So I'm working on a computer vision project that grabs video from my webcam and detects faces in each frame. Earlier yesterday morning I was capping out at 30 frames per second, which is what I believe to be the max for my webcam. As the day became night and I was wrapping up my work on a portion of the project, I noticed that my newly compiled version was only getting around 8 frames per second. Confused, I looked into my frame grabbing + face detection code.

"Maybe I can only detect faces in a certain region of the image, based on where the face was in the previous image?" No, still 8fps. Hmm.

"How about I lower the resolution of the image, that would definitely help!" I tried that, but no speed boost came either. What??

I start to dig deeper. Maybe I'm not linking my libraries correctly, and it's using an older library I compiled. So I recompile that. Nothing.

"Am I low on resources?" I close out of all my other apps. Nothing.
Okay, wtf. Now I just comment out the face detection code entirely, and only grab webcam frames.

8fps. ?????

Suddenly, I get an idea. I get out of my desk, walk over to the doorway of my room, and flip the light on. I sit back down, and run my code.

30fps.

The stupid webcam switches to "night mode" when it detects low light, which restricts its ability to output frames at high speed and caps at 8fps. Damn, I felt like a fool 😂

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

When the teacher wears a low resolution shirt

TL;DR: Printers suck. MS-Word sucks.

Yesterday I wanted to print a few participation certificates for my blender project students.

*Turns on printer, runs downstairs, gets paper, runs upstairs, puts paper in*

So I tried to print in word. Nothing happened. Printer was online. I checked queue: Nothing.

*a couple of tries later*

Okay, fuck it! I export it as a pdf and open it in edge (8 times. 8 documents. Edge is a neat pdf-viewer, fight me). I press print on one. It works. I print the others and check: They look shit. The images look like 25% resolution and 50% jpg compression. I check word.

It by default exports in low quality. Yea, thanks for asking me. I export pdfs again and check "high quality". Open them, print. Done.

These were like 30 wasted minutes and print color. And paper.

Btw they look fucking neat. I can't show them right now but gradient text headline, project name is a rendered and edited 3D object :D

Ladies and gentlemens, my everyday workstation.. at work.

i5-5300 2,30Ghz, 8gb ram and 128ssd. Bloated external screen with low resolution and even lower colour saturation.

Running VM, handling big as images, editing and a tiny bit coding.. and they wonder why I'm asking for a new setup..

(._.) ( l: ) ( .-. ) ( :l ) (._.)

Cheers ☕

2020 seems to be the year of the "dev who has never seen scale."

TypeA -> "Here's a reasoned explanation for a change I think we should make. Here is the current deficiency analysis, here is the desired resolution, here is the course of action and all calculations leading to the resolution + data. This will have x,y,z beneficial result according to our operational metrics."

TypeD -> "Those were words. Why do you need that? Change is bad, learning is worse. This will just slow me down, development speed is all that matters; there is no chance that a poorly considered/factored/checked design could ever require a ground up rewrite or fuck us utterly in the long term. Why do you make my life harder? We could x -> y -> zBUTI haven't done the math and I really don't see the benefit in x, so z is pointless. What even is scale?"

The consequences of the war caused by the ever-widening gap between engineers and developers is low key terrifying.

I am pulling my hair out on ducking low level stuff. This is why people (more importantly me!) should have the chance to learn, rather than assume how things work.

Has anyone of you detailed resources on how linking objects into shared libraries really works ? Especially Name Resolution. All those ducking tutorials and bloody blog post just have simple examples and explain shit not in detail!

Even ducking man pages on gcc/ld don’t help me out! Maybe I’m too dumb to type the right words into me search engine. I’d even love to read a bloody paper book.

Why settle for casual low-resolution thinking when you can have adHD ™ ?

When you go for a demo to your execs and your low-resolution projector screws up each and every part of your website. #screwed

It's always amazing to fire up a PS2 game and go "Wow... this PS3 game looks great!" an hour later before realizing it's still a PS2. Take Final Fantasy 12, for example: the environments are massive and gorgeous, all the textures look nice, and it's a MASSIVE GAME. Sure, in some areas the environment flavor stuff has really noticeable draw-in and there's no AA and some of the area textures (buildings, floors, the like) are noticeably low-res on close inspection and it's only running at 480i, but when playing, lack of AA and resolution are basically invisible and in most areas the env flavor draw-in is still really far off. It *feels* like a mid-life PS3 game, which the creators deserve mad props for. (I have yet to try upscaling via homebrew, when I get a hackable PS2 i'll see if it looks any better at 720p or 1080i.)

This isn't the only game like this, I have at least 4 that look like PS3 games on-disc, and like 12 more waiting for a hacked PS2, this isn't uncommon. They crammed so much flavor and life into 40MB of total VRAM and it's absolutely fucking nuts.

So I finally decided to take the plunge to dualboot my Windows 10, since I'm using Linux applications more and more than Windows applications.

I just had to choose Fedora out of all distros. It sort of worked. When I tried to install, it won't get pass the login screen (kept getting blanks). I rebooted several times and went with "Troubleshooting" and it got me passed the login screen and proceeded to install at the lowest graphical settings, i.e. 800x600

So far so good, I was able to operate stuff that I wanted but I just can't stand working in a really low resolution. My guess is probably incompatibility with nVidia driver. Tried everything, rpmfusion, the negativo17 repo, the current official fedora repo, the If-Not-True-Then-False guide, and bumblebee. None works.

Makes no sense at all. Luckily my Win10 still works. Now I'm stuck on whether to continue trying to get Fedora distro up or try a different distro and start back from square one...

Last week I was working on a web development assignment (php and bootstrap).
I had a few problems but the most annoying was that bootstrap didn't want to apply to one specific element.
I sat there, looking for the error for about 2 hours. When I finally found it I was raging inside. I mistyped a - instead of an = after the class attribute (i.e. class-"Foo").
The mistake was hard to spot because of a combination of the font and the low screen resolution - 2 hours wasted because of that shit

I fucking hate spring boot. I can go unwind and nobody would hear this but boy, does it suck. Every single thing about it is a pita. I spend 98% of time I should have used for feature implementation in JAVA, struggling and battling MUNDANE functionality of the framework that ought to be nobrainers

Today started out with a project I inherited. I don't even know whether to blame its original author but he installed a couple of funny libraries for logging. The spring app doesn't build yet gradle build completes successfully. No errors are logged to the terminal, just reams and bundles of json. WHY IS THE APP NOT BUILDING??? You want me wrangling json through that pinhole console window?

I struggle with the yml settings, none works. Eventually get rid of the package (hint, it wasn't the slf4j one). I'm able to debug app not starting now, but now live reload doesn't work

I copy configs from a previous project where it worked into this. Nope, doesn't budge. Eventually enable an ide setting but now server restarts twice after file changes. The implication is that request argument annotation no longer works! So the server just restarts and has amnesia about argument type resolution

I've been sitting here for hours, without implementing a single new feature. Everything is a painstaking, avoidable aggravation VS the "framework". Never seen anything as horrendous. No line of java code yet. I just want to send a request, retrieve parameters and verify live reload is "up and running". You'd think something as low level as this shouldn't take more than two minutes. Alas, welcome to the incredible world of spring development

This is interesting from a troubleshooting point of view. I have a decent laptop I use to play Fallout 4. It was running just fine until recently. The game will spike GPU activity and crash. I found if I reduced settings and lower resolution it happens less often.

I kept searching and finally found someone saying it could be GPU thermal compound has worn out. So I looked how to change that on a laptop. The video I found it looked fairly easy.

I get into my laptop and I find all the screws for the heatsink/head pipe assembly. However there is a ton of thermal tape used everywhere holding it all down. I think if I am not careful I will break the heat sink. I did pull on the main part and it just didn't want to give.

Feeling a bit defeated as I put everything back together. I had gotten some decent thermal compound for this. So I fire up the game and it runs fine at the low settings. Then I raise all the settings to max with max resolution. This was crashing the game the last few days. It just runs and runs fine on those settings. GPU temps look normal (they did before, but I wanted to see). So, all I can think the act of lifting the heat sink a small amount may have reseated the thermal compound a bit. I am still going to price out a professional doing this, but I can play on max settings again. Maybe messing with screws on GPU and slightly moving the heat sink actually did something.

This confirms to me that something needs done about the thermal compound. The company I bought the laptop from offered custom thermal compound at time of purchase. So I am thinking they can do this for me. It will be cheaper to pay a couple hundred bucks to have a pro do this rather than pay $1800 for a new computer. This is only 2 1/2 years old. It has been a top performer up til now.

How did mid-2000s computer users get along with just 1 GB of RAM or less?

As of today, anything less than 8 GB of RAM seems impractical. A handful of tabs in a web browser and file manager can quickly fill that up.

Shortly after booting, 2 GB of RAM are already eaten up on today's operating systems.

When I occasionally used an older laptop computer with 6 GB of RAM (because it has more ports and better repairability than today's laptops; before upgrading the memory), most of the time over 5 GB were in use, and that did not even include disk caching.

It appears that today's web browsers are far more memory-intensive than 2000s web browsers, even if we do similar things people did in the 2000s: browsing text-based pages with some photos here and there, watching videos, messaging and mailing, forum posting, and perhaps gaming. Tabbed browsing already was a thing in the 2000s. Microsoft added tabs to their pre-installed browser in 2006, back when an average personal computer had 1 GB of RAM, and an average laptop 512 MB!

Perhaps a difference is that people today watch in 720p or 1080p whereas in the 2000s, people typically watched at 240p, 360p, or 480p, but that still does not explain this massive difference. (Also, I pick a low resolution anyway when mostly listening to a video in background.)

One could create a swap file to extend system memory, though that is not healthy for an SSD in the long term. On computers, RAM is king.