND you do this when someone has gone out of their way to add functionality? Why punish someone who does extra work because that extra work isn't perfect? Literally, my grade would have been better without the visualization.

I'm not even mad at my grade - it was fine - I just hate inconsistency in grading practices and the random raising and lowering of expectations depending on how some grader's coffee tasted that morning. I also hate punishing people for doing more - it's this kind of shit that makes people A) wanna rip their eyeballs out, and B) never do anything more than the basic minimum expectation to avoid extra unwanted attention. If you want your coders to step up and actually put work in to make things the best they can be, yell at a grader to reward extra work and not punish it.

Each time I try firefox after somebody mentions it again or it's in my rss feed, it still seems to never actually advance

It's stuck and either gets worse or goes back to its stable non improving level again, how come do they still not have a proper mobile responsive tester, why are even the upgraded addons still suffering the same container and rendering bugs

how is it more important getting bad image by implementing mr robot malware, than getting on an actual competitive level

why is it default bloated with random pocket addon bullshit, why did it begin to lag, ..

I remember when I was using firefox for a good portion of my life and laughed at how google chrome is laggy, but nowadays theres simply no competition to chrome, its stability and developer tools

I wish there was competition, the grid tools were a great start, but then nothing followed and they just went back to their never improving flatline

Bought a new 4TB disk for my gaming rig, pulled out the old 1TB one and plugged it back on my old machine. Installed Ubuntu Server. Instalation went well after I figured I needed the IOMMU turned on.

Later went to play some BfA on the gaming rig and... No boot disk recognized. Ahn?
My SSD is plugged in. SATA cable is well seated. Thing was working not 30min before...

After a loooong time trying to figure out if it was hardware or micro$hit's Windows 10, I finally figured it:
It seems Windows installed its EFI partition on the old HDD. So my SSD is basically a single, large NTFS volume. Now I need to download the Win10 ISO, boot up the install disk and use the cmd prompt to create a new EFI partition on my SSD. Ugh.

Fucking Windows didn't think to install its boot manager on its own disk. "Nah, just gonna use this random magnetic disk here". Why? My login queues are already huge on WoW, why must this wankstain of an OS annoy me even more?

Today in some onboarding meeting i was laughing my ass off.

We were setting up the development machines that we got from the client to work on via citrix.

You guys probably know, that when you put your npm projects too nested into your filesystem, that packages randomly start not behaving because of too long file names or path names and stuff like that. That seems to be a problem with all OS (to be fair i havent actively looked for a solution, but it happened to me on Windis and Linux, so i'm just assuming here)

but even more so for some packages on Windis, when the project is not running on the same fucking drive letter than where your OS is running on. Like... wtf?

Had two UI5 projects pulled, both of them on D:. The first npm install went through flawlessly, the second one has a number of random errors, me and the other dev didn't know what they were. So what i suggested is to move this project onto C: and try it again. Turns out that was exactly it. Et voila, npm install ran through without any hiccups..

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

all of them. countless wasted hours.

as fate decided to turn me from $random-dev-geek into "the guy that calls the shots in tech", one of my earliest decisions was to automate formatting.

everywhere, automated at CI.

gofmt was an inspiration for the industry.
js?/ts? use prettier
C++? use ClangFormat
etc.

always default settings.
enforced by pre-commit hooks and CI.

never a single argument about bracket style, I don't care if someone likes single or double quotes better.

"fucks given" counter is fixed at 0.
everybody prefers it (ok, sometimes after a while sometimes)

of course there is still some more conventions to do for us humans.
IMHO the most critical ones.

like naming or even casing (camel, snake, kebab, - which one works where), but taking out most of the "so what" decisions takes discussions to a much more resonable level.

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

It's almost midnight here and I just realized something. I just realized that none of my college friends have contacted me in almost a year now... Like none of them. They hang out every weekend near the college I cannot coz im working and it has never occurred to them that "hey there's this guy that we we were together for four years with , I wonder what he's doing how's he holding up" and I wasn't even an asshole or a douchebag or something I guess I just vaporizer from their memories like a volatile liquid.

I also feel like my boss gives me nearly impossible tasks so that I fail like "design these two complete web applications in three months while you do your actual job of teaching people java for 8 hrs a day"
And now here I am at midnight sitting curled up in the corner of my bed like a paranoid chipmunk that drank a pot full of dark coffee, trying to talk to this random bunch of people from random places in the world who are doing random shit right now. And the worst part is I chose this ... I wanted this I wanted to make a difference. I didn't want to be just a cog in a machine.

If I die right now how many people would cry? I ask myself that a lot it's never more than ten. This is probably creeping u out right now so I'll probably end this.
Rest assured six hrs from now I will put my mask back on. a mask of a happy, mildly funny, averagely successfully geek, until my next date with sadness

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

LinkedIn recruiter:
- messages me about a fantastic job opportunity
- waits exactly 3 days
- messages me asking about the cool company I work at and how I find the engineering department here
- again 3 days
- messages me saying that he has heard some amazing recent news (there were none) about the fast growing company I work at and asks how I feel about the changes caused by our headcount growth
- 3 more days go by
- today, I get a notification that this recruiter has given me random LinkedIn endorsements for some skills that I had put on my profile back in college and since then forgot about even the existence of the endorsements feature

My favorite part is that the job they had originally sent expects a few languages and other tech skills most of which I actually have listed on my profile, but naturally, he only endorsed me for skills not required for said job spec.

What kind of weird sorcery is this?

300 global variables.. THREE HUNDRED FUCKING GLOBAL VARIABLES?
Are you for real?

Now let me check the line numbers again..

hmm.. line 97 to .. yep line 410, just a few new lines to seperate some of them or.. group? Idk, I've given up on trying to understand those.

Now you may ask "But ThatPerlDeb, where did you see this and what was the intention?"
Low and behold, take a chair and I may explain this to you.

First of all: Fuck the dev that wrote this!
Second: Fuck all the devs that kept up with this practice or whatever you want to fucking call this!

Now, the application is our POS system that our customers can use for a monthly fee (That this piece of garbage even requires payment is disgusting) but anyway..
The global variables sometimes are declared for labels, sometimes for some frames, sometimes just for random values to be there.

We're using Perl for the POS system and Perl ain't the best at OOP, so in the dev's defense I can understand why you'd use a few global variables, but not fucking 300!! FUCK OFF WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!

So now I'm going through this torture slowly but surely deleting globals and putting them into some sort of scope and always MANUALLY test if something broke. Again, this company sucks ass and there's nothing that could even be considered a "unit test" or something like that, so fuck that, too.

After two hours I've brought down the count of global variables to about 260, so there's progress being made..

But then, there comes more!

"But how???" you may ask, and you're right, I've asked that myself.

Now to resolve the global stuff in each file some of the initial globals are used, we got about 20-30 files which do different stuff, all fair and square, at least there was an attempt at seperating functions but god this mess is so fucking fucked up. So in order to "safely" delete a global variable I have to check if any of the variables are used in another file, and if so, in which scope and how they are used.

Spaghetti would be a compliment for this fucking disgusting piece of utter bullshit.

Let alone the code quality of this "code"
Indendation? Dafuq is dat?
Scope? Nah, we got everything global anyway
Function size? Well, some are 5 lines, some are 900 lines, who cares anyways, right?

I'm so fucking glad once I leave this shithole, for real.

Oh no AI can destroy hummanity in the future! It is like skynet and such... Bad! It will be the end! FEAR THE AI!

Yeah so i cant sleep now so im writting a rant about that.

What a load of bullshit.

AI is just a bunch of if elses, and im not joking, they might not be binary and some architectures of ML are more complex but in general they are a lot of little neurons that decide that to output depending on the input. Even humans work that way. It is complicated to analyse it yes. But it is not going to end humanity. Why? Because by itself it is useless. Just like human without arms and legs.

But but but... internet.... nukes... robots! Yeah... So maybe DONT FUCKING GIVE IT BLOODY WEAPONS?! Would you wire a fucking random number generator to a bomb? If you cant predict actions of a black box dont give it fucking influence over anything! This is why goverment isnt giving away nukes to everybody!

Also if you think that your skynet will take control of the internet remember how flawless our infrastructure is and how that infrastructure is so fast that it will be able to accomodate terabytes per second or more throughput needed by the AI to operate. If you connect it to the internet using USB 2.0 it wont be able to do anything bloody dangerous because it cant overcome laws of physics... If the connection isnt the issue just imagine the AI struggle to hack every possible server without knowing about those 1 000 000 errors and "features" that those servers were equiped with by their master programmers... We cant make them work propely yet alone modify them to do something sinister!

AI is a tool just like a nuclear power. You can use it safely but if you are a idiot then... No matter what is the technology you are going to fuck shit up.

Making a reactor that can go prompt critical? Giving AI weapons or controls over something important? Making nukes without proper antitamper measures? Building a chemical plant without the means to contain potential chemical leak? Just doing something stupid? Yeah that is the cause of the damage, not the technology itself.

And that is true for everything in life not only AI.

I'm very angry at C# 😡 (and java in some degree). Recently I decided to create huge project in C#. (It is my favorite launguage now because of great VS2017 its features, lib and such). I used windows form app in order to make pretty gui for this program. Everything worked fine, but i decided to implement some 3d rendering system in order to display grafs in 3d, oh how foolish was I.

Ok so what are my options?
1.DirectX9 -> abandoned by microsoft, they say its ded so nope.
2. DX11 -> great! i even can use sharpdx or simpledx to use it! oh wait, what is that? INVALID DX CALL
(in demo code)Damit!
3.OpenGL -> obsolete, lib non existent.
4. Library that comes with .NET -> WFP only sorry!
(i found some dogdy tutorials on yt for dx11 but they need .net 2.0 really?) 😐

In that moment i decided to swich to java. (because Java c#_launguage = new Java("microsoft");)
After 1 day of instaling eclipse and 2 more to install the newest jdk MANUALY i realized that java isn't that easy to use as C#, because:
- no dynamic type-> HUGE PAIN i cant use a single list to store everything buuuu!
-console? yes but its burried inside some random lib and its not consistent with every java version!
-gui editor similar to VS one? oh you need to create it from scrach!😫

Well at lest i can render things. So maybe java will render suff as another tool in my app? Nope pipes NON existent, we need to use sockiets! (unity pipe plugin was easier! worked but it was SLOW)

Ok so after few more days of struggling i managed to render simple graf using directx9 in my original C# project that works fine.. 😥 I only need to create a lib to wrap in and we are done!

Why can't companies create a laungage that will have ALL the features i need? Or at lest give me something like pipes that work in every laungage that will be helpful!

I know it is sometimes stressful to be a dev. But when your program works 😀 that is great feeling! Especialy when you learned to code yourself like me 😁. (student before a university, that lives in small abadoned town)

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?

So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.

Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.

After reaching the pinnacle of my latent burnout and mental overload lately I quit and managed to get paid leave for the rest of the notice period through hr as I told them I'm not able to work for them anymore and else had to go on sick leave. My brain just had to have a clean cut and blocked me from
getting into their overcomplex and shitty, unplanned projects as I see no value in doing anything for them anymore. I gave them all my access keys and a small handover, but it was clear that they would run into problems without me, cause I've been doing like 5 jobs there due to developer shortage. Now I still get requests from my manager even though I had an operation and spent last week in the hospital and am still recovering for the next two weeks. He's still trying to build pressure as if it was my fault that we never got time to document stuff properly and automate things that have to be automated. He ignored every recommendation I made in past to ensure that things keep running when I leave, as I always knew that I wouldn't do this shit for long. It was always more important to please bosses ever-changing requests and stupid whims as fast as possible at the cost of quality, pressuring us into putting projects live at 80% to meet random deadlines we had no say on. What a fucking asshole trying to put the responsibility on me now. Not my problem anymore. Have fun finding someone else taking over that shithole of an underengineered software-architecture. I'm out!

!tech

recently i have been realising that i am utterly lonely. their isn't a group of people in life (apart from my parents) who aren't either paid to be with me (i.e office colleagues) or i am paying to be with them (i.e gym) and its very sad.

i don't have any siblings. the relatives are on sour terms, so no one visit. my parents are mostly loveless and the whole family is just focusing on sustaining than living or enjoying. i recently had some arguments with my friends and now they too are not on talking terms. .

I am a 25 year old, short , somewhat chubby guy in the most boring and safe field with no interesting interests except an average guy stuff ( cars, stocks, tech, career, sports... things that guys usually discuss).

I have been told on face that my vibe isn't interesting and i can honestly accept that . i myself wouldn't want to be with someone like me. if you are girl, then i will probably be talking to you for 30 seconds of joke-cum-fun-cum-serious-cum-caring stuff( i usually have 1-2 lines of witty stuff prepared) before going all silent and boring you the fuck out.

the next convo will be followed by an even dumber sentence but i will try to end it with a geeky joke or reference and a small laugh prompting you to also smile or fake laugh. and if you did that, then i will be desperate to keep you laughing, but my sentences will keep on getting more dumber and boring until you leave and categorise me as the most boring idiot/ "nice guy" you met. ( and meanwhile i am at the mental stage where i love you as the most precious thing of my world and imagining kids and life with you)

I can't care for anyone. I have seen too much parent fights, empty walls, money issues to understand how to care for anyone . my life is focused and sad.

shall i go on giving chocolates to everyyone in office to be popular? shall i ask a random gorl on the stret for her phone number? shall i start strolling in the park and try to talk to people? honestly, if i were a girl and someone does this to me, i would be shit scared and creeped out than falling for that guy.

then how the fuck i land myself into someone who wants to be with me? do i even want someone to be with me? or is loneliness the only thing i want?

i feel pretty okay for the most part of the day in this loneliness, except at some weird times like when am eating a platefu9 of chinese alone in some shop, or at night when i lock the door of a 9x9 large room and realise that i am the only one here.

i was once excited to grow up and do grown-up stuff like drive a car, take a solo tour, goto vaccination in every few days, be adventurous . but that has changed . i did all these things when i had people in my life. i somewhat felt motivated to do those, seeing that there were people who wanted to be with me during/after these things and care about me. now it just feels pointless.

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

Planned to pull an all nighter last night cause I was procrastinating the whole weekend and the project was due today. Ended up procrastinating even more and seeing random shit on YouTube. 🙄😓

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

It's over.

I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.

Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:

I had a lot of expectations from you.

But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.

The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?

But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.

But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).

And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.

So now the time has come.

Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop. But I'm sad about leaving all of these stickers (yeah I know they're pretty random)

also, should I get a macbook or not? I really like the OS but I hate it's pricetag. But i heard Apple supports their products for more than 5 years and this laptop of mine is just 3 and a half years old and it's slowing down already even on 16gb memory. IntelliJ used to run smoothly on this.

Can u guys suggest a developer friendly laptop? im not really into gaming so I wouldn't need gaming one 👨‍💻

The joy when tools do not have machine parseable output.

I'm looking at you SBT. My favorite pile of poo.

Remove the logging level from each line, then trim the line, then stab around inside the line with regexes, fishing for a possible match which hopefully is right...

Then stripping scala information like the object type, cause yeah...
A line can be for example "[info] Vector(File(...),File(...))" where info is the log level, Vector the wrapping sequence type, File(...) the wrapping element type and the string inside File(...) what yours truly needs.

As this is lot of shitty shabby string stabby stabby, we need to add a fuckton of boiler plate validation cause who knows what we just murdered.

To make it even more fucked up, a multi project project can produce different output for the same key.

:-)

Yeah. So we need to fix that too.

By the way, one can set log output to unbuffered in SBT.

Then the output is in random order :-)

Isn't that fun? Come on, you wanna poke that pile of shit, too.

The SBT plugin way is by the way no alternative, as I need a full Java environment for execution.

Which brings me to the last point:

For fucks sake, writing CLI applications in Java is so much bloody boilerplate code.

There's ugly and then there's the "please kill me" kind of level.

50 lines just to write a basic validation of argc / argv with commons cli.

That's 6 lines in python. Not kidding. :(

I currently hate everything.

Moments where the job sucks: When you have to hotwire two electric cables with high currency by giving both cables the blowjob of your life.

I have a project idea:
Web app that will automatically generate random like-a-facebook project ideas that will handle the buisness side and automatically post that offer on multiple forums, linkedin and send email with it. All using AI, Nural Networks, Big Data and VR.

Seriously, once fucking more some african or indian guy messages me to work for his awesome "its like a facebook but different" idea where he needs "just backend, frontend and mobile apps" and that he will just "handle the rest" and that "have no money now but after I sign a NDA he will give me some shares", I am gonna find him and shit on his head. Monday did not even ended yet and I already read 9 "offers" like this on my mail and facebook, only one guy white, rest indians or africans.

Why are then people suprised that we consider black and indian devs as a fucking joke 90% of the time. I have a indian dev friend and he could not find a dev job for 2 months, because everyone would rather work with less skilled asian / white guy than indian / black guy. This is not about racism, but about those retards that are acting like idiots. Hope I did not offend anyone (unless you do shit like this, then, please just smash your keyboard over your head).

Words like AI and neural networks are used just to lure the investors to our gofundme campain and steal their money after 2 years of silence.

Did anyone else grow up using shitty laptops and cheap hard disks with just not enough space and now that they are adulting and have access to money, have this random, uncontrollable urge to keep buying more SSD's even though they already have more than they'll ever need or is it just me?

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

TIFU by showing login data during presentation

I was presenting my school project when my teacher asked if I could show him the source code. I said ofc, just let me login to the FTP server. I completely forgot that it was also shown on the big screen, and a random funny student logged in and tried to replace the index file with a joke file. Of course, he didn't want to make damage, so he made a backup. But this backup caused the problem, because he connected to the FTP through Windows Explorer (wtf?), and when he made a copy of the original file, it was renamed to "Copy of xy", but in a localized version, which contains special characters. Because of these characters, some FTP clients couldn't even connect, others just couldn't interact with the file. No download, no rename, no delete, nothing. After trying out like 8-9 FTP clients, I just remembered that I could rename it in PHP. Well, it got deleted instead of being renamed, but at least it wasn't there anymore. I have spent like half more hour with searching for a backup version on my computer until I found it.

TL;DR: showed FTP credentials during presentation on big screen, random student accessed and renamed a file, special characters in name fucked up the server, luckily I found a backup.

I can’t control my thoughts.

When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.

It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.

The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.

Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.

My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.

I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started

Tldr: I think I made a company fire some dev a year ago.
I was working for this company remotely, alone, on a very big and old legacy php project where they still used echo '<code><code/>'; and i was a very junior junior front end developer, needed to make the website work somehow (whole new design). They brought in a random guy to work with me, and we started working.. I was using bitbucket to version my changes, and I asked him to do the same. He tried pushing his changes once and then practically never again because he started working in files that i was working on and there were git conflicts, and he gave up, even though i asked him to do that... he then statted using general classes to style the page (like .color) with absolute positioning and it broke everything everywhere. He then proceeded to minify half of the php files 'because of performance', I remember talking to other few people in the company and he disappeared a few more days later. I never finished the project because they stopped it randomly and i think i got him fired even though he could've continued working in the company

I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.

For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.

Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.

To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…

And all of a sudden the code worked.

All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.

So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?

Working with a group on a startup idea. We have weekly Google chat meetings with the full team and sometimes me and the other two founders have side calls. Our group is getting bigger so the weekly is getting longer so the 3 of us were talking about ways to make them more efficient. One was, background distractions like TV, random people talking in bg, kids...

So then yesterday the 3 of us went over a different topic and the guy who had brought up the distraction issue was in the bathroom shaving and trimming nose hairs the whole time. He kept asking questions about the agenda which we all had access to. I shouldn't even care much. I drink through the meetings anyways.

Just found the most embarrassing security hole. Basically a skelleton key to millions of user data. Names, email addresses, zip codes, orders. If the email indicates a birthdate, even more shit if you chain another vector. Basically an order id / hash pair that should allow users to enter data AND SHOULD ONLY AUTHORIZE THEM TO THE SITE FOR ENTRING DATA. Well, what happend was that a non mathing hash/id pair will not provide an aith token bit it will create a session linked to that order.

Long story short, call url 1 enter the foreign ID, get an error, access order overview site, profit. Obviously a big fucking problem and I still had to run directly to our CEO to get it prioritized because product management thought a style update would be more important.

Oh, and of course the IDs are counted upwards. Making them random would be too unfair towards the poor black hats out there.

When you give a basic touch of modern design to a README and critize their replies they end the conversation with

'locked and limited conversation to collaborators'

'We appreciate the effort'

Sure doesn't look like it.

'X is highly specialized software'

Like most other software? And?

'The docs are fairly out of date, and need a complete rewrite, not this kind of graphical adjustment, so it would do more harm than good to present information of how to run this application in a secondary page along with random outdated info.'

So you are too lazy to update them, probably won't for a long time and have a problem with updating the outdated information's design despite that not actually changing the situation.

Disregarding the fact that the 'graphical adjustment' work even if you update the content.

Got it, right.

FUCK YOU PHP, FUCK YOU SYMFONY AND DEFINITELY FUCK YOU SHOPWARE.

Don't get me wrong, PHP has evolved a lot, but the stuff people are building with it is just the biggest load of fucking shit I have ever seen: Shopware. Shopware is the most ass-sucking abomination to extend. It's nearly impossible to develop anything beyond "use the standard features and shut the fuck up" that is more sophisticated than a fucking calculator.

The architecture of this pile of crap is the worst bullshit ever. A mix of OOP, randomly making use of non OOP concepts and features together with the unnecessarily HUGE amount of useless interfaces and classes. Sometimes I feel like it's 90% fucking shitty boilerplate shit.

And don't get me started with TWIG. It's a nice thought, but WHY THE BLOODY FUCK WOULD YOU NOT USE VUE IF YOU ARE ALREADY USING IT FOR A DIFFERENT PART OF SHOPWARE. This makes no fucking sense whatsoever and makes development of new features a huge pain in the ass. I can't comprehend how people actually like using this shit.

OH AND THE DATABASE. OH MY FUCKING GOD. This one is bad. Ever tried to figure anything out in a database where random strings (yes MySQL "relational" - you might think) that are stored as text in a JSON format make up some object or relations during runtime?? Why the fuck do you have foreign and primary keys if you don't use them properly??

Seriously you can't even figure out which data belongs to what because the architecture just sucks fucking ass. FUCK YOU Shopware wankers, you suck, your product sucks, your support sucks, your architecture sucks and you keep releasing new versions that regularly break shit even in minor versions.

I used to like PHP, but not in projects like these.

I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.

Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'?

Fuck Apache TIKA.
Its supposed to be a "universal file reader" or some shit. Im trying to use it as a PDF/image parser that does OCR when needed and yelds a full-file string. It does so, but the text ends up being IN THE WRONG FUCKING ORDER.
WTF would I want to parse the text out of a PDF in any order that is not the one the text is supposed to be read?!?!
"It is more efficient to work in random ordering", says the docs. No shit, really? Wouldn't it be even more efficient to just spit out random strings? Just as useful and 100% CPU-bound.
"You can add a property to forcefully put the text in the right order". THEN WHY THE FUCK IT IS NOT THE DEFAULT SETTING?
Srsly, what's the use case to a parser that yields scrambled text?!?

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

Today we all opened santa claus holiday gifts at the job. we were told to buy each other small gifts based on questionnaire that we filled. Some girl bought me and i bought her

I have never seen someone put in so much effort to buy so many, such detailed gifts for a person they have not even met, personalized to my questionnaire that i filled up...

She bought me a book. Candies. Letters. Socks. Drinks. Spongebob chocolate eggs. About 15 different (but not unique) items in total. She even wrote in the first page of the book how carefully she took the time to find a fun book to read and not choose a random book just to buy a book

And i bought her a figure of santa claus with cupcakes, as in santa claus brought her cupcakes (2 items total)

I feel so bad. I hate it so much when someone else puts in more effort for me than i give in return. I feel ashamed. I didnt take this seriously at all. I cant stop thinking about this. Its making me feel so bad. Im feeling beyond terrible. She said she was happy and grateful for what i bought but I know what i bought is nothing compared to what she bought

How do i live with this moving on forward

This morning me and my colleague had huge debate about using GraphQL or REST. While I was in total favour of GraphQL, that guy was more on REST side because he read some random articles on dev.to and medium and was highly motivated to use REST instead of GraphQL.

The problem is, some people write anything on blogging websites without even doing a proper research.

Since, I have worked on GraphQL, I knew it's pros and cons very clearly and what are the things that can be done to solve them.

The guys said that we can't do native caching in GraphQL at which the lava from my head just got burst out.
I showed him the official GraphQL docs where it was clearly mentioned that we can do caching in GraphQL.
Poor guy couldn't say anything after that.

P.s: We are still going to use old school REST APIs but I am happy that I could prove my point. I'll use GraphQL in my side projects anyway, loss for him if he's not exploring something new.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

Twitter comments are shit
How the fuck to use them? Why don't they just show one under another? If post has more than 2 replies it can be clicked to open its direct replies, some of them are shown in main thread, some of them are shown under opened thread. Some replies from main thread are shown under child thread. And to make it even worse any comment of sub thread can be expanded as well showing some random replies that could be expanded recursievly so you may end in main thread again. It is just impossible to read all replies in chonological order. Show me the moron who made this, I wanna kill him....

Dr Lanning from I, Robot:

There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul? 

One day they'll have secrets... one day they'll have dreams. 

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

holy shit I swear taxes are like the government trying to tell you you're a peasant to them

my medicare card is about to expire and FOR SOME REASON now the process to renew is a fucking interrogation about various documentation the government has given you. before it was just your damned name, date of birth, and a new photo for the card.

evidently they were supposed to send you snail mail 3 months before expiration. evidently also the only way to renew is get this said snail mail.
and evidently I have to go through this "catchall" change your address with everything in the government process
which is a little ironic
because
to use this service you need to give them something called a notice of assessment, which is when the government accepts your taxes they send you back one of those
well I haven't had access to my tax portal for years. I keep filing them and getting excess money back but I can't actually see any of my returns.
so I tried this time
12 pages of verification and more verification... you do one step, it says wrong info because if you have to write in 2,474 well turns out the , fucks it up and your info doesn't match what's on file and if you fail more than 3 times you'll be locked out. repeat. page after page. how many fucking pages are there? what format are they expecting? nobody fucking knows. you'll get to find out if you pass just this one more!
after about 4 hours of this shit
and they have 2 factor authorization now?! wtf.

then this next step is id verification or we snail mail you a code (WHICH AGAIN IS IRONIC)

I chose id. health card doesn't count, it notifies me later. thankfully I have a passport. bad news, passport expires this September so guess who is gonna be having more fun later
the app of course can't use my camera in the browser I have, so I start downloading fucking other browsers and finally hit one that works
also they lied. they also want a selfie. then it tells me I failed to look like myself. if you fail to look like yourself 3 times you are denied.

ok. so I try snail mail. the page says if I revoke consent to id I can go do the snail mailed code. they lied. if you revoke consent it exits the whole wizard. you enter all the verification steps again.

I try to get them to snail mail me the code. they want some basic info they asked me like 16 times now, and a postal code. ironic. well this is the tax people, so by this point I found all my previous sent in tax returns (though I can't access the government's replies). checked. yep. address all the same. put in the postal code. nope. somehow it's wrong. 3 times I put all this random info in in different ways. 5 times and I'm locked out.

now fucking what.

THE FUCKING IRONY OF
I NEED TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING
AND TO CHANGE WHERE I LIVE I HAVE TO CONFIRM WHERE I LIVE SO YOU CAN SNAIL MAIL ME SOMETHING FUCKING ELSE

the government just fucking dunks on you

guess we're all not having fucking medical cards anymore. all we do is pay taxes, and can't even see the paperwork to those taxes we pay.

oh my goodness if I dhsfjhsjfhj
i can barely type right now im so frusterated

I've told my manager multiple times that I don't feel comfortable with the task hes trying to give me because it feels way too large (its designing/programming/testing/documenting an entire prototype cloud file sync application and server backend service on my own, replacing one we have had for several years) and he still just ignores me and persists that I should be thankful for the opportunity and challenge.

It pisses me off so much when people say dumb shit like, 'its a great opportunity to learn' at work. No it isn't. Your boss is going to be on your fucking case for taking too long or not delivering enough, and thats exactly what happened. He got upset and said he was expecting more things to have been written down by now, like design notes. I was just fuming. Design notes? I'm not even a freaking designer, I've never designed any type of big software ever, what the fuck do you want from me.

On top of that, I don't know where the hell he expects me to get time for this. I'm apparently also devops so I get yoinked off of anything im doing if some stupid thing breaks in some other environment about something I really don't even care about. Any other random ass task just gets dumped on me too. I'm supposed to be a 'junior developer', and get paid as such (i've wanted to go to the intermediate level but get told the title doesn't actually matter and no pay raise for you) but I get the responsibilties of a whole fucking team dumped on me and its just

do I just quit now? I'm just, for fuck sakes man

What the fuck is this trend of pricing cloud services by the minute? I mean It's fucking great and all that I buy 2 minutes with a sql db but who the fuck actually does that?

After another night working on a server I (strongly) suggest we move our shit to a cloud service. It's cool providing I promise the costs don't rape us blind folded. Seems easy enough, right? Nope it's not.

6 hours later, halfway to becoming a fucking network engineer and I'm more lost than ever.

Seriously can't the fuck AWS and google cloud show a monthly price - even an estimate for generic shit like $x for the average crappy wp blog!

If anyone has some helpful info / experience on the true cost of hosting generic web apps - the retardedly simple app I'm trying to price is:
1 php web application with 150 domains, 3gb mysql db and 30gb ssd.

I gets has 45000 sessions with 250000 page views.

Your help would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm leaning towards deploying a clone sending 250 000 random requests and praying my $300 cloud platform credit will cover the bill.

Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.

Subject: Pharo

Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.

Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.

Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.

We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny

Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.

Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.

Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.

I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.

I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.

Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.

For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.

Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.

There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.

Guess I really am a simple dude.

I been looking over my profile and god it's been a while, programming as still been going on in the background but more for game mods and alikes, kind of been lazy but same time dealing with life.

I really had forgotten my passion for tech and programming it's just become a tool I know and use and I kind of feel bad for doing that. I got in to computers when I was 6 years old built my own PC our of random spare parts at 7, was teaching family members how to repair there own pcs by 9 at the age of 11 was helping with the schools computer department repair and fixing networking problems and my ideas and comments mattered.

Now I am an adult ... Sadly it seems the enjoyment of any idea is shot down with some rude remarks from another Dev, but isn't the point we all see a problem different so we all can contribute?

Like I said I never worked away from computers or programming but now I more like your little side computer repair shop I can do it, I get the job done but the passion isn't there and the end result reflects it.

I believe it's the human part what put me off not just others but myself, I used to put my heart in to my projects and when someone comes alone and rips them apart for let's say a spelling mistake what I state everywhere I am dyslexic but seems to be over looks alot. I became more stale in what I was willing to take on. My own websites now reflect this I am using crappy reinstalled software over me doing it myself.

But the passion for the idea what tech and programming never left I just hope one day soon I am enjoy it again, the wow factor is still there, god there is some talent out there and some of them people I meet before they became big but my aim was never to be come big I would be happy to be on a small project what only as a few eyes on it as long as it makes a difference and that's my problem tech like everything as become so commercial.

Even small projects are ran like a company and the wow factor is gone or the risk factor of trying a unknown way is dismissed for trying to keep face.

If I was born 20 years before right now I would be glad to slow down but I am 30+ and seen the world change so much in this last 10 years where I can do it but .... Why would I do it, when most cases it goes out of my moral ideals

I still mess around with teck, I still have Pi's kicking about and you bet your bottom Dollar I will be trying to get a Pi 5 lol

The love of tech hasn't gone but the communities I enjoyed have, I know this is a me not adapting but I don't need to adapted, I want what we do to matter to someone to make a difference, and I mean with there life's and wellbeing not there bottom line.

If you have any communities to look in to please comment below and of you was able to read this then OMG I am so sorry, I didn't proof read this or anything it was just a little rant about how I become disconnected from the world I have always found enjoyment.

I slipped away to game at late but this last few months I seen myself wanting to be apart of a project or community for tech/programming and even just be a voice helping even someone else get the answer.

I do still have hope for the geeky nerds of yester years even if we are now just a relic of the past lol

Well sorry to put anyone's eyes though this lol enjoy your rants guys and keep up what ever projects your working on.

There are periods when my intolerance level is increased, my pet peeves are more present than they were. During this time every fucking thing pisses me off, especially noise. It's the bane of my focus and concentration. Got a couple of loud ass colleagues and let me tell you, I've killed them many times over in my head. Always going off topic and talking about random shit that doesn't even matter.

Story about someone elses rant
A = coworker;
B = random guy from company, but from another office;
C = manager we like a lot, cause he has IT background;

A asked B about a problem, because B worked with the that thing. B answered I dont know. So A asked C, and told him, im asking you, because B said, he dont know. C went nuts and pulled a shitstorm on B, like who WTF do you think you are, that you cant give at least a hint to A on the problem or Cc someone who may know more about the problem.

what i wanna say is, shouldnt it be common sence if someone asks me about a problem i navigate him to a person, who knows more than me? Even if its the first day i the office, I know this is my team leader he should see the bigger picture of the problem, so ask him. But telling idk is like, go fuck your self.

!dev !tech

it's 2 am, nd just out of curiosity i put on earphones and tried to dance on a romantic couple song . interestingly, my life has been so single and restrictive that I can't even imagine holding hands of someone , nd that feels a bit sad.

after being burdened with the family ethics, relgions, family fights and financial crisis for so long, i feel i have lost a personality that i should have had.

1. i have lost the sense of random naughtiness and unnecessary bravery/arrogance. from what i know, the best way to reach your path is to remain focused on it. unnecessary acts of curiousity or nuisance leads to fights, frauds or worse.
however, people enjoy life by doing unnecessary banter, gossips, nuisance and having fun with unknown things, people and surroundings.
i guess this makes people a likeable/interesting character in social scenarios as me being an alert dog trying to focus on resching the party place, have a safe party and come home at time becomes a less interesting character than the guy entertaining everyone by his stupid talks in the car.

2. i have lost sense of compassion or showing love , expressing love or doing things out of love and not just for transaction.
From what i heard, people in relationship are clumsy to the max level. messages every 5 seconds, random acts of flirting, teasing, playing hard to get, what not.
i ... am simple. if i like someone, they are gonna know in 5 seconds (which is followed by a lifetime of awkwardness, so i have stopped even letting this thing to be known). physically nd financially i have enough resources and plans to be a good person to be with : i can be helpful in situations, am always up for doing anything interesting and have reputable personna. but expressing via those sugary baby talks is not my ☕

3. I haven't gained any passion for anything. i see people having deep thoughts on their passions for poetry, music, dance , guitar, travel, political alignment, causes, or whatnot.
i am not that much passionate towards anything because life doesn't give everyone the chance to choose passions.
i sat with my father in a flea market selling stuff. that wasn't passion, that was a necessity. for me, money>>study>>>anything
i am only passionate about having food on my plate and a roof over my head

-------

so all these things makes jack a boring person. i jave been chasing money so much that i question everyday of its worth it, as it's currently just being used to battle with the financial crisis while having a little bit in savjngs to enjoy life. but am so much worn out by this pressure of earning money that I don't even know how to enjoy life or have someone to enjoy life with , so its even more pointless to increase that limit.

i do try to explore the things i like : dance, singing, traveling, working out but not at the level that those attributes define me

#awkward_loney_life

When my brain was overloaded and overwhelmed during rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, my life and my thoughts were a complete mess. Somehow, when I heard or imagined plurals of certain words, like "cans" or "cups", my brain painted pictures of a cute civilization of living soda cans. They fought oppression that came from us humans, but lacked mental capacity to do so. I felt really sorry for them and wanted to help. The more ordinary the word were, the more striking effect it had on me.

The rapid-cycling fashion of bipolar disorder is often triggered by unfit prescription medicines. This kind of disorder is among the most lethal mental disorders there are, with a huge percentage of patients committing suicide.

If you can't make sense of your thoughts, if your emotional responses seem inadequate or too strong, to the point when you can collapse crying after some random thought, stop whatever you're doing and seek help. Ask friends and family to find you a psychiatrist, as by the time you need help, you may lack mental capacity or emotional resource to find a doctor by yourself. To me, even the idea of leaving my bedroom and going somewhere was painful to think about.

If your thoughts appear to be "put into your brain" against your own will, if they make no sense, don't attempt to make sense of them. They are nothing but a random noise produced by overwhelmed synapses.

!rant

My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.

So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.

I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?

It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

Finally got Proton to run arbitrary programs with some tinkering. Works fairly well for running nigh anything I throw at it, even some random non-game programs. Might do this more often. (Next up: DXVK)

Today I created some reusable clean decent code to replace the random chaos in a huge project and then realised I had 3 options:

1. Sort out every instance to use the new code. This is very high risk because the project is both a shit show and has no tests. I don't have time to manual test or write unit tests on so much stuff.

2. Move over only some so that I can manually test. Still no time to unit test (management is fucked on their priorities). This will fuck the project even more since i will never get time to revisit this and adds yet more inconsistency and chaos to a project on its last legs and has this problem in droves.

3. Leave the project fucked

\_(^^)_/

I'm veering towards option 3 these days.

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.

WSL seems really cool from what i've been toying with it. WSL2 seems like it'll be even better and the integration with docker(another thing i'm toying with) looks interesting. as far as i can find though it's only on windows insider for now, and I don't like having telemetry on my main machine.

So i spent a good chuck of my day just setting up Hyper-v, learning about nested virtualization (so docker will work), setting up a win10pro vm, and i'm now in the process of setting this up to be a virtualized dev machine (not gonna be a one use only system cause i spent way too long on this shit) and setting up docker and wsl

I don't know much about docker or WSL beyond just some random stuff i've learned to toy with to simplify some things i do. but maybe this will give me a cool way to actively learn more about them and maybe use them as more than just boredom toys

Been wondering about something and can't figure out if I am a retard or a genius 😂.

If MD5 is so outdated and should not be used to store password hashes (let's say for whatever reason you cannot effectively switch to another algorithm) wouldn't it just be easier and more secure to just re-encrypt the hash again, so just MD5 the MD5 hash... in theory, wouldn't that make the hash virtually uncrackable because instead of trying to brute force actual real words, you now have a hash of essentially random characters which have no relation to the others, and even then, suppose you manage to crack the hash, you will get another hash to crack before getting to the password?