Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Got the iPod and music synchronisation isn't working well with Linux (I've synced quite some iProducts and it always goes great so this is a new one for me).

Bought a windows pc a few days ago and haven't installed Linux onto it yet so booted it up, installed Firefox and then downloaded iTunes.

Nearly done with installing when an error message pops up and the entire fucker blue-screens. Now it doesn't boot anymore 😡

Go die in a fucking corner, windows.

That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.

So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.

At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.

One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.

His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."

Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!

And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.

But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

Storytime!

I got a ticket near the end of the day, asking to install a printer on a computer. The branch in question was in a different time zone (I'm in US-Pacific [GMT-07] and the computer was in US-Eastern [GMT-04]). I figured I wouldn't worry about it; after all, I had other tickets to work on that were much higher priority.

The next day I come into work and immediately get a message from one of my East Coast coworkers, telling me that this branch is calling and asking how the printer is coming. I told him to tell them I would call them a bit later. I do a couple of easy jobs and then begrudgingly call the branch. I listen to the phone tree that they have (which requires two button presses instead of one in order to speak with someone) and finally get in contact with a person... only to have the call disconnect.

I call back and ask for the person who called in the ticket and then followed up, who had apparently gone to lunch. I informed the person that I was just going to install the printer and it would be good to go. This would be fine... up until she mentioned she needed scanning functionality.

Now I wasn't sure if the driver we have in AD is set up with the scan functionality, so I said okay, but that meant I would have to get the driver from the website. The connection to our branches are about 1Mbps, so even downloading Java updates (60-ish MB) take about 5-10 minutes on a good day. The file for this printer was about 700MB (thanks HP). So I went and did other stuff while that downloaded.

I come back after it finished and started the install process. Right away it asks to re-seat the USB cable. So I call the branch. The call disconnects. I call again. It disconnects. I call one more time, and finally get the person who called the ticket in. I instruct him to re-seat the cable. He does. The driver starts doing its thing. I tell him I'll call back if I run into any issues and we hang up.

The driver goes through the install process for about 20 minutes, stops at 99%, then fails. I want to restart the computer, just in case there's a conflict somewhere, but that would require calling the store again, so I put it off.

About an hour later I get a message from another East Coast coworker, telling me the branch is calling about the printer again. I was in the middle of another call and said I would call back later. I do. It disconnects. I call again, and get the person who called the ticket in again. I tell him I want to restart the computer, but wasn't sure if it was okay. He checks with the people using it, who says it's okay, so I reboot. I hang up.

Once the computer comes back up I start the install process again. It asks to re-seat the cable. Fuck. I don't want to call the store again, so I open notepad and say "Please take out the printer's USB connection from the back of the computer."

Three. Fucking. People. Saw it. They moved the window and one even tried to close it, but they didn't re-seat the cable. I opened another window, telling them to call me at my number. They didn't. I called them. Got disconnected. I called them again, finally got someone, told them to re-seat the printer cable again. They do, thank god.

I say thank you and hang up. Continue the installer. It stops at 99% again and fails. I reboot the computer; screw it, I'm just going to install the driver from Active Directory. Check Devices and Printers. It's installed successfully. Hallelujah!

I get the printer set up for the various programs they use and print a test page. I call them one last time; their phone system sounding like they were connected via an underwater line connected by tin cans. I get someone.

$me: Hi, I want to know if the printer has printed something.

$them (garbled): -et me shee... yesh, it -rint-d a *beezelborp*.

$me: Perfect, I'm going to close this ticket! Thanks, goodbye! *hangs up*

tl;dr - I hate printers

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.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Stories from Gary #000

Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.

So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.

Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.

Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.

I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.

-.-

So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.

"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.

To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.

tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Story && rant && dev && linux

I was using linux mint for a while... more like 5 months for work, there's this Touchpad/mouse issue in it that was driving me crazy, so basically the mouse stops responding out of nowhere in the middle of my coding and I have to restart the fucking laptop to get it back. Yeah, I tried all the solutions I could find on the Internet and nothing works.

This issue likes to fucking mess with me so much, it seems to only happen when I absolutely mustn't restart the laptop or I'm working on a task and have a tight deadline and I don't have time to waste restarting my pc.

A couple of days ago, I had this major feature I needed to release to production and the time I estimated for it and shared with my team turned out to be insufficient, so I had to work extra hours from home to finish it ... while I was working, the mouse issue returned and I had to restart my pc like 20 times that day. It was fucking frustrating and It was already midnight and all you can hear are keyboard sounds and fucks flying.

I made a promise to myself that once i finish this task, I'm gonna fucking migrate to another distro, I'm fed up with linux mint's BS. I've been putting up with it for so long it's time to move on.

Yesterday I installed Manjaro and I'm happily working on it today xD.

I was once handed a very old PHP project that I had to make some changes to. I thought it would be a piece of cake. But the moment I looked at the code, I knew it wasn't going to be easy. It was so poorly written, it took me hours to figure out what was actually going on. Now these were the times when I was already quite disturbed mentally and emotionally, and this shitty PHP code only made it worse. At one point, I was like, fuck this shit I'm gonna quit this job.

Thankfully, the client soon emailed that the requested changes weren't needed anymore.

I personally have nothing against PHP. I have created some amazing stuff with it. But it's the programmers that don't follow the best practices that piss me off. I mean, how fucking hard can it be to write clean code. You might save your time today by taking shortcuts but you'll make life hell for the people who might have to maintain your code in the future.

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.

Okay then, ex-android user there.

It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.

It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.

At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.

Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?

Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.

I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.

Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.

But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.

Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.

That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.

I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.

I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.

Peace to android folks tho✌️

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

grrrr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so am switching jobs as an Android dev from a company which made android libs (using almost 0 external dependencies and mostly java) to a company which makes android apps( and is probably using either rx/guava/ribs/hilt etc or the more fancy hilt/compose/coroutines/clean-arc etc. its either one of them depending upon the maturity of product)

B2C folks use tons of libraries in favor of delivering fast but learning about those libraries while taking new tasks and fixing bugs CAUSED by those libraries ( or their inappropriate usage) is a big PAIN IN THE FUCKING ASS.

I remember i had once became such a weird dev coz of my prev company ( before the current libraries one, which was also a B2C) .

on weekends i would come up with a nice app idea, start a new android studio project, and before writing a single line of useful code, i would add a bunch of libraries, gradle scripts and extensions .

that ocd will only settle once all the steps are done and i can see a working app after which i would write the code for actual code for feature implementation.

granted that these libs are good for creating robust scalable code, but most of the times those infinite kayers of seperation, inheritance and abstraction are not really needed for a simple , working product.

:/

i have also started reading about rxjava , and although i am repulsive to this library due to its complicated black box like structure, i find its vast number of operators nd built in solutions very cool.

at the end of the day, all i want is to write code that is good enough for monkeys, get it shipped without any objections and go back home.

and when you work on a codebase that has these complicated libs, you bet your ass that there will be thos leetcode bros and library lover senëõr devs waiting to delay the "go back home" part 😪

I'm so fed up with Codecademy. I payed for the pro, and I admit I haven't been able to consistently use it everyday as I would like. But every fucking time I would be on a lecture of some sort, I swear to fucking to christ it's the most buggy, uninformative piece of shit! And everytime you're in deep into subjects, the information is beyond unclear!

AND GOD FORBID YOU NEED A FUCKING HINT! they leave you to dry saying in the hint that "Look back at the previous sections" or "try to remember the steps you've learned"

No you stupid fucking bitch for a site. I clicked on the hint because I needed an answer as to what I'm doing wrong, and to something that can stir me in the right path. My god....I feel so stupid for giving PRO a chance. I thought maybe it would be nice to have some sort of professional site would be useful.

I swear this early afternoon I was spending fucking forever on the first few lectures of HTML trying to figure out what the actual fuck is wrong with the system fucking up not letting me change directories. And the community was no help whatsoever to the issues at hand.

Again, why the fuck is Codecademy so goddamn buggy!? Sure it may be a fun site to fuck around with to get your feet wet on the free version. But is it too much to ask for some good actual lessons that are being payed for!?

Idk anymore. I'm sticking to just YouTube and other free help. This is the last time I spend a fucking penny to any site that's supposed to teach something valuable.

I feel so upset because I feel like I wasted my money and time on something that I thought could've helped a lot.

If anyone was asking if PRO is worth it....definitely not! Please don't waste money with it! Don't make my mistakes, stick to YouTube and other free sources! The least I can do is warn people about spending money on this site. Trust me it's not worth it. It may not seem bad in the beginning, but once you go deeper it becomes clear the issues.

If anything stick to only free!!