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Search - "irrational"
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New engineer: "How do you estimate how long a project will take?"
Seasoned engineer: "I add up the time required for each task, then multiply the sum by pi."
New engineer: "Why pi?"
Seasoned engineer: "It ensures that all my budgets are irrational."5 -
Unpopular opinion about Microsoft buying GitHub.
Just putting it out there that when you made your github repos you did so under their privacy policy and terms and will be protected under those in the future, and that both GitHub and Microsoft are corporations with the goals of making money.
Are people seriously mad that their code has gone from one capitalist corporation to another, with no foreseeable change in privacy or data policy? I have respect for those that switched to self hosted long ago since that's going from corporate to private, but if you throw away the UX and community GitHub has developed because a multinational corporation (with so many branches, products and divisions, which happens to have a few products you don't like) will soon own it, are you actually making a rational, guided decision?
Also just throwing it out there that GitLab is also a company. They've also had issues with keeping data intact in the past. They do, however, have free private repos (although I can't ever trust someone who gives me "free" privacy) as well as builtin CI. There are some definite upsides to it, although the UX has a ton of differences. If you're expecting the same dashboard and workflow you've used on GitHub, don't, GitLab has cool features but the bells and whistles aren't the exact same.
If you're switching to GitLab solely because of Microsoft, step back and think, regardless of how popular it might make you to hate Microsoft, is it really worth changing your development ecosystem to go from one corporate entity to another solely because you don't like the company?
I use GitLab and GitBub as well as Bitbucket and selfhosted git on a daily basis. They each have their upsides and downsides; but I think switching from one to the other solely because of Microsoft is not only totally irrational, but really makes light of/disrespects the amazing tools and UX the teams behind each one have carefully developed. Pick your Git hosting based on features and what works out for your use case, not because of which corporate overlord has their name plastered on it.
(Also just throwing it out there that lots of devs love VS Code, and that's Microsoft owned too... They did also build and pioneer a bunch of really cool shit for devs including Typescript so it's not like they're evil or incapable in any sense?)11 -
Always multiply your time estimate by Pi (an Irrational number). That way you're guaranteed your estimate will be irrational! (Just like the clients expection :P)3
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On every new job, there is always the Impostor Syndrome.
They know each other, they're all having fun and they're friends. They're super nice to me and include you in everything, but still a lot of the time they're talking about shit that I have no idea about.
And professionally it's not better. I'm new, I don't know how things work, yet everybody knows it like the back of their hands.
There is this irrational fear, this feeling, that I don't belong, that I'm an impostor, and someone might see through my mask for who I really am - a guy with no idea about what's going on, that doesn't belong, that's an IMPOSTOR.
It takes time to overcome, especially when in a foreign country. Once it's passed, I become more attached to my colleagues and my job if the hurdle was harder, than whether I felt right at home from the very start.6 -
About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.
About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.
The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.
I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.
At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.
Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.
Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.6 -
Just sent my devRant profile link to my employer. They loved some of my memes, but generally they didn't care much.
Dreaded this moment for 1.5 years now, and now decided to come clean.
Did I know that an irrational fear about being fired over some memes was indeed irrational? Yes. Do I feel better now? Yes, hell yes!
To be completely honest with you, it was today's @scor interactions that finally empowered me to do it. A dumb fear of getting doxxed was with me way before @scor started attacking me, but now I ended it: my partners (I'm polyamorous) know about devRant, my friends, my ex-colleagues, and now my current employer knows it too. Everyone from my public life knows who I really am and what I really think.
Not as a step in a dumb “beef” that doesn't exist, not as a slide, not as an insult, I'm going to say THANK YOU, @scor, for finally pushing me over that tiny obstacle. One and a half year of annoying obscure itching is finally over.28 -
Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?
This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.
Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.
Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.
Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.
React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.
Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.10 -
I hate Google for invading the world's privacy and try to avoid or block their services wherever possible.
Still, I'd love to work for them.
Am I nuts? That's f-ing irrational...3 -
!dev
Sucks how the society pressures people into to stupid, irrational shit.
For the last time, I DO NOT WANT TO HOP THE BANDWAGON.
while(1) {
head.bang(table);
}27 -
So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.
I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :
1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.
I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.
Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.
Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS12 -
Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.
Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.
Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.
Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.
Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.
This is the state of our current industry.
*Drops the mic*1 -
Deep inside, no matter how many times I overcome my fears, I'm still "scared" of rejection.
It's an irrational fear, and I hate it.5 -
Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.
A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.
Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.
A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.
I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.
People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.
Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.4 -
So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.3 -
What is the point of disabling the fullscreen button on a youtube video embed?
And funnily enough, I seem to find this on a lot of sites for software, that have a demo video embedded the page or some shit, like a screen recording in this tiny little frame where I can't read anything because it's in this 400 pixel wide box, that I can't fullscreen. I don't understand it at all! What purpose does it serve? You're actually encouraging me to leave your stupid site to view the damn video on youtube.com so I can actually read the text in your stupid ass video.
Why does youtube even give you the option to remove the fullscreen button in your embeds in the first place? They even recently removed some of the "modest branding" features, like hiding the title, or removing the recommended videos at the end, but they thought that this feature was valuable enough to keep?
This may seem irrational to complain about, but I'm confused and befuddled more than anything else? If I'm embedding a video on a website, the last thought I have in my mind is "Oh, I really don't want people to see my video fullscreen. Better make sure I disable that!"4 -
FFS, just because they do it that way on a competitor website doesn't mean it is either good, right or the best way to do it. My next door neighbours car number plate is held on with gaffa tape, im not about to copy that and suggest everyone should do it. Dim fucking irrational, know it all clients. GO FUCK YOURSELVES!! From my research i could probably run your business better than you anyway, your whole fucking outlook is fundamentally flawed. Cunts!1
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Valid from, valid until.
Who else has this irrational feeling that in some edge case, it might be not long enough?24 -
In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.
This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.
Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.
The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.
The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.
Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?13 -
The lower the level language, the more concerned I am with performance for some reason...irrational I know.
Programming in C: oh no I have this extra if statement which may have to copy the 16 byte struct.
Programming in Python: oh hey I can simplify the logic if I write a class to dynamically build this regex, compile it, and search through a 1MB text file.5 -
I have an irrational fear that I'll be sacked when I come back from a holiday.
I came back from my holiday this morning and within seconds of sitting down I was asked to not login because "we needed a quick chat"... Great start to the week....
(Wasn't sacked btw)1 -
After I cured my depression with Vortioxetine which was prescribed to me because of pure luck, I can notice that something has changed.
I can't tell if I like or don't like something anymore. It doesn't matter now which food to eat, what music to listen to, I just can't see the difference. I dropped all my side projects, quit my job and got another, much easier one. I don't see the big picture of things anymore. I also lost my ability to reverse-engineer problematic outcomes and find solutions.
I used to be an architect but now I can't design anything, I just forgot how to do what I could do without thinking. I forgot Lisp and Clojure, functional programming is too hard for me now. I just don't understand it.
My iq also significantly dropped.
Summarizing all that, and also remembering that liking or not liking something implies that you have a personality, I can only see one reason – I probably don't have a personality anymore.
Here's a summary of my experiences from when I was depressed:
depression makes you dumb
you struggle with simplest tasks
you only eat and go to the bathroom because sometimes your basic instincts win
depression takes your power of will – the most valuable thing you have
society doesn't understand and shames you
you can't think
you can't focus
you can't study
you need money but you can't make it
you don't have that save space inside your thoughts anymore
you don't have dreams
your sleep schedule is fucked
every night there's a nightmare and you can't wake up
you can't cry
they prescribe you one neuroleptic after another and they only makes it worse, turning you into a vegetable
you feel nothing but shame and irrational infinite guilt10 -
Anyone else have an irrational fear of others finding the swears in your comments that you forgot to remove before pushing?2
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A message to designers and developers:
please please please stop being so touchy about your designs/software. The final work is meant to be used/enjoyed by end users, customers, clients, young people, old people, disabled people, short attention span people, irrational people, patient people etc. So if they say it's not good enough accept it go back and make it simpler (not necessarily better but simpler) and move on!!
Stop going into defence mode and start throwing your toys out the pram or giving people the silent treatment.
Sorry just been on the receiving end and boy is childish.1 -
Fuck these SJWs, what kind of society respects and validates the opinion of irrational, psychologically mutilated humanoids. how long will people let them.
And I don't care if try to mute my freedom of speach, I will say what I wish, whether is sexist, racist, or offensive in general
But what happens when progress decays because of it?! Yesterday, this master/puppet situation, today Linus leaves Linux, what if tomorrow I am not allowed to eat chocolate because it's offensive for the people of Ivory coast who slave for it, what if tomorow I can't say that the sun is blue, because it'd be offensive to colorblind people? Until when is this society going to regress?
I hope live in a modern Babylon world which is to be teared down and burned to ashes, buried deep underground, down by fascist nationalist with no sense of moral freedom of speach and justice, because I feel like it would happen anyways.2 -
Every few months I think about this and I lose my fucking britches.
So back in 8th grade, I thought I would have a really good time, good grades and shit... you know the drill.
Then comes the worst main teacher I have EVER had (will call her Jane Doe because I still have some respect...).
For some odd reason Jane REALLY hated me and one of my friends.
She asked irrational questions in exams, didn't write on the whiteboard, didn't write organized summaries of the learning material... basically a bitch.
I worked my ass off for 2 weeks working for a literature exam on the level of high-school finals (she did that, while straying further away from the actual fucking curriculum our ministry of education has created), and I got the worst grade I have ever had.
55.
Me and my friend both got a fucking 55/100 on an exam I have worked on for 2 weeks. 2 fucking weeks. No computer, no programming, just literature, while my other friend just completely guessed his answers and didn't REMOTELY elaborate and got a fucking 95/100 on his test. Because of Jane, I had the worst average grade I have ever gotten in my life on the second third of the year: 68.5/100. When the high schools in my area were opening for registration I had to come with this ugly ass average and my current school rejected me (at first). After I finished 8th grade, Jane took pity on me and I got a 74.8/100 on the final average. Still, 0.2 points from the minimum. So I got in to my current high school under special conditions.
Jane's excuse?
"It's training for high school".
Training for high-school my ass, in my high school they write on the fucking whiteboard and are more organized, damn it.2 -
I have a confession to make. I am indeed a team of entities. Yes! The only catch is all those entities live inside one brain.
My first and perhaps most important insight stemmed from not being able to overcome a persistent identity crisis. I spent seven years trying to figure out who I am and what my worldview is. I realized however that it was impossible. It makes no sense to be rational while your irrational part is hovering over, judging.
So, I split my “me” into two parts: rational and emotional. Usually, they coexist peacefully.
When presented with a complicated case, I let both speak. It doesn't matter if they contradict each other. The consensus is never reached, but at least both parts spoke their mind and are now calm.
There are two kikis. Rational kiki talks about life, insights, worldview, and occasionally tech. Emotional kiki sends leg pics and describes her wild dreams.
Also, it gets even more complex when derealization hits. Remember, autistic brains don't have garbage collectors, so as the day goes by, noise accumulates, influencing my entire being. In the morning, I'm cold and calculated, albeit a bit robotic. In the evening, I'm creative and talkative, albeit a bit unhinged.
You're welcome!7 -
Can anyone see where this repeats predictably?
Decimal('507.724375') / Decimal('173.2336')
I set the precision to 500+ digits and I'm not seeing any repetitions at a glance.
If there isn't, this is my new favorite irrational number.30 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
/sigh
When you say something about machine learning that's cool, and someone responds with a quote from Terminator or some other Hollywood bullshit that attempts to terrify everyone with an irrational fear of technology.2 -
Is it a good idea to hack the website of my previous condescending and irrational boss? and do social media attacks on their online pages as well?9
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I have this irrational cringe every time that people say infinite when they actually mean unlimited. I hear and read it everywhere, multiple times per day. In English and in German.
"You can do this infinitely often"
"AI bots have infinite APM"
"The number of items you can store is infinite"
Aaaaargh! Stop it! It hurts! 😫22 -
rumor has it dfox and trogus are abandoning their jobs to prioritize adding stories to devRant.
i mean, a social network without stories? sounds incredibly stupid and irrational to me8 -
Meanwhile today, somewhere in America
Fan - "Apple is great. Added two camera on the same phone and 7MP camera om front. Totally irrational. Who does that. Ever heard anyone provided "7" MP camera, all they provide is non-prime and rational. Apple always bring something new and great that others cant "7 -
So we had a service provider which would provide climate info. The service is paid for. Then suddenly we started getting irrational or no data. When asking the provider, he said their job is to provide the api and they're not responsible for the quality of the data which apparently comes from other places. So we basically pay for an api which we could have done ourself....2
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When I was at my previous sales job, explaining the same sales pitch for the 987345284th time, listening to my customers' every irrational need, I suddenly realised I wanted to work with something rational and logical. Best insight of my life!
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I don't know if someone has noticed but I haven't been on DevRant lately. It's not that the community is awesome. In the last month or two, I've had a blast of an experience here. I've just been avoiding screens, specifically texts in screens. I think something snapped on my head last week. Here's why:
As I've said in other rants/comments, I study history, and at the moment, I haven't found any career that has to read more than this one. Sometimes I've had to read about 1200 pages in less than three days. Last week I had to read 6 books which accounted for about 3500 pages. I was actively reading more than 600 pages a day. Now, this was for an investigation, and each of these reads had to be properly summarised with their respective arguments, thesis, etc. So I intensely read everything before Thursday, the day in which I had to present my work, in which I referenced about 10 books.
Apart from that, daily, I spent 4 hours coding. That's been the minimum I've done daily since I started learning.
I wasn't too tired. I'm used to read a lot, and coding is always fun. But the problem came in Friday when I woke up with a strange headache that spanned from my eyes to the back of my ears. Hurting especially on the sides of my forehead.
It eventually dissipated, but whenever I read something, the ache slowly came back. Loud noises and bright lights also brought it back. So you could imagine, everytime I tried to read a Rant, comment, etc, the headache came back. The same for coding and reading. For fucks sake I feel like I'm fucking crippled.
And no, the pain isn't the worst. Pain is pain and you can't do anything about it. The worst is that I'm developing some anxiety here. In all this time I have been learning daily nonstop. Coding was something I craved for everyday. Now I'm fucking wasting entire days in non-productive activities. I'm losing my fucking time here guys!
I'm afraid I have some anxiety problem with time. I've already fucking wasted entire years, now I don't want to continue wasting them and push my goals further away, I want to get to my goals as soon as I can because time and life can't be stopped and once time is lost, you can't fucking get it back. And, considering I'm still 21, I do notice this feeling is somehow irrational, but for fucks sake, I'm wasting fucking LIFE :( -
What's wrong with Stack Overflow? Honestly, somebody asked how to do something that should in most practical cases be avoided. I provided an answer and here comes the downvote army for no reason. I explicitly said it should be avoided but for the sake of experiment I posted the solution because I think people should explore what they can do with the language instead of feeling constricted to a set of standard recipes.
I don't buy into claims that this irrational elitist moderation is necessary for SO to be useful.
In the end, even their search sucks and most of us find it easier to search SO using Google instead of their native search.
I remember when I was a student at a programme which admitted both people with linguistic and computational background how hard it was for the linguists to even start writing code and I would always try to help them and relieve the frustration.
For me, it took years to start writing a high quality code and more than 6 years to become productive while writing quality code.
Do we forget we all began somewhere? I honestly don't care about building an immense "objective" problem solving tool for someone else to earn money at the expense of treating people the way SO community does.
I think it would be way better if SO managed to distribute questions in a more relevant manner and stopped holding onto their "objectivism", which is in itself a questionable concept.
Even simply separating questions into how popular they are could move the useful ones forward without radically cancelling and hurting new people.
I like to see people thinking differently and see their questions reveal what they know and what they don't. There's nothing wrong with pointing people to already answered questions, correcting them etc. And I get that there are many people being annoying when asking, but I never forget there is a person on the other side and I would never want to destroy their potential just to massage my ego and "reputation". And heck who cares about their reputation? Show your Github, CV, talk smart in an interview and you'll get the job. And in the end, wouldn't you feel greater inner joy from helping a person grow instead of seeing only your reputation?4 -
Can somebody tell me why people put pics of someone else in their profile photo??
Pics of kids/spouse/friends and the like.
I don't know why I'm so annoyed by it.4 -
tl;dr i am proud of my universal program but annoyed it won't get appreciation.
<brag type='slightly'>the last three days i refactored my various snippets to a kind of modular and scalable software package. restricted to a rigid company system i make use of the technologies i feel confident in. so i created a javascript app that can be used with internet explorer. it is a neat tool to work smarter and mainly to make repetitive writing tasks efficient using predefined textblocks that have automated linguistic adjustments and are multilingual usable. after refactoring it is possible to extend any desired functionality by just adding another module. i learned a lot about implementing separated data structures, data processing, output and asynchronous script loading (and the annoying limitations of ie11).</brag>
i kept in mind that this tool might not only help my personal duties to be done more efficient but also might come in handy to all my colleagues having similar tasks to do. the downside is my colleagues having irrational computerphobia and i know for sure they will proceed to do these repetitive writings manually resulting in inconsistencies and an inefficient time management. while my wise wife tries to convice me that at least i had fun coding this stuff and having it supporting me with annoying tasks, it still bothers me being the only user, as it means no progression for the company. it riddles me how the colleagues, acknowledging us all being craftspeople in the first place, avoid use of computers whenever possible and rather rely on medieval working flows.
i find it quite amusing to be the 'can you fix my printer'-guy, but i just cannot handle this attitude. and everyone complains about having so much to do. get your shit together and start clicking these few buttons goddammit! -
If you ever have the pleasure of teaching kids (perhaps because they chose to stay home and pretend to be sick) teach them math.
Specifically teach them division. Have them divide 22/7.
Let them keep going until they ask 'when do we stop?'
And when they do, tell them: "you don't. It's an irrational fraction."9 -
If you're coding, thinking and manually/auto debugging way too often several time a day, then you're likely to be suffering from "Geekonomous Schizophrenia", the Symptoms of that are:
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1. You grow a habit to cut the B$ in real-life conversations.
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2. You get instantaneously angry and disturbed when your mom/siblings/friends are interrupting you during your work.
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3. Not to mention you cannot tolerate irrational words from Socially Accepted Normal Chaps (SANC)
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4. You have nothing to speak unless a SANC starts the conversation themself.
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5. You tend to correct these SANCs mid-semi-technical-talk whenever these do factual errors.
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6. You get overwhelmingly excited and ecstatic to talk to someone of your expertise or at least a person who can intellectually handle your tech-blabbers and dev-rants!
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7. You start doing minor-to-major experiments regarding different things in real life as you do virtually with your codes and try to predict the outcome the next time.
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8. Best of all - whenever you are "loned-out" you don't feel lonely since you have many people and string of thoughts to talk to and inside your head there's a grand meeting going on.
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Relatable? We're on same lines then! 😊 -
After seven years of search, I’m dropping all my efforts to find a suitable concise ideology for myself to live by.
So what made me try to design it in the first place?
Simplified reasoning based on pre-calculated opinions? Your response is irrational instincts at first, irrational emotions at second and sometimes rational, but flawed and biased mind after.
Peace of mind? Constant search through such ephemeral matter is a huge stress itself.
Concise reasoning apparatus? World is changing and so are you, and I doubt that any concise system that isn’t based on absolute truth can withstand the test of time.
The interest itself to find such ideology? People try different kinds of reasoning from the beginning of human history and nobody was able to come up with universal solution.
A human being is a bunch of contradictions.6 -
I actually don't understand why most people like saying bad things about electron-js been a memory hog. I am not denying the fact that it sucks up system resources. Placing all the blame on electron-js is irrational because most apps built untop of electron-js does not hug memory (vscode is a living testimony to that). When you use bloated frameworks and/or libraries you are bound to have memory issues. When you don't understand how to manage memory effectively (in higher level language - you still have to do something for your value to be garbage collected) you are bound to be held captive in the chains of memory consumption.
Don't hate electron8 -
Irrational Programmer's Response to Problems - "I tried, if I couldn't find a solution to it, then it's impossible."
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Most of us taught in school that we have to get a decent job right after the graduation.
Unfortunately, the school forgot to teach certain people to be decent, not to be a complaining b*tch and manipulative.
Most managers(There are good managers too, is just I am mentioning the bad ones) in my country are heartless, manipulative, inconsiderate and irrational.
The only good about these kind of managers are consistencies. Consistently being a KAREN in the workspace b*tching about everything and everyone. -
Is it just me or does anyone else wince when someone says the word "cyber" when referencing something on the internet ....like the current series of attacks ..... oh god ... i winced just typing that !
I hate the word, its an irrational hate i know still !1 -
Okay. I look at myself as a kind of intellectual person. My parents are not believers so I came out quiet normal. As engineer and fan of technology I believe in science and I have a fairly complete look at life and universe at whole, I do not need any religional explanation for anything. I do not believe in the conspiracy theories and in any highly organized global secret society who controll us. I have acquired my view and opinions by systematically rethinking every aspect of life and everything I knew and I was thought before, btw this is the reason I stopped to eat animal products too.
But after all this corona shitshow, I really don't know If the current situation is just rolled by stupidity of media and politics or its really some plan of some people. I mean you can legally buy cigarettes with proven death rate of 10%, they recommend you to drink milk while its ultra carcinogenic and like 60% of population is intolerant, you have to wear mask but not gloves while the virus transference is 90% trough hand contact, and there are many many many questions that makes me paranoid. And now this vaccination stuff with countries almost forcing it in population, ahh... Man, This complete story is too irrational and strange. I start to loose my stable belief system and slide out. I noticed that I am not sure and I am just silent when people talk about these things. I hope this nonsense will end soon.43 -
if you're not crazy you're clearly not pushing yourself enough
I got a friend who gets weirdly sentimental about people acting "human", and he defines it as them being irrational
I never understood wtf irrationality meant, but this book I've been recently reading defined it as someone (or an organization) with competing interests that have not been unified yet, so basically hypocrites and chaos / impulsivity and etc
so if you're not irrational you're not human, because you haven't pushed yourself hard enough to grow into all sorts of conflicting angles, and amass karmic debt via hypocritical concepts
be crazy or be lazy
and I'm part of this community I lurk in and I absolutely adore the people in it. they're all fucking crazy, because they push themselves so hard. it's the only place I found that feels so human. I think my friend might be right
not like a place where everyone just complains how hard they push themselves either. God those people are insufferable
but you can see it in their odd personalities, the infighting, the obvious non-rectified principles... but fuck are they driven. like they care about stuff, and they chug along with the broken bits and all. it's just so vibe -
Not Dev related but just need to rant about parents....
They keep asking me to do things for irrational reasons...
Latest one: tmr is 9/11, can you WFH (from public library where I would need to disconnect and carry a 17in laptop too)
Seriously? WTF? -
For some reason I detest the word performant ..it has become a real word but is basically techie jargon..it’s irrational but it really gets on my tits!3
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Well to be honest with you concerning this coding practice. As a deliberated of obsession without coming from a divers angle of reasoning,by application of ardent and candid Wisdom,and more on a logical pattern of presentations,even in the absence of sentimental aggregations I will move with a conspicuous and convertible analysis,base on imperative understanding of this matter,having in mind not to be influenced by perceptional retroversion which can interfere with good judgmental alibis. Hmm therefore, I will advice or come to a conclusion that point going too deeper cause this is just untainted matters of circumvention and irrational amplitude.Do you comprehend or should I go deeper?2