Small agency, wants to try out some voice tech. Bought a Google AIY to get started, found some limits, worked round them.

Junior developer thought it would be fun to 'teach' it to swear.

Played around with some nice dialogflow intents, etc and got it all working.

Looking pretty good, loaded it with some quippy answers and case studies to show off our services.

Just got in to find out the boss has taken it to a presentation to a client about some of the new stuff we're doing... Now we are all sitting here waiting to see how many of us have a job tomorrow :-/

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

Client: "Let's code a prototype to show our intents to the customer. We have 96 screens to implement as a native app in 6 weeks"
~Prototype delivered in 6 weeks, despite some changes in the design on-the-go. Few months later~
Client: "The customer likes the prototype a lot. They would like to see some changes (another set of > 40 screens). It's still a prototype and the changes should be implemented in a month, but this time it has to use real data from external apis. We don't know which APIs yet, but it should also go live on the app store"

Like, seriously?

Set out to copy the iOS alarm on android because a) android's stock alarm is fugly and b) all other sleep reminder apps either offer me way too much or no functionality.

Week 1: "Oh, custom UIs need a lot of math... Ok."
Week 2 "Why on earth is my ram usage at 400 mb?!"
Week 6: "I have come to the realisation that android's ByteArrayDecoder should burn in hell.
Week 7: "Man... They sure made the management of intents and pending intents a pain."
Week 10: There. It works. Two classes, 7000 lines of code.... Hmmmm maybe apply MVP."
Week 11: I discovered embarrassment driven development, throw away all my code and start from scratch.
Week 12: Oh ButterKnife, where have you been all my life?
Week 17: I might actually finish this in my life time!
Week 28: Man, this MVP and managing Context, intents, SQLITE DB and pending intents do not mix well.
Week 46: I discover RxJava and Dagger 2
Week 47: I discover that the 'V' in MVP does not refer to an 'Activity'
Week 48: My StudyBudy says to me "Man, exams are only a month away!"
Week 49: I put all your code in my github, delete it locally and focus back on being a student.

*working in android with manager who doesn't know android*

Me:"we need to establish different intents for x and y to get the job done"

Manager:"i dont need you deciding what I intend to do"

.... thats not what I meant by intent

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

CORS is shit
Stupid useless shit that protects from nothing. It is harmful mechanism that does nothing but randomly blocks browser from accessing resources - nothing more.

Main idea of CORS is that if server does not send proper header to OPTIONS request, browser will block other requests to that server.

What does stupid cocksuckers that invented CORS, think their retarded shit can protect from?
- If server is malicious, it will send any header required to let you access it.
- If client has malicious intents - he will never use your shit browser to make requests, he will use curl or any ther tool available. Also if server security bases on something as unreliable as http headers it sends to the client - its a shit server, and CORS will not save it.

Can anyone give REAL examples when CORS can really protect from anything?

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

So I'm looking at getting a drone to do some videography for commercial purposes. I've been researching all the FAA regulations, dos and don'ts, tips for flying, videography, etc. My finger is hovering over the "buy now" button on BestBuy.com.

But, there's an exam you have to take to certify to fly for commercial purposes that, I thought, was supposed to test you on the Part 107 regulations. I pull up a list of sample test questions from the FAA's own website and it has questions on it that, for all intents and purposes, apply only to MANned aircraft, not UNmanned aircraft. Crap like "What airport is located approximately 47 (degrees) 40 (minutes) N latitude and 101 (degrees) 26 (minutes) W longitude?"

And I'm sitting here like, "WTF! I don't live anywhere near there! I just want to take pictures of some friggin trees and houses in my metro area!"

"Welcome to the FAA website, where we're not happy until you're not happy."

I made a reminder application, with different sounds for different hours, but it's super primitive, as I'd never figured out how to use android intents that we'll, and the logic was barebones. I'd like to polish it up so it's a little more user friendly and intuitive.

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

Going through my lore notes. And I'm playing a game with myself, so to speak: it's called "is this metal enough?", but with a side of quasi-metaphysical arcane technobabble plus mass wallmelting and nightmarishly psychedelic confusion.

For example... why are shadow gates a thing? Well, because of the undoing of time caused a multiplicity of parallel cycles that will, inevitably, slowly collapse upon themselves through a sequence of irreducible asynchronicities. But of course!

Now, as for the metal part, that's the undoing of time. You see, the Somberlain attempted to cast the most sinful signa in order to restore the desolate mortal realm as it stood on the brink of a world-ending cataclysm, this was after a decade of brutal, reckless litechnical abuse during the civil war fought amongst the first undecimvirate...

Now, he intended to roll back time itself as a way to avoid the cataclysm and restore life to the mortal realm, but the cost was immense: time was not rolled back, but rather __forcefully__ torn apart; it was effectively shredded, shattered, and undone.

Countless lives were lost as nearly six hundred years of Being were __erased__ in an instant, the most heinous large-scale blood sacrifice in history, spanning the entirety of the lower fragment of reality. I mean is this too dark, I'm not sure. How about I clarify: he didn't just snuff out their lives, no, they CEASED TO EXIST. THEY NEVER EXISTED. GONE. UNBECOMED INTO A TRUE IMMEMORIAL. OVER FIVE CENTURIES OF EVERY CONSCIOUS MOMENT ON EARTH DEVOURED TO FUEL HIS DARK MAGIC.

That's gotta have consequences, right? Well, obviously you'll get temporal distortions after that shit, I mean duh...

But wait, I'm lost, you say the undecimvirate deified themselves but were cast down after the whole superman spinning the earth backwards thing went full bathory and erased entire centuries from the fabric of the cosmos, so they were turned into the eleven thrones to guard over the eleven circles of the night eternal... but how is that linked to natural occurrences of teleportation?

First off, because *natural* teleportation is distinct from *artificial* teleportation. Failed experiments with (and miscasts of) mass transference of living matter are one of the leading causes of death among litarchs. It is not an instant transmission, just very, very quick, moreso than a mortal mind can process, that's why the "dilate" and "delay" sigils are added, so as to make the journey seem slowed down to the perceptions of whomever is teletransported, this is meant to ensure their brains don't __melt__ from the experience.

Similar reason as to why you have to give the _approximate_ total weight to carry when inscribing the ritual circle, you *do* know that it is __highly__ recommended to use accurate weighing scales to approximate this quantity, as under or overestimating it can lead to _FATAL_ consequences... do you not?

No, *natural* occurrences of teleportation do not have these constraints for two reasons: one, because both ends of the gateway are _fixed_ in both time and space due to the logic-defying occurrence of a future event being undeniably the cause of the past it revisited. Put on this toga. They are inextricably linked through the metaphorical and *literal* corpse of infinite collapsed timelines, which generates a conduit through the first circle of the night eternal, which *is* the domain of both forgetfulness and horror immemorial.

Second, the final layer on our stratified reality, that is, the final circle before the INVIOLABLE divine veil, wraps around the night eternal, which is why we call it "the shell". Or "Crisalida" if you dig Luis Alberto. It is a realm entirely outside of time, which is why the patriarchs can grant immortality, you see. By proximity to this sacred shell of existence, the timeline-corpse-conduit that links both ends of a shadow gate is, for all intents and purposes, approaching total chronostasis, therefore making it so bypassing physical space in a few seconds doesn't give you permanent loss of the sense of self as your brain turns into liquified jelly.

I don't remember what I was getting at and I don't care.

I am new to this so bare with me ,
how do you create intents for dialogue flow using c# so that you can use them in your agent .
I scavaged the internet for the solution for this but i only found the official documentation by google i need help or a tutorial to understand how do i create intents ,entities in c# code

for all intents and purposes I am a fullstack developer if thats what your frckn company requires it's backend on the line anyway - literally