So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

So our company hired a new COO few months ago, and he oversees digital department as well

recently he called the digital department into his office to talk about a new campaign for a client, and client's mascot is a ladybug, so he goes like this

COO: So i was thinking, we need to make people more aware about the new branch opening

COO: I have a creative / innovative idea, we probably can get an award for this and I'm sure client will be really impressed with this. Why don't we put ladybug​s on Google homepage, just walking around flapping their wings and stuff, i mean everyone visits Google right ?

Our Team: awkwardly looking at each other
Me: 😐😐😐😐
( I was confused what to think )

Then our designer calmly explained him why it wouldn't work while we were trying our best not to laugh

how the fuck someone like him manage to stay alive all these years and become a COO, i mean he doesn't have to know it all but damn this is common sense

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

Rating:
"1 star for now. Will give 5 stars if it can make me coffee, bring me breakfast in bed and drive me to work."

It's a digital assistant not a literal butler you troll!

Less rant, more story.

Tl;Dr: Disney uses "Magic Bands" to track every action of every person within their parks.

So I took my family to Disney World this past summer and we got these "nifty" little things called Magic Bands. These things are little wrist devices that basically handle everything for you in the parks. It unlocks your resort room, it gets you into the parks, you pay for meals and souvenirs with it by connecting a credit card and/or your meal plan. It makes things real simple as it's like putting on your watch each day.

At first I kinda enjoyed how easy it made everything on the trip, but then as we were exiting a ride the couple in front of us noticed the digital signs had their names on them, I looked around and noticed mine too, a sign that said "have a good day $myName." It suddenly clicked. These "Magic Bands" are people trackers. Suddenly everything about the park that I had been enjoying, was part of the system they had in place using these bands as human cattle tags. The ride wait time estimations were perfect, not because of a good algorithm and estimations, but because they had actual real data telling them when a person entered the line and got off the ride.

Using a BLE scanner app I was able to see that they have hundreds of APs throughout the parks tracking every single band on every single person withing their compound. I started to think about all of the data they're collecting and the thought of it was overwhelming. The amount of assumptions they can make about people based on their actions within their parks and what that data would be worth to additional advertisers. By the end of the trip I was cynically pointing out everything to my family about the cattle tags and how much I hated wearing it and yet it was required in order to do anything.

Manual Data Entry: Most boring job
This reminds me of one conversation with one of my faculty..
Faculty: Why not try some Machine Learning Project?
Me: Cool. Any ideas you have already thought
Faculty: Comes up with a really noble idea
Me: Awesome idea. But we need data
Faculty: Don't worry. I will get it. Just help me setup Hadoop (see the irony.. no data yet, and he wants big data setup)
Me: But we don't have data. Let's focus of data collection, Sir
Faculty: I will get it. Don't worry. Trust me.
( I did setup for him twice coz he formatted the system on which I did the setup first time)
After 6 months,
Me: (same question) Sir, Data??
Faculty: I got it.
Me: Great. Give me, I can start looking into it from today.
Faculty: Actually, it's in a register written manually in a different language (which even I can't understand) I will hire data entry guys to convert it into English digital contents.
Me: *facepalm*
Road to Manual data entry to Big Data
Dedicating this pencil to the individuals keeping the register up to date and Sir in hopes of converting it into big data..
Long way to go..

When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.

Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".

What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.

Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.

Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.

I did this for 4 months.

The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.

So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.

I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.

In the end:

- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.

- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job

- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.

So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.

3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.

I remember my first software engineer internship, the boss was terrible. He was cheap and only hired interns we had 0 guidance. This mother fucker would say shit in meetings like "hey we should start providing DBAAS, similar to DynamoDB start researching it I want a prototype by Wednesday" Wtf this guy is nuts. The overall product was suppose to be a fucking virtual machine hosting platform to compete with AWS, Digital Ocean, RackSpace etc designed by BS computer science interns lol. This guy tells us in a meeting one day "You know what's the difference between those guys (the competitors) and us?" We all looked around lost. This pompous ass hole says "Me , that's the difference you guys have me " 😂 what a fucking joke , not to mention all he has is a shitty math degree from a bullshit no name college in India, no developing experience what so ever. Man o man I never met anyone that was so fucking stupid but thought they were so fucking smart

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

Wtf, really??? Are they trying to liyerally KILL ME????

Got home from hospital today wth my family. Baby got sick. Wife also caught cold... Bad news. It was just me still healthy like a raddish [we have such saying].
So I got home. Started feeling somewhat funny. Sore thighs, feeling nauseaus, chilly, a bit dizzy.

10 minutes later I'm fucking trembling! It felt as of I was kicked put bare ass to -20C outside! I'm not exaggerating [probably made some typos.. Pls correct me] - i live where winters get like -35C. Everything around got like twice darker. And my lower teeth got itchy af [NOT the best feeling, trust me].

I must have caught cold too - I thought to myself, cuz I know what these sympthoms mean. I always have 'em all when I have fever. Since shivers are caused by rising fever I got my Microlife remote thermometer out of my drawer. Click, blue light, wait, beeep. 36.5C. Allright.. Maybe I got it wrong... Try again -- same result. Wife also gave a couple tries - nada. Nil. Nullpointerexception. Healthy like a pickle!

10 minutes later I couldn't stand the cold. Got under my blankets wife made some soup, tea,... I still have this analog thermometer, the one with quicksilver. Pop it into my armpit - jusyt in case. 10minutes later I take it out. It says 39,5 and rising. Try the microlife again. 36,5. WHAT THE FUCK?????????

If I weren't so fond of old-school stuff I'd be in a fucking ER now!!

Fuck you medical digital equipment made to be used at home! FUCK YOU!!

I'm pissed.

Do you folks kbow where could I get those q-silver thermometers? Just in case. They're already out of matket in my area for quite some time... For being dangerous [i give 'em that, okay?] and.... Lisen to this.... "unreliable"!

FUCK IT!

We received an urgent email from a client this morning that needed addressed immediately. We knew it was not going to be easy or fun so we did the sensible thing and began a rock paper scissors tournament to see who would work on it.

I lost... But then we see a follow up email from my boss saying he is handling it. Win!

Fast forward 6 hours, he comes out of his office and hands me a piece of paper and says he is too busy to work on it so I need to do it before going home. The paper is the email from 8am this morning... He did absolutely nothing with it for six hours except print it because a digital copy isn't good enough I guess.

I ended up working late, got yelled at by said client, and still haven't finished the fixes.

Worst of all is that I missed part of shark week because I stayed late.

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).

The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"

And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.

The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.

On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.

On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.

Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.

In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.

WHY can I only make digital payments on weekdays, 7:00-16:00?? Its not like there's a human authorizing all transactions. And computers don't sleep!!

Unexperienced digital immigrant: "Let's make a website, can you do this?"
Me: "Yeah."
"But you gotta use wordpress. We want to be able to change the content easily. Also we want to have that website done fast."
"Meh, ok."

one day later

"Are you done yet?"
Me: "No, I got to find a good way for the lightbox I'm still implementing to fetch data from posts blabla"
"Why are you not done yet? Just take a plugin, even I can do that. Wordpress is so easy, it's just 1, 2, 3 and done."

Yeah I have an idea. Why don't you just make the website yourself.

Not to say anyone here is right or wrong about this, but I just do t get the whole privacy paranoia. Yes, I get that our rights are being violated. Yes I know I need to be aware and concerned.

People use specials rims, VPN software, etc... The bottom line is every keystroke, SMS, voice call, search text, historical reference... every piece of digital communication is recorded (At least in the US).

The sad reality is I can be as angry as I want, but unless I forego using tech or leaving the house, there is nothing I can do about it.

I await your comments, both positive and negative.

I feel guilty when I spend time after work writing code, because there's that voice in the back of my head saying I should switch to leisure activities. "You've worked enough, don't sit all day, it's unhealthy".

Then I go for a walk or start planning something to cook. And there's still this weird feeling of guilt for not being productive enough, telling me I should learn a new programming language. "Work on your skills, you need to learn stuff to stay relevant in your field"

BRAIN, BE FUCKING CONTENT WITH WHAT I'M DOING FOR ONCE!

And stop fucking bullshitting me.

You're not trying to make me take a walk, you're not having my best interests at heart by making me learn or work.

I'm fucking on to you, you treacherous shitlitter of neurons. You're betraying me, and it happens every single fucking time I let my guard down.

I alt-tab out of my IDE, and within seconds you're there, impeding my intellect, making me click bookmarks to check the feculent streams spraying from the fingers of "friends" on Facebook.

I take a poop, and you just let me slide into a slowwitted state where I pick up my phone and stare at some crapfilled mire of memes.

You're the retarded digital-era id, wearing the disguise of a renaissance smart-ass ego, and you're dumping the fucking guilt on ME?

FUCK YOU AND YOUR MEMES, I'M GONNA BAKE A STEAK WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE AND WATCH PROGRAMMING VIDEOS WHILE DANCING.

NAKED.

(and maybe browse devRant later. I still love you, devRant)

So I've been playing some DnD with friends.
And we've been working with some lego characters, whiteboard markers and plastic sheets to draw on.

But that's always a mess:
The ink was old and did not come off again for the most part
The sides of the map curled up and and made the lego character fall over
The lego characters were too big
And more...

So I thought, why not make it digital?

And so I did.
I used UWP to make a master and a client, both using the Windows Ink api to be able to draw.
Some circles with an initial served as characters, and everything was synchronized using a TCP library I wrote half a year ago.

Yesterday we tried it out.
We all (including me) were sceptical if it would work well because the 'analog' clumsy way we did it before does have a certain charm.

But at the end we were all very enthousiastic about it and we'll be using it next time too!
It's awesome to be able to create programs for your own use :D
That's why being able to program is such a great thing!

Now I need to restructure everything, make it more efficient, add a turn order display, make the map zoom- and moveable and more and more....

A digital billboard in Odessa malfunctioned, in the fog. Convincing unknown numbers of motorists not only were they living in the Matrix, but it was being run on Windows 98

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

Fuck post-it notes.

Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.

Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.

Now your whole project is on the floor.

OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.

Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.

Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.

The cleaning lady saga continues yet again..

Here in Belgium, cleaning ladies are paid with cheques. All fine and dandy, and apparently the parent organization (Sodexo) even migrated to digital cheques. Amazing!!!

If only they did it properly.

Just now I received an email with my login data.
Login: ${FIRSTNAME}${FIRST2CHARSOFLASTNAME}
Password: I won't reveal the amount of characters.. but it's not even hex. It's just uppercase letters, and far from what I'd deem even remotely secure. Hopefully I'll be able to change that shitty password shortly, and not get it mailed back, even when I ask for recovery. Guess I'll have to check that later - the person who made that account was pretty incompetent when it comes to tech after all. Don't ask me why they did it instead of me. I honestly don't really know either.

With that said, this is a government organization after all... Can I really expect them to hash their passwords?

At a previous job, I worked with a graphic designer who knew it all.

The first design he gave me, all font sizes were in points, and way too big.

I asked for them in pixels.

He said points and pixels are exactly the same.

I explained that they were not, when you're using a browser. He got visibly angry, and stormed out of the office to cool down.

When he came back, I sent him a link explaining the difference between points and pixels for digital media.

He sent me pixel sizes.

Next project, same exact thing happens, complete with him angrily storming out of the room.

By the third project, I just started picking my own font sizes, and ignored his point specs.

Many hotels dont have floor #13 due to superstitious reasons... do you think the digital age would threaten the future of rooms 404?

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

Game is underway in unreal engine!

Been doing the art for a ridiculously long time, got help from many people! All sorts of suggestions, and great ones too! I've used paint dot net because it is reliable, Im not a great digital artist but can do a decent job!
So what's happening now is that I'm working on the maps and going to start on the character design tonight.
I have less than a month to get a huge portion done but I hope I execute it at an international standard! :D
Here's a preview of the basic part

So my office manager decided to ban kitchen utensils in the office. Part of the reason was that there was too much stealing. Apparently too many mugs, knives, plates & spoons have gone missing for it to be just through loss.

I tried to reason with this office manager. I asked if we really want to create a culture of mistrust where we ban basic utilities like we’re children.

I appealed to the business logic do we really want freelancers going out to grab a coffee 10 minutes a day over a period of a year.

I tried to appeal to the digital nature of the office can we “source the solution from the office”

The other office have to bring in their own utensils but the other office has a canteen.

Essentially I feel like this was a power issue a decision was made I’m not allowed to question it.

Apparently my “behaviour” has been flagged with the CTO. 🤣🤨

I have to stir my tea with a knife unless I put stuff in my desk.

As a solution I decided to reach out to several green companies that provide disposable cutlery and kitchen where they agreed to send a sample which I put in the kitchen. I have a feeling this will be taken as hostile move in of what is: a solution.

Seriously W T actual F.

I fucking hate the Safari browser to death.
This piece of disk space waste is 50% of the reason why I have to spend hours to find out what the fuck is incorrectly displaying or not working on W.I.P. websites.
The other 50% is Edge, IE <=11 and Firefucks.

Just for piss smelling Safari, I need to either run a VM with Crapple OS X for debugging or borrow a Crapbook from $randomPerson.
Is it fucking not possible to compile Safari blowser to run on Linux or Winblows?

Eventhough I'm disgusted about Google and its privacy and data mining policies, Chrome is the most decent browser there is on the whole digital world. It only happens extremely rarely that something is not working/displaying as expected during development.

Most browser developers seem to be useless pubes eaters and like to shower with curd soap.

devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.

It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...

'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'

... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.

The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!

PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!

Hi everyone, just discovered this wonderful community and I've got a new rant just for the occasion.

I work at a creative agency and we offer writing, design and web development.

This client wanted the whole package, so we've written a ton a copy, got it approved, sent it to translation, got it approved, designed both print and digital assets and developed a website.

Everything was looking good, files sent to the printer, website ready to be deployed...

Then we get a call and a PDF of text changes. The stuff is already printed.

The business owner's wife (not an employee) took it upon herself to make changes to the text, some of which have grammatical and spelling mistakes.

Everything has to be delayed, files have to be resent to the printer, project goes over budget, we're pissed, the printer is pissed and their director of communications is pissed.

What a shit show. I wonder who's going to get thrown under the bus for this one.

I fucking nailed my c exam.
Had to write C on paper today. Fuck my uni for that. But I think I aced it. I coded C for weeks and hopefully finally payed off.
Fuck coding on paper though. They are just too lazy to make something digital. But man at least let me get some compiler messages. It's not like anyone codes without compiler messages anymore.

Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.

In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.

Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.

My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.

Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..

When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.

I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.

When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.

I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.

I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.

I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.

devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.

Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.

Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.

I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.

Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.

Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.

Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.

I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.

Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.

I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.

Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...

Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.

Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.

I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.

I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.

I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.

I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.

Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.

I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.

Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)

We're digital plumbers.

90% of this job is figuring out what thing to connect to what thing and then figuring out how to connect them.

Writing the code that goes in-between both ends of the pipe is easy if not trivial 90% of the time.

Meaningful change in this industry is centered around endpoints: contracts, deployments, etc. Nobody needs yet another way to organize and import their leftpad().

Time to do a little bit of shaming:

I'm specialized in e-commerce applications, mostly based on Shopware, a german out-of-the-box online-shop. They essentially claim to be a better Magento. In December of last year I found a critical issue within the code. Products within the shop can be declared as digital wares. In that case the purchase of a product will unlock the possibility to download a designated file.

As a customer you can access your downloads within the account section. Now here's the problem: The query that fetches the unlocked downloads for a customer is hard-capped at 500 rows. So after your 500th purchase, you won't be able to access any further files you paid for. Essentially their developers thought that this limit would never be exceeded anyway and called it a day.

Personally I think this unacceptable. For the merchant this is a potential law-suit in the making. So I took the time to refactor the code and fix the issue. The corresponding pull-request was flagged as scheduled back in December. Since then there have been numerous releases and the issue is still present. Not only do I ask myself why I should ever put in time and effort to fix their code again, but I also can't believe that they just chose to ignore the issue completely. Also mind that this is not just a small or non-profit open-source project. The responsible company behind the software is a stock corporation that claims to be the market leader in Germany.

Germany trying to fight Covid with digital tools (at least not another app today): registered for a test with QR-Code, Webform and E-Mail. After being tested by friendly people, I received an email that contains a link to a download of a PDF document.

Inside the PDF, a QR code, and a bureaucratic text like during the time of the Prussian emperor: "Bescheinigung über das Vorliegen eines positiven oder negativen Tests (Antigen Schnelltest) zum Nachweis des SARS-CoV-2 Virus".

Okay, we have a national "Corona Warn App" using Google's bluetooth based distancing detection, that also allows to add a test by scanning a QR code.

Scanned the code, got

"QR code is invalid".

Despite the unfriendly UX writing and the unhelpful description, another proof of the state of digitalization in Germany in 2021.

I am not even surprised.

At least my test result is negative.

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

Applied to a Jr. Dev job and was hired as a Digital Marketer — I can deal with this, I’m AdWords & Analytics certified. What I can’t abide is that I spent the last year working my ass off learning to code and the person next to me with the Jr. Dev position only uses DIVI and has zero inclination to study, learn or write basic HTML & CSS—much less PHP. I’m not an expert by any means but I love programming, I love the problem solving, the challenges and the culture of it all. So far, and these are only two examples, I’ve shown him how to use the target attribute to open a page as a new tab, and how to register a nav in the functions.php file to create a menu but he is unwilling to even attempt it. Rather, he told me that I was too technical and that no one would be using code in this day and age.

For the record, I think DIVI is a cool platform, it’s clear that my boss knows nothing about code to be fair and I love my job— this is my only issue so far😂 I just needed to rant.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

It’s still to easy.
I hope one day software will get so complicated no one will be able to fix it.

Somewhere in future :
- government established law that new AI system is only one that can accept new law
- every financial operation is monitored by government supervision AI
- we developed robots that are taking care of us
- everyone is happy cause work for money, shelter and food is now optional
- education is fully digital and managed by AI
- whole knowledge is based on asking questions, we don’t need to write and read anymore
- we use one common language and our knowledge specialization increased

A little more time passed by in this utopia.
- after power loss most of data got corrupted
- last man who knew how to restore backup died last night ( R.I.P. admin we will not forget you )
- people trying to save knowledge base to rebuild part of this civilization but no one knows how to make a paper because it haven’t been used for ages
- we decided to put what is left from knowledge on stone but we forgot how to write since everything is audio or video and most of time we were spending in VR
- someone decided that we draw some pictures
- all of use are now drawing animal heads like we remember ourselves from VR, let people know our tech is good
- some people love cats so they try to make cats from stones
- volcano eruptions destroyed most of stones that we made

Starving waiting for another respawn of my DNA sequence. I hope we manage to survive this time.

Shit Developers say:

Fuck you Jasmine and your camelCase

I’ve been wrestling cucumbers all day

Oh no all the cucumbers are broken

In a fit of refactoring madness I have gone and changed a lot

Did you seriously just give ME nil?... No!

If the shit sticks, then we put nice paint on it

Fucking red dot motherfucker (Ben and his failing specs)

You know what we don’t do often..kill each others builds. Kill them and reschedule for later. Mwahaha ha ha.

This build is going to be so rad...(5mins later)...Ok this is not going to pass..I can feel it in my waters!

Can i do that in a digital way or do i have to move my meaty body downstairs to find him?

All the donkeys have be out the gate by sundown

God, imagine if you could patent mathematical solutions

actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you can in the states "no, you can't use a laplace transform, you haven't got the rights, you have to use a less accurate transform on your matrices"
ooooo a boolean that's phrased in the negative, my favourite for code review destruction!

Fuck the police i'll call the object here

Web RTC - its super easy, all you have to do is..probably some hard stuff

I want to go to that conference so I can start arguments with dickheads about semicolons. Just for fun.

This this is not the same as that this.

Can’t come to work I can’t find any clothes. It’s best for everyone if I just don’t come in. ...2 hours later... Yeah my clothes were just in the other room and i couldn’t be fucked moving

(OH about bad bug reports) - you know when they are all like oh joogly joogly doesn’t doodle doodle and it should wobbly doodle you know? and im all like fuck i don’t know any of that shit you are talking about.

Him: "I don’t like it, it’s against REST convention its so 2006 that my eyes are bleeding. As a privileged white male i feel entitled to complain about this." Me: "you. were. eleven in 2006

Source: Kellective Github

I hate it when I try to press ctrl+f while studying a hard-copy book, it literally makes me sad

About a year ago I was doing work for a client that hired a separate contractor for SEO consultation. I could easily end the rant here.

This lady was trying to convince my client to write the same page or blog article several times over and merely change their physical address at the bottom of the page to one of their many respective clinics.

When I told them not to do this because they would suffer for stuffing and duplicating content, their response was to ask me to be respectful of the other contractor's skills and knowledge regarding digital marketing and to call her and sort it out.

I called. We argued. I called the client back and asked if they should respect the skills of an auto mechanic with pliers to remove a teenager's braces rather than send them to one of their orthodontic clinics.

4th grade. My parents left for the night and got a babysitter for me and my younger siblings. The babysitter showed me a game she likes in IE. You could make an account, raise a digital pet, a "neopet," play flash games for points to buy items from other users who listed them in their own stores that had custom css/html, including bg music. This was the first time I had really witnessed what the web could look like. Animated tiled gif bgs really amazed me so I took to google with which I discovered sites where one could copy css and html snippets for themes. I stored each new html tag I discovered via w3cschools.com in a powerpoint where the snippets I found were pasted somewhere randomly in the ppt. From there I learned html, CSS, and a billion other things. To date I've made websites, apps with several langs in win/Linux/osx/Android (but not ios yet). I've managed servers, and databases , and DNS records. I've in even ran website with 100k requests a day.

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

I didn't think I'd be able to contribute but today proved me wrong.

I'm a front end dev, and I'm the marketing department's go-to in IT (read: I'm their bitch :[ ) The digital marketing guy pinged me today saying he wanted to see if there's a way he could avoid having the president ask him about a task he supposedly did months ago: implement a glossary on our website and index its pages.

Turns out he hasn't done that task at all because he disagreed with the president's decision to even have a glossary.

Fast forward to now, and the president is asking how the glossary is doing. Cue my coworker sending me messages asking how he can avoid having to index the pages now, as well as not get in trouble for not having done it but saying he did.

So in summary: he did not do a job the president told him to do, he lied and said that he had done it, he is avoiding talking to the president about it, he is trying to get me to help him get out of it and cover his tracks, AND he just admitted it in company channels of communication.

Next time, just index the glossary, dude. We all get handed work tasks we don't want to do.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

My most personal rant to date...

The company I work for operates in an industry that might experience the next Kodak moment. The industry is really feeling the knife against it's throat at the moment. The company I work for is a dinosaur, so to say. And almost everyone within fight to continue staying as a dinosaur.

I am the sole dev of said company, and I am so alone. Not just literally, but also in thought and action.

I've been flagging the possibilities and dangers of the digitizing aspect we're experiencing for the last six or eight years (yep, I've been around for quite some time), but I feel that I'm not heard. I am that grumpy, sour manifestation of everything digital that they hate so much. At least that's what it feels like.

I am so fed up with this situation. But my options are limited. There aren't many dev jobs around, and those who've tried to hire me offered a salary reduction of about $12K, which is quite a lot. I've been offered jobs in other parts of the country, but I have family matters to tend to, so I can't move at the moment. I've looked for companies offering a job where I'm not required to work from the office, but in my country these seem to be far apart. I could go freelance, but I am too scared to do so. A stable income is neccessary to put food on the table for my family.

Sigh,

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

ESET Antivirus is a strange animal. On one hand, it seems reasonably well written, because unlike Norton or F-Secure, it doesn't subject your computer to death by constant disk access and 100% CPU load for 10 minutes when you start it.

On the other hand, when I clicked the link in the mail about renewing licenses and filled out the form, I was not redirected to a page where I could enter credit cart details.

Instead, I got message that some representative would get back to me in 1-2 work days. Eh, what? It's a digital product for f***'s sake. Now, I suppose they'll send me a hand written letter (written using a quill, no doubt), delivered by a bloke riding a horse and wearing a tricorn.

Well, at least ESET virus definition updates are pushed on the internet, and not sent out on 5.25" diskettes.

TL;DR just read this
So my current (student) job. Asked me to count inventory. Did so, on paper because nobody had a list of the product barcodes for easy cumulative scanning. I also made records for every single barcode. Then I had to key it in onto the Bookkeeping and sales software thing. They don't have keyboard shortcuts, so I quickly made an ahk script.
Had to manually type in everything 3ven though I had a digital listing.
Software lets you print barcodes for products but gives you an error when you try because you haven't assigned a code. WHICH YOU CAN'T DO IN THAT Crap. You also can't search for a product based on code.

Found out it used access as a back end for that buggy c++ thing that crashes with 'operation not permitted' when you press the red x. Great! Now I can import! And there is a barcode field. Wow. Fucking fantastic. What a fuckfest.

Their website. Their fucking website. Great from a user's standpoint, but my God. It uses joomla! However, version 2.5. That hasn't been supported for a long time. Part of the images are hard coded into the theme. The text editor flips. Adding a page sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes makes 2 pages.

And their cnc lathe runs on a laptop with Windows 3 on it, but hey, fine

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Professors today in colleges don't know...
.
1. the proper denominations of outputs of basic shell commands like "ls -l", "cat", "cal" (pronounces linux as laynux)
.
2. how memory management works
.
3. how process scheduling actually takes place and not in the outdated bookish way.
.
4. how to compile a package from scratch and including digital signatures
.
5. cannot read a man page properly, yet come to take OS labs.
.
6. how to mount a different hardware
.
7. how to check kernel build rules, forget about compiling a custom kernel.
.
.
.
n. ....

Yet we are expecting the engineers who are churned out of colleges to be NEXT GEN ?!
It is not entirely because of syllabus, its also because of professors who had not updated their knowledge since they got a job. Therefore they cannot impart proper basics on students.
If you want things to change, train students directly in the industry with versions of these professors UPDATED.

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 honestly hate the ap computer science principles curriculum. we're taking an ap test soon, so for the past few weeks, we've been constantly taking practice tests.

it pisses me off so much. the questions, the criteria, it's all bs.

we have questions like "what will reduce the digital divide?" with choices like "education for low income families on computers." like, I DONT FUCKING KNOW.

frankly, I DONT FUCKING CARE. giving electronics to people who cant afford it is great and all, BUT IT DOESNT INVOLVE ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTING.

HEY, COLLEGE BOARD, KNOWING IF AN ALGORITHM IS TECHNICALLY AN "ABSTRACTION" DOESNT FUCKING MATTER. WHAT MATTERS IS THAT I CAN IDENTIFY WHATS MORE EFFICIENT, WHERE A BUG IS, CONCEPTS INVOLVED IN PROGRAMS, THINGS LIKE THAT.

NOT IF DNS IS SIMILAR IN STRUCTURE TO THE US POSTAL SYSTEM.

god i hope whoever wrote this gets hit in the head by a github server that was dropped from the 2^8th floor.

So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.

Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.

She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.

Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.

I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.

He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.

Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.

I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD

I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.

If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

Here’s book most of you have either read a newer edition or some variant based on this book, as computer science students you had to take an intro to logic course.. prior to digital logic.. or atleast that’s how it went for me and many others I know.
Which regardless how much the universities screwed up teaching comp sci and programming.. this is one aspect I think they nailed. Requiring philosophical logic course for comp sci.

Again this isn’t a digital logic book. It’s just philosophical logic. The first edition of this book came out in 1953... and I think they are edition 14 or 15... for a book to have this many editions and last this long thru time it’s a good book.

It’s a book that should be a must read for anyone venturing into AI and working on human machine thought processing.

It’s a great book to have around as reference, considering philosophical logic is not a walk in the park atleast not in the beginning because it requires you to change the way you view things.. more specifically it requires you to think objectively and make decisions objectively rather than subjective emotional reasoning.

Programmers need to think objectively with everything they do. The moment you begin thinking subjectively .. ie personal style, wishes and wants, or personal reasons and put that into code for a code base with a team u just put the team at risk.

Does this book teach objective thought? No... indirectly yes, because it teaches the objective rules of logic... you don’t get to have an emotional opinion on wether you agree or disagree or whatnot, logic is logic even philosophical. Many people failed the logic course I was in university.. infact the bell curve was c- / D ... many people had to take the course more than once.. they even had to change the way the grading was done.. just to get more people to pass...

But here’s the thing it’s not about it being taught wrong.. people just couldn’t adapt to thinking objectively, with rules as such in philosophical logic courses. Grant it the symbols takes time getting use to but it literally wasn’t the reason people failed.. it was their subjective opinions and thought process interfereing with the objectiveness of the course exams and homework.

Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "

Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.

What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.

I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.

Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();

Start to read the book from Jaron Lanier "Who owns the Future". And suddenly realize that the company which offering us "free services" is trying to build a superior model of machine learning and read all of our behaviour.

Thus, i start to logout my facebook, twitter, instagram and all of my social media. But, i'm not the lucky one who could fight this "selling data practices", because I still use devices with "Android OS". My privacy stolen & sold is inevitable. What a Digital Life!

So,

A) I suck at digital drawing.
B) They have not invited me to the third interview like they said they would in the second interview.
C) I am still working on the PhD application. Still think the CV is bad, the SOP sucks, and back and forth emailing professors about recommendation letters. I am not built for this, but who is. So out of comfort zone. So unrelated to actual research or brain capabilities.
D) Moving in with parents is all fun and games and "I can do this", until you get stuck inside with them for over a month because of lockdowns.

... I hope next year is going to be better...

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Last completed (so not something which is still going on) project i have learned a lot was for "digital- and microcontroller technology" classes.
I designed a tower which fits on a pc fan. In this tower there is a tabletennis ball and on top of it is a infrared sensor. With a Potentiometer you can set the height at which the ball shall float.
As microcontroller i took an arduino uno. For visualization i used SerialComInstruments.
Learned lots of microcontroller programming, pid controls and how the fuck a serial port communication really works.

Rant Mode: ON

Do you know what really grinds my gears? Those dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors. It's like a digital black hole, sucking your users into a vortex of frustration.

And don't get me started on inconsistent coding standards. It's like trying to decipher hieroglyphics written by different ancient civilizations. Why can't we all just follow the same conventions?

Oh, and software updates that break everything! You spend hours perfecting your code, only for a new update to come along and wreak havoc. It's like the universe is conspiring against developers.

But hey, despite the rants, we developers are a resilient bunch. We thrive on solving problems, no matter how infuriating they can be. So, here's to the endless debugging, the endless coffee, and the endless love-hate relationship with coding. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Rant Mode: OFF

Phew, that felt good. Thanks for letting me vent!

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

I feel I have developed some sort of digital hoarding and can't be at peace just browsing before the night, I have to save, like, ++, whatever or I feel I will some day think of that specific content (image, post, music, video, ..) and never be able to find it, it did happen before, which probably engraved that even further or was the cause, but it's just such a disease not to be able to just browse and not worry about some day having the need to find it again.

Finally got my stickers! And they go on the BAG, not the expendable digital tools.

Western Digital, please, for the love of all things holy and not entirely shit, stop making your external hard drives flash a fucking flashlight when they are in "sleep" mode (attached to a sleeping laptop for example). I would like to sleep you beerpissers!

devrant rant

Every rant is SEO friendly.

Put few of your GitHub names in ddg - got few pages of devrant post. Not sure if that's beneficial for the personal digital footprint.

Option to exclude post from robots?

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.

Fucking shit for brains authors that think the digital world is a fantasy realm where everything can happen just to aid their story. Out of boredom i watched "scorpion" today, a tv series about a group of geniusses which are a special case task force.
They got a visitor from the government saying the servers from the federal reserve bank were encrypted with ransomware. I already twitched when they said the economic system would collapse if the servers were left inoperational for a few days. Then one guy got to his desk and "hacked" the fed network to check... he then tried to remove the malware but "it changed itself when observed". But they got the magical fingerprint of the device that uploaded it. In the end some non-programmers created the malware, but it is super fast and dangerous because it runs on a quantum computer which makes it hyper fast and dangerous. They got to the quantum computer which was a glowing cube inside another cube with lasers going into it and they had to use mirrors to divert the lasers to slow down that quantum thingy. And be careful with that, otherwise it explodes. In the end the anti-malware battled the malware and won, all in a matter of minutes.

This is a multimillion hollywood production. How can a movie this abusive to computer science even air on television? Shit like this is the reason people still think the cyberworld is some instable thing that can explode any second. It's not, it's an instable thing that can break down any second. I remember "ghost in the wires" and people had surreal imaginations about the internet already. Shit like this is why people stay dumb and think everything can be done in seconds. If i ever should encounter one of these idiots i tell him i have an app that can publish his browser history by taking a picture of his phone and watch his reaction.
Time to shuw down the tv and learn vim again.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

YIL (Yesterday, I learned) that, in Austria, digital signatures on documents (using a signature you can only get by verifying your identity, which can be done in person, or online but no I'm not making pics with my passport, ever) have the same value as handwritten signatures.

If someone provides you a PDF and tells you to print it out and sign it, you can just sign it on your PC and send the PDF back, and unless they explicitly told you not to do so (it can't be put in terms and conditions), they can't reject a signature provided in this way.

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

The state of digital comic book metadata is a mess. There is not really a standard format if the metadata even exists at all. All digital comic books consist of is a zip or rar with ordered images and potentially some type of file to store metadata. The closest thing to a standard is the Comic Rack format of metadata and even that is not very widespread. There exists a project called comictagger(on github) that attempts to assign metadata in Comic Rack format but it is somewhat unpolished yet provides a solid feature set.

I am planning on making a program to organize comics based on metadata attributes and am frustrated with the lack of consistency in this department. This isn't really a problem because of any developers but I would argue more so due to the organization of comic books themselves. For example, the term volume can have a different meaning based on who is asked or what context is used. The redundancy between issues and trade paperbacks can also lead to confusion and logistical problems. I just wish we already had a widespread schema in place for comic books metadata already.

Am I the only one worried with the OS wars lately? Microsoft and Apple trying to gain even more control on everything and Linux remaining at less than 2% on the desktop. People are oblivious to the fact that their personal freedom is at risk, and don't you dare tell me otherwise. Companies knowing what we search or what files we have on our computer, having the ability to control us and force us to follow their rules. We have a choice, and I'm not talking about destroying the economical system a la Mr. Robot, but moving to the Open Source world, not because it's more secure, faster or some such shit, but because it's the only way to ensure freedom on one of the biggest part of our lifes, the digital part. My concerns may be exceeding the normal, and I'll hate it to be right, but I'm afraid that if this goes on, in a few years, we'll understand that we made a big mistake...

FUCK Banks

Fuck Banks and fuck online Banking

Fuck you for not supporting real 2FA
Fuck you for having such shitty bloated bullshit Websites and online services
Fuck you for taking forever to transfer money
Fuck you for not having public APIs Fuck you for so many uncountable reasons.

And most of all Fuck you for constantly trying to fuck me. I FUCKING HATE BANKS SO FUCKING MUCH.

I hope so much that there'll be a decentralised uncontrollable anonymous and digital currency in the future. Something like Cryptos (like BTC or ETH) but without all the major Problems they have now.

I wish there was a hell Banks could go to. I want to see them burn and suffer so fucking much not even the worst medieval torture methods are enough to satisfy me.

Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.

But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.

Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.

So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.

Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook

Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper

Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

TL;DR - (almost) childhood trauma due to Wesrern Digital crap products lead to lot of data loss and a plege to not trust or purchase their products for the rest of my life.

....

So, I got my first ever Wester Digital 2TB Mybook, back when 2TB was a really big thing. While in the midst of moving (not copying) a LOT of data to it, the damn disk just.. died. There was no fall, no power outage, no damage, it just stopped working. I was out of words and out of options. Tried yanking out the disk and connecting it directly to a system, but no luck because it looks like it's the HDD mobo that died.

Also stupid young me did not realise back then that, even if a "moved" the data, the original data is still most likely in their original location, and so, never bothered a recovery.

Lots of good stuff lost that day.

And as with a lot of you, my disaster recovery system kicked up 10 fold. Now I got redundant local and cloud backup copies of all critical and otherwise unattainable data.

As you may have guessed, I never bought another Wester Digital product ever again. My internal HDDs are Segate, and external is a suprisingly long lived Toshiba Canvio.

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

Just got access to OpenAI beta. This thing is seriously impressive. The attached image shows it summarizing a paragraph from Friedrich Nietzsche. Apart from that, I have tried summarizing a complex Math Algo which I found on Wikipedia, getting specs for building a new PC, and also improving my Startup Idea. The results were astonishing. I can't imagine what possibilities it can have in the future.

At the same time, I can clearly see why they are not allowing open access to their APIs. The potential for abuse is so high here. Especially when most of our population is full of digital idiots.

someone please motivate me to code again.

since one month i did nothing but digital art/youtube watching/maths/chatting but i did not code.
the main reason being that all my projects have bugs currently :/

Let's say you have a business that is 100% gonna get canceled from lots of internet infrastructure services because reasons. Let's say you decided "Screw it. I'm gonna build all my own infrastructure and services from the ground up and deliver all my digital content to millions, including broadband video, apps, gaming, devices, etc."

A) Is that even remotely possible?
B) If money were no object and time were not of the essence, how would you do it?
C) How could that even scale at all if thousands of other businesses did the exact same thing?

Focus on projects, not tests.

If you want people to be able to code, judge them by their ability to code.

Plus that way your graduates have a portfolio as opposed to a grade list that says nothing about their usefulness in the market.

If you must do tests, at least mimic real world conditions:

- Digital, no paper
- Internet allowed (have rules on copying SO if you must)
- BYOD, let people work in their customised environment

Your company bio says:

"We are a global network of elite, independent software engineers and digital designers"

And then you go ask a native iOS developer if he's interested in an EmberJs role ..... not very fucking elite apparently

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

I had to send in my bachelor thesis project in paper documents and also digitally ... on a CD. Probably bought one of the last CD packs in my life. Why does uni need this in 2020? What about usb?
I don't even have a PC with a CD-drive anymore. Everything is downloaded. I was lucky that there is still a laptop at home that has a drive.
Am I spoiled? Why are CD's still needed, except for games (maybe?)?

trying to get into gamedev is usually a shitty experience to me...

being a web dev OTOH feels like the opposite. There are css libraries that can make your site beautiful for you (albeit kinda generic).

so when you look at the screen when working on something, you can see something pretty, and it feels like progress.

you can show this to people and they'll be like "wow, look at you and your fancy site".

Show an expertly coded but cssless site to people and they will ask you if you did it with digital crayons.

That's how it feels when I try to get into gamedev, shockingly embarassing.

If I do my own assets, it looks like shit and takes forever. If I use other people's assets, it feels unoriginal.

I used to believe that gameplay is everything, graphics are nothing. But I'm not certain about that right now.

A very common advice to get into gamedev is to start with games that are already made. Like doing a tetris.
Great, that's exactly what I need. Doing a game that looks like shit, with a gameplay I'm not dying to program.

Another thing that makes me feel incompatible with games is the possible reality of that saying that goes "art is never finished, only abandoned", and games being art in a sense.

I'm not sure if I have that mentality. I think I am more of a results type of person, and doing games feels a bit opposite to that.

All of this is making me a bit sad, because video games have been and still are my number one interest, and there has been countless times where I wished I had the role of game designer so I could define in actual projects what a game would be. Like all those "wouldn't it be cool if you could remove X and add Y to this fame" feelings.

Holy shit! I have not programmed a Teensy micro in a while. So I was looking at what they offer and saw they now have a 600Mhz version that is the same size/pinout as their 72MHz version. I am just amazed by how much micros have changed. I love the embedded wifi chips that are out there too. I guess I am going to be playing with the Teensy the next few weeks. I love playing around with embedded audio processing. Lately I have been playing with bluetooth wireless audio. So this will fit nicely. The chip has 2 AD and assorted digital audio inputs/outputs.

I dunno, I was excited and this seems like a nice new years present.

The amount of energy spent to just write ‘Hi’ and click a send button is so big that we should consider banning of sending hi messages.

Instead of just saying “Hi!” we are now using analog to digital preprocessors that convert it to bunch of 0 and 1 to send it over communication layer and deliver it to other human being that will convert it from digital to analog by reading it but that is simple.

By sending message using phone we also:
- save it to local phone
- convert it to couple protocols
- transmit it over air so make connection to internet provider services that would generate logs on this provider as well as whole routing table before it gets to the target person
- save it on messaging provider disk
- probably be processed by filters by provider, sometimes be reviewed or listened by third parties and also processed in bulk by artificial intelligence algorithms
- finally delivered to target phone and saved there where that person would just change this text to their inner voice and save it
- sometimes encrypted and decrypted
- sometimes saved on provider
- sometimes saved on phone manufacturer cloud backup
- don’t get me started on people involved to keep this infrastructure in place for you just to say hi

There are also some indirect infinite possibilities of actions for example:
- emit sound and light that can lead to walking from one room to other
- the floor in your house is destroyed cause of it so you need to renovate your floor
- sound can expose your position and kill you if you’re hiding from attacker
- sound can wake you up so you wake up in different hours
- it can stop you from having sex or even lead to divorce as a result simple hi can destroy your life
- can get you fired
- can prevent from suicide and as a result you can make technology to destroy humans

and I can write about sound and light all day but that’s not the point, the point is that every invention makes life more complicated, maybe it saves time but does it really matter ?

I can say that every invention we made didn’t make world simpler. The world is growing with complexity instead.

It’s just because most of those inventions lead to computer that didn’t make our world simpler but made it more complicated.

On a digital marketing course.
Teacher:
"Web pages are made of structured content and style, that's HTML and CSS. There are also many programming languages, like JavaScript or Python, but we are not discussing those here because it's computer freaks stuff. Now let's talk about cookies..."
Me: Should I kill myself now or wait until that man stops saying shit an die killing him too...?

I was browsing websites in search of a nice digital camera because my wife saw one but it's long since been discontinued. So I found this one article about a few current ones. I open it, it shows the typical GDPR consent request about cookies with a prominent button 'ACCEPT ALL,' and a less prominent button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES.'

But tapping the button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES' did not show any preferences to manage! WHAT THE HECK? There was only a list of 'partners' whose cookies I need to accept. A long list. A very long list. I stopped counting at 500.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHAT REASON COULD A WEBSITE POSSIBLY HAVE TO REQUIRE COOKIE CONSENT FOR MORE THAN 500 PARTNERS?

Fucking capitalist internet.

Once again, due to poor management, I find myself exporting svgs from Figma, saving them as pngs, and importing them into our application... (remember I'm a developer, NOT a designer)

Don't we have a design team who can export the needed assets for a feature?

"Noooooo fullstackclown can do all of that himself! He's an expert!!!"

The fucks are lucky I dabble in digital art as a hobby and even know how to do this stuff...

FML

After 25 years working in the IT industry, as a web designer, developer, digital marketing professional, and a bunch of other stuff, I've had it up to here with recruiters who approach me on LinkedIn. After having (presumably) reviewed my extensive and detailed résumé and testimonials from people I've worked with that I put there for the world to see, they then are surprised when I tell them in no uncertain terms and before anything else is said that, yes, I'm interested and that I need $X in compensation to take the job they're offering. They just don't know what to say to that. Here's a hint: "Yeah, that sounds like something we can work with. Let's schedule an interview." or "Sorry, we're not paying that much." But say _something_.

I figure that I'm done playing the "We have a job, and we want you to jump through a million hoops to find out what we'll offer you" game.

Let's play a new game, where you pay ACTUAL attention to my experience level, and then you ask me if I'm available and I say "Yes, and here's what I want to get paid. When can we meet?" My CV speaks for itself. You either want me or you don't. No, I won't take your stupid qualification test. No, I don't want to be put in front of 5 different HR screeners. If you want me, I'll be here waiting for you to schedule a real, bona fide interview with the person who is empowered to make a decision. I've LONG not been some junior-level schmuck you can feed into your filter to figure out whether I'm worth it. Ok?

Dear BOSE, how can you make a "smart" speaker so dumb and complicated? Why require to use an app that needs frequent updates and takes up so much storage space for ... what exactly?
Dear Spotify, why not add features to the web player if your app does not run on older devices? Which native feature would your app need that is missing on iOS 13?
Dear companies making money due to the fact that some real artists make real music that real people love to listen to, how come your apps and gadgets always make me nostalgic about actual records and make me tune in to an actual radio station at the end of the day? At least you keep showing us not to rely on digital technology and rather go visit actual live concerts to listen to live music in the real world more often!

I finally found something to rant about! So what happened is that I am participating in the Digital Ocean competition (I need to do 5PR's). So I find a report with a lot of scripts. I decide to contribute and write a discord webhook API (send messages through a webhook). The next day, the guy goes "No thanks :)" and closes the PR. Words cannot express how triggered I am. I ask him if I can make anything else out of exasperation (I did not intend to do anything for him anymore, I can't explain why I did that), he tells me no...

;(

Sus!
yesterday I bought a cool domain in namecheap, I was very lucky to find short and good one for my case.

Today (at weekends!!!!) I receive a letter:
>Hello **redacted name**,
>
>We are contacting you from the Namecheap Risk Management Team regarding your '**redacted name account**' account.
>
>Unfortunately, your Namecheap account was flagged by our fraud screening system as requiring verification and was locked.
>
>Please follow the instructions below to get your account verified:
>
>- take a color photo of the credit card used for the payment at **redacted link**
>
>Please make sure all of the edges of the credit card are visible, and that we can clearly see the card holder's name, expiration, and last four digits of the card number. The screenshots or images of the card cannot be accepted for verification. >If the submission does not meet these requirements, we can either request to submit the details again or permanently suspend your account.
>
>- provide a valid phone number and the best time to call you (within normal business hours, US Pacific time).
>
>If we do not hear back from you within 24 hours, we will be forced to cancel your orders.
>
>We apologize for any inconvenience that may result from this process. This extra verification is done for your security and to ensure that orders are legitimate. This industry, unfortunately, has a high rate of fraudulent orders, and this sort of >verification helps us drastically reduce fraud and ensure our customers remain secure. Such documents are used for verification only and are not provided to third parties in any way. Account verification is a one-time procedure, after your account >is verified, you will never face this issue again.
>
>Looking forward to your reply.
>
>---------------
>Dmitriy K.
>Risk Management
> Namecheap, Inc.

what if I did not notice it in 24 hours? It is the weekend for god's sake! People usually rest until monday.
They would what, cancel order and scalpel it to super high price?!
I have some doubts if the request is trully having anti fraudulent origins.

What if I used digital visa card? How was I supposed to photo it?

And the service they provided for photoing accepts only photos from web camera. I was lucky that I bought recently web camera with high enough amount of pixel power and manual focus. What if I did not?

That's all really SUS!
The person can not notice the letter within 24 hours time frame until the morning, when it would be already too late.

I guess my story is not really cool, but okay, I lost my job as a Digital designer (Yeah, I actually have a bachelor's degree in graphic design, I'm an impostor)

I lost it because I saved enough money to travel to Japan and I wanted to stay at least a month so the company didn't like it. after coming back I got a job as a content editor, I just copied old content from an old website to a new one, basic html and css, not even responsive design, then I got really into it, and bootstrap came along, the company opened a new department "Front End" so I got in, I learnt responsive design and Jquery, really loved it, I went back to Japan for a month and a half, keeping my job, I liked it, but I quit.

I now work as a remote front end and I feel stuck, I'm very comfortable as remote, don't wanna go back to an office, but it seems I'll have to, can't find any opportunities to improve remotely, and I feel like I'm missing what the "cool kids" are doing.

This is what I’ve got on LinkedIn today People are getting creative, not sure how to respond to that. I am curious to see what this scam is all about 🤷‍♂️

Dear PappyHans,

I hope this email finds you well and safe. My name is **** and I work for ******, a leading expert network company based in New York. I am currently working with a client who is conducting a project and needs expertise on Digital Engineering - ***** .

After some research I did regarding the topic, I concluded that you would be a great fit for this project, given your experience.

Please, let me know if you would be willing to share your expertise on this subject through a paid phone consultation. For your input and time, you will be compensated with a fee that you can set yourself. As a reference – the average rate of our consultations is around 400$/hour.

It is essential to note that in no way will you be asked to discuss your current employer nor any kind of confidential information during the phone consultation.

Should you be interested in this subject, I would be more than happy to address any questions regarding the topic on LinkedIn or by phone

Kind Regards
(Sender name)

Why do some people feel the need to prove their stupidity and utter lack of skill in the face of the world?!?!
Yesterday I learned that a sister company is hiring an intern civil engineer to code some application plugins connected to our IS ?!?!? How the fuck do you think he can only understand what the fuck we do?

To put it in context, I'm kind of the CDO of a French medium group (a little cluster of companies), as the group is in the construction industry I'm the CTO for all Computer things. Inside the group, I'm the CTO of the digital factory. So the group IS is a microservice decentralized API REST-based architecture.

Next Monday we'll have a meeting, so I can explain to them why it's a FUCKING STUPID IDEA!!!! The only good thing is that any application programming done outside of the Digital Factory will be handled as an External Company Application, so it's not my problem to secure it, debug it, or simply make it work. And they already know that I'll enforce this ruling!!!

But WHY the fuck do they still think any mother fucker can professionally program!!!!!! Every time I have to deal with them It's horrendous!!!! I had to prove them why using a not encrypted external drive for a high security mission It's stupid!!!, and why having the same password for every account is FUCKING STUPID!!!

The most ridiculous part is they have a guy who really believe he has some IT skills!! Saying things like "SVN" it's a today tool (WTF), firewall are useless, etc....

WHY!!!! WHY!!!!

I really like the concept of a "hackerspace" but they are far away from my flat and after working all day I don't really wanna travel across the city for hours to try things for an hour or two because I need to catch the train on time to get at least a bit of sleep.

I'm thinking of a "digital hackerspace" where ppl can "meet" and write code or build something(?). Does something like this exist?

If it doesn't I'd really like to build that kind of thing because I'd say I'm not the only person thinking like that 😅

People who use weak passwords are the digital equivalent to anti-vaxxers. Not only are they putting themselves at risk, but they can effect everyone else who has a lick of common sense.

SHORT: BEST 1st WEB DEV LANGUAGE? READ FOR CONTEXT

So my gf became even more of the girl of my dreams last night by confiding to me she wanted to learn web development like actually learn it and do freelance work, this evolved from just wanting to start a blog. (We have a dream of being digital nomads and traveling the world together)

Now I am but a simple innocent C++ dev not trying to start a flame war buuuutttt... What web language would be most beneficial for her to learn as her first main language? And Why?

She's done some simple html is the past (not myspace), she took a web design class in high school years ago. Thank you for all the help! 🖒

damn

even hacktoberfest is going woke this year

no more t-shirts

some stupid digital pin probably that can forever spew out CO2 somewhere on some server farm in iceland or something

to be clear, i'm not a climate change denyer. but it stupid shit like this as to why we can't have nice things. all the incentives are backwards. change my mind

would have been the 5th shirt too... 😉

i'll probably print myself one anyway

Finally able to complete my almost-aorus build!

Ryzen 5 3600
Gigabyte Aorus B450 Pro Wifi
Team Delta 2x16gb 3600mhz
Western Digital 2tb 3.5
Crucial P2 500gb NVME m.2
Gigabyte Aorus RX 5700 XT 8gb
Aorus GP AC300G Tempered Case
Gigabyte Aorus P850w 80 gold
Gigabyte Aorus Cooler 360
ID Cooling XF 12025 RGB Trio
Viewsonic XG2405 24in IPS 144hz 1ms

Cables are not managed yet, sorry. And I like listening to Blankpink 😋

Fucking fuckwits! I sent a digital contract to sign online via hellobonsai.com. The client said he hadnt recieved it. After resending and pestering him he finally signed it, but not in the way a normal person would. He printed it out, all of it, signed it, scanned it and generated a pdf to which he emailed back to me. It would have taken 3 seconds to digitally sign it. I wondered if his secretary had done all the scanning and shit.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

So I joined this digital agency where they are working on this ad-tech product and right from day one, I was given a task to implement a new feature on the product. No knowledge transfer. No onboarding process. So, I had given estimation about the task and apparently it took longer than expected. But what were they expecting. Anyways, my manager asked me to have a KT with the only senior guy that has been working there for last couple of years. And man, since the KT started, it's been hell for me. The guy is such an asshole and won't even give me a basic walkthrough of the system. He only took one call and that ended within 30 minutes. On top of that he went ahead and told the product manager that I am not keeping up and am not ready. And my product manager apparently wants me to take his place within a month. It's been only two months since I joined. I have already pushed two major features, tried to understand the system architecture, codebase and everything on my own. On top of that, I got yelled at by that senior dev in a meeting about a PR. I was quite confident guy when I joined and now I am anxious everyday at work and i am scared that they'll let me go because I won't be able to meet their unrealistic expectations. I also can't stand this senior dev and he can't stand me which makes me really demotivated to work. I have anxiety issues and now I am thinking if I stay, I am gonna mess up big time and they'll fire me or worse. I might break something in production because I didn't have proper onboarding.

!(pure)dev
This might sound like generalisation but the amount of paper people in France (atleast Paris) waste uneccesarily is shocking. It disturbs me to see some jackass printing pages after pages of garbage in the office each time they want to check if a printer is working as expected. Or the professors using huge white sheets to explain shit when the white board is right fucking behind them (to add to it, they use only one side of the sheet). Or literally every single store handing out paper receipts for a 1€ chocolate I buy. Why isn't their a digital alternative? Why are people so not bothered about how much they're fucking the planet just coz they have enough resources to live happily?

If machines ever overthrow humanity, I'm sure they'll do a better job in tidying up everything.

German public service digitization. Websites celebrating the new "digital functionality" of the federal ID card, but if you need to prolong the actual card, you have to visit a public administration center in person, no way to prove your existing valid ID in a zoom meeting although that's de-facto standard accepted even when opening a bank account, plus they have all of my data so they should know I have a valid ID and they could just send the new one to my postal address.
So I have to appear in person at their offices, so I need an appointment, but in times of covid pandemic, appointments are rare and only offered on a day-to-day basis in my hometown, that's why I have to visit their online appointment web app at 7 a.m. in the morning to grab one of the few appointments when they are released.
Don't tempt me to write a script that squats all the other appointment slots to resell at the highest prices...

Situation reminds of the times when it was even harder to get a vaccination against covid, and the media kept reporting about the minority that refused to get vaxxed, so they didn't have to admit there wasn't enough vaccine anyway.

This rant is not about politics, it's about the failure of bureaucracy, but if it was about politics, I would just quote Rezo that it shows who had governed this state for sixteen years.

When I rant about German internet connectivity, people usually reply that the web is much better in Taipeh, Bangalore or Guadalajara, so I can still have some hope that it's not all of the world that's totally lost.

So give me some hope, folks.

The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.

The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.

Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.

Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.

Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.

Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.

In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.

I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.

What is a life form?
How exactly a life started on earth? Was it brought from outer space?
Are there any life forms there out of earth?
Can a life form be based not on protein but on some other chemicals?
How exactly the very first life form of the universe was created?
Can digital things be life forms?
Can ideas and concepts be life forms? Can they exists without a medium? If so, where exactly are they stored?
Can we create living things?

Those questions are keeping me up at night

I really hate the term fullstack developer. Just call it what it really is. Javascript react developer who dabbles in node occasionally.

If you don't have some knowledge of tuning a database, tuning your runtime, handling issues with networks and latency in your code, dealing with issues with message queues, writing abstraction layers for the database, etc. you aren't a backend developer, sorry to say.

Being able to reason about a mean stack running on digital ocean doesn't not make you proficient in the backend.

StackOverflow feels like a digital version of McDonald's, Costa's, or Weatherspoons - it's hard not to bump into one, and if you're hungry you won't go an extra mile to find something decent.

So I’ve asked my Unis infrastructure guys via mail, why we don’t use the digital id with our phone additional to our RFID Badge.

One of those (maybe a moron, I don’t judge yet, see question below) replies, that they would need to replace all readers “as current ones rely on RFID scanning chips” and they are not sure how US Unis implemented it.

Thing is, that when I hold my iPhone SE 2020 next to the reader, my phone shows my credit card to use for Apple Pay.
Doesn’t that mean, that they use compatible RFID frequencies ?
I’m not an iOS dev, so maybe someone can help me out. Any info appreciated!

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

Would like to try realizing a game idea or two I've had a while ago.
I'd also like to put some more work into that webapp I built last year.
Then there's a couple old projects that never went anywhere but I could polish them up a bit.
Kinda want to learn some new languages and CG and digital art and finish 7 online courses I bought years ago.

There's just not enough time in the day.

OH: We have a DevOps team that does neither Dev nor Ops. An SRE team that are not engineers and a head of SW Dev who said with a straight face today that our Oracle multi-monolithification over the past 3 years was a ‘Digital Transformation'.

It’s from a job posting for a fully remote position. You have to invest your time for a homework task, 2 interviews a week apart, and only then you get the priviledge to know the salary range.
Your compensation is based on your location, even though it’s a remote job with digital nomad wibes.
Guys, you are not Google to pull this off.

Android 12, stop telling me every other day which app has permission to access my location in the background. I know, I gave permission, and I want to keep the setting "Allow all the time". Where's the "don't ask again" option?
And why does this happen for an app released by the German federal government (about once a week) but never, ever for your shitty Google Maps that always seems to know where I've been (at least if don't leave my phone at home, which is hard to do in times when you have to show your digital proof of vaccination everywhere yo go). Fucking Android, fuck the Android 12 clunkiness (inspired by Apple's iOS?) and fuck the fucking notifications. This is my phone, I paid for it, I own it, I want to turn off this bullshit. Wait, Google, once I find time to get back to LineageOS/Cyanogenmod you will never see a trace of my digital existence again. Oh, and fuck your "digital wellbeing" as well! At least you let me turn that off. Yes, I know, I am not grateful, but that's what devrant is for, isn't it? Fuck you, Google!

More then ten years ago, as a student, I made a website as freelance job. Customer was a friend of my father, old, artist, digital illiterate af. Money was okay when I had none but as you can imagine not much actually.
Guy has no idea about domains, hosting etc. So to keep things simple I hosted the site on my webspace (which i needed anyway back than), I made it with Wordpress because it looked that he wants to add content from time to time.
He never did and surely forgot about the possibility.
I still host the site, although it's the only thing on the webspace meanwhile. When it goes down, guy calls me, so he actually is aware of his site. I don't mind the 1.5€ a month much, but Hoster or fucking Wordpress needs attention from time to time and this is annoying. Updates and stuff. Surely I could turn it into a static site, to minimize the work, but this would take effort too.
I could (and should) charge him, but i am much to expensive nowadays. Just cancel the site? I feel sorry for the guy and that's It's somehow my fault that i didn't inform him properly that a site need maintenance as well. I was not so much of a beginner anymore back than and wonder why i did this mistake, maybe i had just other stuff in my mind (girls most likely) and wanted to finish it asap or I don't know.
So i sit here an update Wordpress once more wondering if my decade old templates will still work.

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

- Remake all my hacky products and finally make those adjustments and improvements I always forget about. (A shitton of maintenance that I always YOLO my way through)
- Potentially finally give digital drawing and design a go as a second career (if money permits, also)
- Move to middle of Asia, dead center of Kazakhstan or wherever there are gypsy tribes, learn their language and teach their kids about computers and robots and make a lot of products that'd make a gypsy's life easier. Or rather, create a modern gypsy life that does not override their traditional ways, rather integrates with it. (This is one of my dreams, which I know will never come true. Gypsies and nomads do settle more and more each year and their culture is basically going extinct. Plus, govts around the world dislike them greatly)
- Do a lot more research projects in robotics. Literally make everyday robotic items and then sell them. (with a sprinkle of AI/ML, that is)

All the above would also need lots of money and effort tho.

Are you content with your job or always searching for greener pastures?

I'm split inbetween. Current pay is very decent and working conditions are flexible. However, the work itself is not always that great. I find it to be comedically true how "hard workers" don't get promoted or bonuses, they get more work. There has recently been a heavy influx of what I'd like to classify as "shit tickets" since a guy who was the main "shit ticket doer" left the company after being burnt out.

I work with a small-ish digital agency as a BE dev, so I'm mostly dealing with small to medium scale projects built with WordPress/WooCommerce, with often custom API/ERP integrations on top. I'm not a big fan of the stack as a developer but as a contractor I can understand the business reasons why it is used. Part of me wants to find something else, part of me thinks I'm looking for a perfect company that doesn't exist and I should lower my expectations -- I might find better work for sure, but with the same pay and conditions? It seems unlikely at the moment. The company was recently acquired, so I'm hopeful for the future.

Met a girl in an app. She is hot 10/10. Sense of humor is 10/10. Empathy, integrity is 3/10. I’ve realized she is an addict of Marijuana. We’ve been talking for a month and she’s stood me up once. Then went traveling. Says she misses me. Then goes cold. And back and forth. This shit is a fucking headache. Just today she was stoned and telling me its not gonna work, I want kids and marriage and she can’t give me that. She sends me nudes and promises we will meet at the end of the month. This entire fucking thing is an emotional rollercoaster. I don’t feel the same at work. My productivity is suffering. My gut says to block her. And I fucking hate the thought of it but it’s right for my peace of mind and productivity. I just wonder how long I should fight since we have such fun conversations. I’ve lots all trust for her. She’s basically like a permanent fixture of my digital life it seems. And that’s depressing as hell. I’m giving her two weeks to show in my physical life otherwise I’ve set a date in my calendar where I must block. Addiction doesn’t even cut it, I feel addicted to this person. The jokes the laughter, the beauty. It’s torture.

What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?

At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS)  + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)

Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball]