Got a phone call: I got an error, what do I do?
Me: what kind of error?
Her: I closed it.
Me: what did it say?
Her: I don't know, it was a window with "ok" and "cancel"
Me: why didn't you read it?
Her: I don't understand this computer language.

/me dies a little inside.
There is nothing quite as stupid as people who refuse to read their own language as soon as it appears on a screen.
They make those things for a reason.
This happens too often.

This was typical for me:

Yesterday evening I was installing a webserver on my Raspberry Pi for experiments with WordPress. I began some days ago, but I had to stop because the downloads took at least to long.

So I started to logi in:

Username: Raspberry
Password: Pi
-> False Password

Wondering why it is not working a tried again. Same result. After some time I remembered that I changed my password.

Username: Raspberry
Password: Ih4G2tgY*
-> false password

*example
Tried again. Still false password. Then I remembered, that I used my another standard password.

Username: Raspberry
Password: U2gra94hY*
-> false password

After that I felt a mix of angry and helplessness. After some other failed attempts I gave up.

I formatted the SD-Card and installed Raspian again.I started my Pi

Username: Raspberry
Password: Pi
-> false password

My thought: WTF, why does this not work!!

This was the moment when I got the brainwave that the Username wasn't Raspberry, it's Pi.

Username: Pi
Password: Raspberry
-> access

Then I hated myself.

FFUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKK

Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from such real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

^^^ This sums up my last year as a systems engineer perfectly

Trying to buy a house in another state. First time moving out of state, first time trying to buy a house. Making first offer this weekend. Which is terrifying, and exciting. But it’s also lonely because my other half is in the other state looking at houses and I’m stuck here working and taking care of the cats.

Had a poor mental health day yesterday. Got a call today that my mama (gran on my mum’s side) took a tumble and has been in hospital and they don’t think she’ll pull through. I don’t have many memories of her, but the memories I do have are happy ones. She was always full of life and love and kindness.

💔

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

Fuck the feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. when a friend comes crying for you for help with their hacked account and you keep asking them about what they did to protect it in the first place and they reply with nothing, no recovery email, no recover phone, no secondary verification, NOTHING. and you can do nothing but stand there and watch them cry while you can literally do nothing because there literally nothing you can do to retrieve their stolen accounts. FUCK BLACK HAT HACKERS.

(Part 2/2?)

THE RAT-RACE ARC:

I get a mail 2 months into this fiasco telling me to register on their website and take up another test. I was already over with my emergency and was working my full-time default. (Fortunately I found another internship during this time which was one of the best initiatives I've worked with).

It asks me to register as a new user, take up the test and "share" my results. Not pushing it on insta/fb but legitimately share my test results link to my friends manually like a referral code. The more shares the more marks I'll get in the test. Why the test you ask. Of course to sign you up for the same Whatsapp trickery bullshit.

Luckily these nutcases didn't know they could be bypassed. I simply opened the link in incognito and logged in with my own account and that counted as a point. So I automated that shit.

Surprise surprise. The same fucking "Hello everyone" message into my mail. To my surprise I was relatively lucky to get ghosted after my attempt. This story is quite depressing in general cases. You're supposed to do this assignment shit for 2 months and then they ask for 2000 INR for a training period, past which you are paid between 1000/- and 7000/-. Though I didn't get the chance but I'm willing to bet you get 1000/- per month in a 2-MONTH INTERNSHIP. WTF.

You also have the other option of ranking first in their 3 consecutive competition that they hold. The theme is again to create chunks of their actual outsourced work.

WHY NOW:

The reason why this rant sparked is because I recently received an email with my results of the aptitude exam that I first took before the Whatsapp fiasco. I imagine they just pushed out a new update to their test thingy and forgot to set it's limit.

THE CORRECTION ARC:

I pushed this message to Internshala. They were kind enough to remove them from their website. I also shot down their Angel and Indeed listings. I sent a strongly worded email counting their con-artist operations and how I've alerted authorities (obviously a bluff but I was enjoying it). They most probably are not affected by this though. They might still be continuing their operations on their website.

I'm sharing the story here with the moral of:

Don't do jackshit if they're not compensating you for it

Always check for reviews before you start working at a place.

Be cautious of bulk messages (and the infamous HEY GUYS!! opening)

Don't do anything outside your work specification at least while doing an assignment.

You're free to question and inquire respectfully about the proceedings.

If you're good at your job you'll get good working place. No need to crush yourself with an oppressive job due to external restrictions.

And if you manage a company, please don't take advantage of helplessness.

There's no good ending to this tale as I have not received a follow-up. Though I want to see scumbags of their calibre shot down without remorse.

Good bye and thank you for listening.

I just had a nightmare like I open the fridge and there is a cup with rotten slices of ham inside it and I look around and there is my ex with 8 hands telling me to E A T I T

and there is a feeling of complete helplessness and immense fear like I'm going to die right there. It's like suffocating in your sleep it's awful

Just spent 4-5 hours debugging a failing staging deployment that was using Bower, among many other things.

Turns out bower has a feature where if any library in bower.json has been deleted, it just hangs, and silently waits for nothing.

Fuck bower, and fuck me for using it in 2014!

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.

The mind and body end up as they do via the most common activity both are placed through.

I've been surrounded by stupid and lost my ability to communicate.

I've been surrounded by helplessness and became old.

I've traveled to my original life and become young again, though diminished, the mind tricks itself, with effort to push past stalls from lack of use of will it can come alive again at any time.

I've been to the steel mills of Alaska, and the cornfields of Nebraska. I've seen the derelict offices of Google burn with the window boarded up and the squatters inside them. I've seen the houses where they cut up the little babies. From coast to shining coast I have walked empty down drooling path. The decaying flesh of false morality poisoning our children. I have stood atop the mountain of this greedy earth, looking upon our beautiful pious pit, filled to bursting with the vast hands of helplessness. And did you know what I saw?
Hell!
[The audience erupts into laughter]

So my coworker asked for help with his work. I understand that sometimes talking about the problem with someone else will help solve the problem, but seriously, don't ask me "How do I fix this?". If you wanted me to help you fix something, go to lunch and let me work on it for a couple of hours. I can't fix something by telling you what to do. I need time to look into the problem myself, do research, and run tests on my own. Telling to do that over your shoulder is a complete waste of our time.

Also, his attitude of complete helplessness is tiring. It's hard to help someone who continually reminds you of how much he just wants to give up.