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Recently I've played around with the Seam Carving algorithm for the content-aware image resizing.
It turned out that the algorithm is pretty powerful, elegant but yet simple. One of the interesting parts was that it might be optimized with the Dynamic Progrming approach. Also, it may perform a simple object removal from the image without even modern ML algorithms.
I've tried to describe my experience here in the interactive article:
https://trekhleb.dev/blog/2021/...
5 -
!dev
An interesting read about why the second (and last) WhatsApp co-founder left Facebook while leaving behind a whopping 850 million because ethics/morals.
"I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit," Acton told Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."
Here's the article (do click through to the Forbes one): https://fossbytes.com/whatsapp-co-f...9 -
I read an interesting article on internet.
Thought my friend would like it and sent a link to him.
-_-
I will never send anything to him again.
6 -
it can be the most interesting article in the world, but if you ask me to confirm cookies, to enable notifications and to disable my adblock or subscribe to your aWeSoMe newsletter at the same time I'm not interested in spending any more time on your site
oh and also, FUCK YOU, return your degree, resign and FUCK OFF1 -
These moronic idiots wrote a scientific paper, and did not bother explaining the acronym they've used. 😐
https://sciencedirect.com/science/...
How am I supposed to know which fuckin CART it means? Huh? Who the fuck told you that was acceptable? Also fig 3 can get fucked too.
Your approach seemed interesting for all of two whole fuckin seconds before you fucked it with your unscientific explanation of your results in SIXTEEN FUCKING DIGITS after zero. Fuck you and fuck this and fuck that. Am I clear?
... The straw that broke the camel's back. 😑14 -
a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.
i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.
it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.
it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.
at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.
it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.
it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.
also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...
it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"
back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D1 -
What the fuck??!?!?
I wanna say :-
Fuck!!! What the fuck a sex robot is?!?? Fuck???
Lets leave this planet here humans are thinking to make a sex robot(fuck! ) who can say no fuck?!?!?! Later they will file rape case for humans who tried to force their robot. FUCKING FUCK BRAINS?!?!?
Full answer: -
A lot of ethicists and psychologists think that yes, they should learn to say no. Here is an interesting article about it:
Should We Program Sex Robots to Give Consent?
I agree with Kate Darling, Ph.D., a research specialist and robot-human interaction expert at MIT Media Lab, told Inverse in a discussion about Westworld, when she says she isn’t concerned about the robots, but with human behavior.
However, when I’ve expressed these feelings on Quora, about this controversy I was downvoted and my answer collapsed because people got offended that I made the claim that an object (the robot) could be ‘raped,’ even after I clarified exactly what I meant by that- that no you cannot rape an object, but just as an object cannot consent, you may be enacting ‘rape’ or torture fantasies, etc., on the robot. I think I was downvoted because my point of view wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear, was too blunt, and the people who downvote opinions that may look more negatively at the sex robot industry typically aren’t feminists in the slight.
It seems a lot of people want the right to use sex robots and also that a lot of people haven’t really thought about it too deeply. Some people say that the robots will relieve women from sex work or protect people from sexual assault, I think these are very bold claims. Some people compare the sex robots to vibrators or other masturbation tools, but this is simply not accurate because sex robots are designed to be much more. They are marketed as companions that do not cry, nag, etc. People that own them often may dress them, tie them up, have marriage ceremonies, etc., a lot more activities than they would if it was a simple masturbation tool.
5 -
I'm starting to dislike the targeted news articles at the bottom of a new tab on chrome lol
I went to check my grades, saw the title of an article that seemed really interesting, so i read it. By the time I finished it, I thought of a friend who'd like to read it. So I sent him the link.
15 minutes go by and I mutter "fuck" as I remember I never checked my grades, the whole reason I even opened chrome lol
12 -
[random article] - interesting TITLE.
Click.
checks scroll bar - not much
Quick read.
read
read
read..
hmmm
read
read
read
hmm seems forever that i'm reading.
something's not right
check
check
chek m**F8d8fd , it loading a freaking 3000 words article with ajax.2 -
In the past: "Alright, have the day off, so can do some serious work (work on my game project). Let me just check my mail first... And a cpl of sub-reddits... And see if there are any updates for Unit3D, or any interesting forum posts, or new assets on asset store that look nice... And check some online newspapers just to see if anything is going on... And check if anything new has been posted on slashdot since I last checked 5 minutes ago (nope)... And maybe see if there's any updates to Sublime Text or new useful packages that can help improve workflow... Ooh came across article on how to improve workflow... Hm someone mentioned a new task-management system in comments, gotta check that out... I'll just sign up for a demo-account and... Hm but what if there are any better ones? Better google for comparisons. Wait, isn't there a new episode of Silicon Valley today? Gotta see that first, no time tmr. Hmm also new episode of Archer, and American Gods. Better get watching these out of the way first, or I can't concentrate... Ah, wait, it's dinner time, no point starting anything until after that."
Now: All of the above, plus "I'll just check devRant real quick before I... hmm... interesting rant... *scrolls and reads rants and comments for 3 hours*"
How am I supposed to get any work done? :_(3 -
!dev
I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.
The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.
As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.
This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.
My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.
That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again. -
What does GPT-3 tell us about how our brains work?
I just read an interesting article (link below) about how it does on the turing test. I've had this inclination for a while that state of the art AI is "incomplete", in the sense that we have some of the systems to make AGI, but not all of them. One of the comments they make is that "GPT-3 often finds it easier to write code to solve a programming problem, than to solve the problem on one example input", and that's the nail on the head. We can codify situations, describe the rules, put them in memory and run those rules in our head. We can manipulate the input to see how it'll change, we can spot from a problem statement what the rules are instead of focusing on what the answer is. Anyway, light bulb moment shared.
Link: https://lacker.io/ai/2020/...9 -
"What language should I learn?" Wellll.
[0]
43 PERCENT Of banking systems are built on COBOL
80 PERCENT Of in-person transactions use COBOL
95 PERCENT Of ATM swipes rely on COBOL code
220 BILLION Lines of COBOL in use today
"Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old." [1]
Found this pretty interesting/crazy.
Source:
[0] http://tmsnrt.rs/2nMf18G
[1] http://reuters.com/article/...6 -
I find interesting article on the internet but can't / don't want to see it right now so i save it in a .txt file with a random name. I never look at it again and, a week later, i delete all txt files cause desktop looks cluttered.
Is this stupid?8 -
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me3 -
Is there such a thing as a front-end developer or are we all becoming either UX engineers or JavaScript developers?
An interesting article from Chris Coyier made me think.
https://css-tricks.com/the-great-di...2 -
personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.
which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).
first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.
right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.
that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.
i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.
i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.
three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).
put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...
... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.
awesome experience, though. worth every second.
to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...
dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD
those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D
as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting. -
Question
To the VPN users here, I have been always using VPN as soon as I am out of my own network, ie. cafes or hotels, now I came across an interesting article
https://arstechnica.com/information...
which tl;dr basically describes the first impact seconds, which happen before the vpn connection is actually established.
Do you (or your vpn-client) take any precautions to prevent that? or are you just sure that everything is using tls and doesn't auto sync?5 -
I spent a major part of last week writing my third blog post. Last weeks topic was the alias command, I did lots of reading and I came up with an article I think would be interesting.
You can read the article on https://munawrites.me/2020/06/...
I would really love to read your feedback on what your thoughts are on the alias command.4 -
https://bit.ly/2yaWZFd
An interesting article on silent meeting. I think this is extremely efficient. Thoughts?4 -
! Dev
An interesting (little dramatical) article depicting the stages from how the covid 19 enters the body silently to its worst case scenario
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/... -
My vision is to work part time as a dev and part time as a writer about mobile app development! I only started recently to write one article each week about interesting topics or my current side projects. Previously I never thought that it would be so much fun to write about what I am doing, but I really enjoy planing and writing these articles 🥳 Maybe some day I will try my luck and apply as an iOS author at raywenderlich.
PS: I would be very glad, if you could give me feedback to my new article! 😁 Help me to achieve my vision 😜 Here is my new article about music and sound effects in a SpriteKit game for iOS:
https://medium.com/@HeyDaveTheDev/... -
Interesting NY Times article today Saturday March 26 2016 by Markoff and Lohr, "A Race to Take Control of Artificial Intelligence And the Future of Tech". Lots of C levels will read this article and ask CIO if AI on radar. Will fan the fire. Also a lot of VC action. Google TensorFlow open source. Microsoft also all in and of course IBM Watson. Google beat Go grandmaster 4-1, which is tougher than chess program. Something to keep on your radar. Have fun!
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I should close this window.
But.. this article is short and moderately amusing.
Ok, now i should close this window.
But.. look at those pictures.
Ok, we are at the end of the article. I should close now.
But.. look at those comments.
Hmm, cool comments, close now.
But.. look at that interesting next article.
Hmm..
***Newsletter popup***
closes window. -
Read an article about "Who is gonna grab the position of Google ". Nice jnsight about how a giant like Google can lose control of Android , due to proliferation of cross platform apllications . Instilled fear in my mind due to my lack of mobile developement knowledge . Interesting perspective on how cross platform developement can trigger downfall of Android..2
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I am using a bunch of vcpkg based cmake projects in visual studio. I realized I don't understand how any of this works from the ground up. So I found this article:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/...
This was an interesting trip getting this to work on a newer version of an auto generated cmake project in vs. It took a bit to understand how to make the vcpkg preset work with the existing generated presets for debug/release x86/x64. Then I had the additional pain of figuring out how to include only the things I actually want from boost. I kept seeing conflicting methods because cmake versions keep changing how it is done.
I am glad to say after much swearing I finally figured out the modern way of using cmake with vcpkg and vs. It is very satisfying when everything downloads, configures, and compiles. I think vcpkg will be not that bad to work with. Still don't understand manifests yet.
Right now my libraries are not version selected. I should probably do that before it decides to install the next latest version of boost or something. -
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...
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