My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

Less recruiter and more recruiting company.
Specifially: Robert Half.

t;ldr version:
Robert Half is scammy as hell, and they 'fired' me for quitting when my girlfriend got raped. Really.

------

Robert Half took half of my paychecks for the entire duration of my contracts with them. I didn't know right away because, as a policy, they hide how much the hiring company is paying for you, and they also forbid the company from telling you. (The company pays RHI, RHI pays you). Makes sense why they hide it because it certainly pissed me off.

Long story short, I worked for a php dev shop through them (after telling them to lower their fees or i'd walk), worked there for awhile (while remote moonlighting because why not!), and quit. I quit because my girlfriend at the time had just gotten raped, and with the emotionall fallout from that, there was no way I could focus on two jobs and be there for her. My boss understood and let me leave, though it put him in a bind.

The next day, I got a call from the regional manager of Robert Half. He was a total tool. He demanded to know if I quit, didn't care why I quit, proceeded to "educate" me in the finer points of why that was unprofessional and why i'm unemployable, accused me of lying about idr what, and finally switched into legalese to say "I regret to inform you that you can no longer consider Robert Half as a means of employment." (or something along those lines) and hung up on me. Asshole. I hope various large someones rape him so he has an inkling what it's like to be objectified and thrown away like trash.

Guy was an asshole; probably still is.
RHI was awful and scammy; probably still is, too.
Wasn't really a fan of the job either.

So at the end of it, I wasn't out anything but some patience and serenity (a lot of serenity). I kept the first (remote) job, was there for my girlfriend, and helped her through everything.

But yeah, Robert Half?
They can fucking go to hell.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

My wifi was hacked two times last year, so I decided to change the factory credentials. Some months ago a tree fell on top of the cables on the street, cutting my internet connection. I call the ISP and when they get here they say I have no right for costumer support as I have altered my own connection.
WHAT. THE. FUCK
I had to revert the credentials to admin/admin in order get my internet back. These ISPs live in the fucking stone age. How the fuck do they force me to fucking have my router exposed with a fucking "admin/admin".
Fuck them.
I hope some day we have a cable revolution and finally have some rights over the networks we pay for with both tax money and excesive fees with low fucking speeds. Fuck them. Really.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.

They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.

A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.

And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.

They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.

This is what happens when you have business people develop code.

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

Dear Atlassian Support,

In my life I had a lot of experiences...

But your software manages to replace all these experiences with a unique feeling of depression, hatred, anger... Only negative emotions.

Not once have I said anything good about your software - not once in > 5 years.

Whenever your chum bucket of mismanagement and misanthropy stops working, it's never the fault of the end user, the administrator or someone else.

It's entirely your fault.

Fucked up upgrades, lack of documentation, catastrophic handling of logging, lack of support of current database systems, lack of proper migration and clean up of plugins, ....

I could go on. But it's really just and endless tirade.

I wish I could stop management for even giving you money for the pile of poo you call software, but sadly they don't listen.

But there's hope on the horizon.

Thanks for making people go cloud only.

No one wants that.

It would mean entrusting that pile of poo to the craptastic hands of your irresponsible people.

No one really wants that.

Not even management who blindly paid the license fees all the times.

Thank you for your cloud only movement.

Maybe we can finally find an alternative and I can finally start a therapy for the PTSD I have thx to your software.

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

WTF freelancer, just won a design contest and it’s so fucking hard to withdraw the money to my bank account.

“There is some invalid bank details in your withdraw request, please confirm with your bank”

I never withdraw money before so i have to wait 15 days for my first withdrawal for each withdrawal methods.

The first method (express withdrawal with no fees) was failed because the bank details issue, talk with the cs and they told me to confirm to my bank, confirmed and tried again (only 1 or 2 days waiting time) but still failed, been trying this 3 times.

Trying the second method a.k.a wire transfer, i have confirmed the bank about what details are required to receive money from overseas first so i can prevent some stupid errors.

Wait another 15 days and ...

STILL FAILED WITH SAME PROBLEM

FUCK

This is the first time i regret when i won something.

ＦＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵＵ

>>> Stadia thread <<<
Stadia is a new Cloud Gaming platform that runs on GCP and details were announced some minutes ago.

For maximum performance you would need at least 35mb/s, while about 10mb/s are enough for 720p l, Stereo gameplay.

Maximum performance provides 4k, HDR and 5.1 Surround Sound and comes in at 9,99$ / month for Stadia Pro. As far as announcements go, there are no lower performance tiers available.

Stadia Pro will get you unlimited access to your Games (I believe this is Bring-Your-Own-License, but I might be wrong), while Stadia Basic allows unlimited access to one specific game. For that you probably buy the game directly of Stadia, which then includes any fees in it's price.

Stadia will be usable on all devices that run Chrome and on the Chromecast Ultra. Android will get it's own app, first available on the Google Pixel 3, to be expanded later on, iOS was not mentioned.

Google developed a custom Stadia controller that works out of the box, including an Google Assistant and a DVR button. However, all other controllers should supported too, but I don't believe that's the case for playing on the Chromecast Ultra.

Starting now, you can get the Stadia Founders Edition, that allows you to be one of the firsts on the platform, includes a Controller, a Chromecast Ultra, 3 months of Stadia Pro, 3 additional months of Pro you can gift to your buddy and some Destiny Bundle with the first and second game, including all add-ons, plus the Destiny 2 Season pass.
The founders edition can be pre-ordered right now for about 129$.

Stadia launches 'later' this year, founders edition buyers will be the first to get public access on launch.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

TL;DR: Why does that online shop NOT support paypal?

I'm a LITTLE pissed.

I wanted to buy some stuff online (since my gf birthday comes closer and I have no city, no car nearby to go shopping) - and this website doesn't support paypal. You know why? Because they had to high fees.

Why on earth don't they do it like any other online shop?! - the user can pay with paypal for a little more % or €.

I don't have an actual credit card but the thing you can get <18yo. Paypal works with it but I can't use any other payment option.

For some reason, I lost my devRant subscription. No label anymore... but I'm also not charged anymore.

Subscribing again doesn't seem to work, there's a success message from the app, but not from the play store (I have a valid payment method and have other subs), no fees are charged and my account stays unsubscribed.

Has anyone else experienced this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

I'm a .Net developer from Morocco, i'm currently working on an accounting software for this fucking company owned by an American boss. And i'm handling every single aspect of the project including the back-end (C#), Database (Sql Server), Reports (crystal reports, ABAP, VSTO), and design (UI, logos, animation...). For a salary of 300 USD/month, with no insurance, no transportation fees, and no fuck given about my health or my coworkers'. Not mentioning the shitty working hours and condition.
This is my first (job)

Guys should I quit my CURRENT job ? I feel like I should find another job because of the following reasons

a. I suck. I know I can't complete the task given. The task given is to build a trading bot. I can't complete it because of my incompetent trading knowledge and i find it difficult to understand trading logic and I tried my level best even paying someone to private tutor me but the tuition fees are too high and I still don't understand. Btw I am from a web development background

b. It has been 3 months in this company. I feel like I am not doing anything. I feel like a loser who has been eating free salary without contributing anything. Sure I have managed to write few strategies on pinescript.

c. I dread everyday to even do anything. I use to feel accomplished in my previous job. Nowadays I cant hope to feel like a complete idiot.

d. I don't have the motivation or fire that I use to have when I was a web developer. I just hate looking at code nowadays.

e. Algo Trading is too difficult for me. I don't feel like I am progressing anywhere.

f. Nobody in my company knows how to build a bot or have any knowledge on this.

g. Python dataframes , plots, charts bores me to death and I am really no interested to even look at it.

I am just so frustrated as I am typing this and I am becoming tired and exhausted to go to work everyday because everyday I am so clueless on what to do. You need at least some idea where to go to but I don't. Everyday I feel like a complete clueless moron.

Things I wish I knew when I was younger:
- no matter how clean your teeth are, bad breath won't go away until you clean your tongue. Buy a tongue cleaner and use it after you brush your teeth
- whitening toothpastes don't work, while desensitizing ones work well.
- after you brush your teeth, spit but do NOT rinse!
- when brushing your teeth, keep the toothbrush angled 45 degrees. The bristle ends should touch the area where your gums meet your teeth.
- use sunscreen every morning.
- don't waste money on acne-treating products unless they contain salicylic acid, benzoyl peroxide, tretinoin or adapalene.
- if you want to lose weight, you have to eat MORE, not less. But, that “more” should be protein.
- showering every morning feels like “humanity restored” thing from Dark Souls. Also, clean your damn room and wash your damn windows.
- APS-C DSLR cameras make no sense. For their weight, you can get a full-frame camera, and for their price you can get an APS-C mirrorless cam that will be way lighter.
- If you want a damn thing, save up and buy that damn thing. Don't buy the alternative thing you don't want. You'll be asking “what if” till you either die or buy the original damn thing.
- people aren't replaceable, but many people can fit their designated role. Not being able to replace your ex-boyfriend with his exact copy doesn't mean no one else can be your boyfriend.
- try a MacBook & iPhone as soon as you can to check whether it's your thing or not, because if it is, oh boy are you in for a treat.
- added sugar is evil, but it's beneficial for the economy. It makes you fat, so you need a car, so you buy fuel. Also, you feel guilty because you're fat, so you buy diet products & things to compensate because you hate your reflection in the mirror. You also pay medical fees to treat your newly developed health problems, and you die a day before retirement. Everyone makes a buck on you eating added sugar but you.
- you can use the freshly removed sticker to remove the sticky residue left by that same sticker.
- static typing doesn't solve jack shit.

Just had my reasoning for not doing technical projects for interviews proven.

Pass the first 2 stages of interview (including showing some personal portfolio projects) then after a week of hearing nothing get sent a technical project to complete.

Spend every spare moment for a week polishing this thing, decent front end, quick and efficient back end, low traffic between fe, be, persistence etc.

Submit the code at midday ready for the interview the following day, only for the company to phone at 5pm and say all is fine and the code is great for the final interview (walkthrough) the next day, then phone 5:10pm phone and pull the position.

That company has just had free work done which should have cost 1 weeks worth of fees, using the premise of a job at the end of it, only to take the code that they are super happy with and run with no payout.

Founding an international organisation to teach code in organised focus groups with little or no fees, with various paths

Can I list this experience? Will it look bad?

I am an entry level programmer in a software shop, or whatever they are called. I was given no mentorship on the task I have done. Not even proper documentation and it seems management is passing me around. What I mean by that is that the task I work on no one has ideas about since it seems the last guy who was responsible left. He was a senior though and it seems that I might have been too eager to find a job. Now I am being tasked for things a senior would do but I have the entry pay and knowledge and skill set. 2 months experience...

I am going to design a whole system from scratch and they have not read anything on it. From networking to applications to fees to compliance requirements. Oh the great part is they want it soon, no pressure, but we have to start certification within a tight deadline. This is a great opportunity and maybe a dumpster fire waiting to start. I will gain so much real experience but they are taking a great risk. It seems that is throughout their code and infrastructure though.

I plan to leave after the project. I also will document and hopefully they start reviewing my stuff to catch my incompetence. Not on purpose but from pressure and inexperience, which I hate cause I was excited at first.

I plan to stick the year or until Covid strips work-from-home, cause they are bit “old school”. I will begin my job search as well. I just know I will burn out long term and the money and package is shit.

Do I list them if I leave earlier but finish the project?

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

At least pretend to have a reason for using checkboxes where the behaviour is obviously a single choice. I know I'm sometimes full of crap. I know I can waste so much time arguing for something I'm wrong about. At least I have arguments to support my approach, and I don't dismiss my mistakes. I don't need you to spend the next 5 minutes changing checkboxes for radio buttons in the mockup, it took dev 5 seconds to replace "checkbox" with "radio" and move on. However, I do need you to know what you're doing, even if it turns to be wrong.

I know this world celebrates people who can do things perfectly: models with perfect bodies, singers with perfect voices, sportsmen with perfect scores, students with perfect grades. I understand that's why you wish to try again so you can do it perfectly.

That's not what the world needs. The world needs people who know why they did what they did. It's drunk drivers who break down in the court, not serial killers. Serial killers know what they did, they know why they did it, and they believe it was the right thing to do; drunk drivers on the other hand had no idea what they did or why they did it, and they try to dismiss their wrongdoings by blaming them on alcohol, not getting a taxi, parking fees, the car, or some other circumstances.

So confront your bullshit for once. Stop searching for excuses to dismiss challenging ideas and prove you can defend your position. Otherwise, don't get angry when your "impeccable" ideas lose to someone who at least tries to defend their nonsense.

!Rant

TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.

MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....

A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);

Dear Systems Analyst,

I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.

In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.

Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.

Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.

I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?

.... The Systems Analyst replied:

Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.

Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.

Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.

Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).

Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.

When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.

It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.

Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.

To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).

DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.

BEST WISHES!

Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.

Guys check out IOTA, get a light node wallet and buy some as long as it is still low. It is rising at a rising rate since some hours now.

IOTA is the solution to bitcoins speed and scalability problems. IOTA does not use the blockchain but instead a network called the tangle, which enables decentralized peer-to-peer transactions. There are no miners, no fees and the transaction validation speed depends on how many people are using the currency. One transaction requires your device to validate 2 other transactions through proof of work and therefore the system can never be overloaded by too many transaction requests.

Be warned though, the IOTA foundation is only currently building up the infrastructure, and people are just starting to trade since a few weeks so trasactions still may take a few hours.