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We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
!dev
A child's mind is fascinating.
I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.
Things were magical, mystical and happy.
I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.
But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.
And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.
I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.
I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.
From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.
When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.
"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".
I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.
My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.
The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.
It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.
Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.
Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.
I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).
I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.
I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.
It was dreamy.
Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.
So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.
I started to get annoyed at the game.
"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"
At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.
Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.
And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.
And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:
I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.
(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).
That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.
A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.
and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid
you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy
you get attached
that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.
Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.
and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts17 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.
3 -
I like developing on windows. Like many people here I got into development at home starting as a hobby when I was in school so there were things I still did on my computer that Linux wasn't really appropriate for.
I've made the jump to Linux in the past but found that it was awkward and annoying when I needed to do something on my windows. And I hate doing Dev out of a VM. So I've just got used to using windows at home.
And honestly, I don't know what's happening to everyone who keeps getting broken Windows updates. I think I've had 2 in living memory.
It's in no way perfect but what is? I don't use Windows servers, just for when I'm at home. -
We have this kettle that says "perfect memory" on the box, so does that mean it has ecc I would hate for a bit flip to occur and it make my tea too hot.
1 -
In highschool we went through something like a malware/phishing prevention course.
It was pretty cool tbh, we spend the whole hour in a virtual environment where you'd see common malware and phishing attempts, but the really fun you could also "hack" other students.
Hacking them means you could cause some things to happen on their "PC". One of those was showing in a captcha on their screen and they had to type a the string of your choosing, before they could access the rest of the "virtual computer" again.
You can probably guess where this is going.
I was the first who had the idea to mix big i and small L and tested it on our teacher, who was also part of this environment and screenshared to the projector.
Thanks to sitting next projection I could see the pixels and I can confirm: same character, Pixel perfect!
I will forever cherish the memory of my the teacher begging me to undo the "hack" and the chaos that followed amongst my peers 😈
Also one of the excersizes was stupid. Click on a phishing mail and enter your credentials in the form. I asked the teacher WTF kind of credentials they even want me to enter to microsooft.cum and they just said "the credentials obviously" so I think they got their karma🖕 -
I hate people who think they are always right.
A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.
Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.
And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.
Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.
This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.
In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.
So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.
Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.3 -
When I was about 10, I used to read these magazines with code listings for programs, and the only things I really understood were these text adventures that I imagined to be of Zork-like quality (gasp!). In reality, it was more like the choose-your-own adventure books of the time (which were actually pretty cool, and had pretty tight memory management). At one time, on a vacation somewhere in the eighties, I got tired of playing in the river with my friends and instead opted to continue writing lines of BASIC in a little paper notebook, inside my parents' car (at 34 degrees C), trying to perfect a storyline about my little brother and his pet dog he got for his most recent birthday, fighting the cat empire etcetera etcetera. Weird looks, good times.
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I'm notoriously bad at Git. By that I mean I REALLY REALLY SUCK AT IT. And I have the curse of short memory and an even shorter ability to retain the how-to, muscle memory knowledge of things if too much time passes.
So, I was staring down the gullet of merging two separate repositories onto my local machine and then pushing the result to a remote server. Not having the benefit of someone else to bounce this off of, and always finding the usual Git docs too dense and obtuse, I turned to ChatGPT to help me sort it out.
Guys, where has this been all of my life? I know it's not perfect and it can make mistakes. I knew that going into it, so I made preparations in case this failed. BUT. IT. WORKED! I feel like it has put me into the Star Trek:TNG universe where I can say "Computer, do the thing." and it does that thing. Here's the prompt I used and which it answered perfectly.
"Play the role of a git coach. I have two git repositories. One is on Bitbucket. The other is on GitHub. The branch named "master" on Bitbucket has the latest code. The branch named "master" on GitHub needs to be updated to what's on the Bitbucket "master" branch. Please write the series of git commands that I will need to accomplish this."9 -
Today's accomplishments:
- Actually got the fuck out of bed this morning
- Fixed the RCA connector on the CRT I got from a friend (I got scared while discharging it but it turned out fine). Basically the metal piece that carries the signal through the connector was bent to hell and sticking out, so I desoldered it, bent it right again, put it in, and resoldered it.
- Went to taco bell twice within 8 hours
- Sat and talked with a couple friends for like 2 hours after school
- Met and briefly talked to a very cute girl that my friend introduced me to. She has colored hair (I REALLY like colored hair) and she vapes. So perfect girl for me.
- FINALLY FUCKING STARTED LAUNDRY
Things I didn't accomplish today:
- Working on the web page I posted about this morning
- Getting to school on time (ONE DAY I WILL)
- Staying in school once I was actually there (left during my 6th period to go to taco bell the second time, first time today was in the morning after I was already late to school cause they won't let me into class if I'm late)
- Fixing the boot errors on my laptop (sometimes when I boot it fucking freezes after flushing the journal, I've been trying to figure it out for a while but I have no fucking clue)
- Figuring out why my PS2 doesn't want to recognize controllers or memory cards (got a new motherboard and now it just isn't recognizing the controller/memory card, I feel like some of the traces broke at some point while it was apart??)1 -
So, in opengl 4.x, there are no primitives for circle, and the only ways to draw an almost perfect circle are following
Draw a triangle fan and fk up your memory for a circle
Draw a rectangle and use the fragment shader and distance equation to discard the bit that is not used
But you will need to add an if statement and potentially increase the frame time (from what i have heard)
And it will be more complicated than just using a triangle fan14 -
Not actually dev-related, but the news of Mira Furlan's passing hit me like a ton of bricks. Two tons even. Babylon 5 is to this day my favorite creative anything. It's just perfect to me, and a huge part of why is her work as Delenn. Everything I've ever heard about her indicates she was as awesome in real life as she was on B5 and 65 is way too young for anyone to die, period. There is, of course, sadly a lot of death around us these days, and all of it stings, but some of them sting a bit more. But, I think it's a testament to her work how devastated I feel about losing someone I never actually knew. R.I.P. Mira Furlan... to absent friends, in memory still bright :(2
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!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one
Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).
Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.2 -
I still a memory, i was to install a distro of linux and got zorin, the installation perfect but not connect to internet cause the driver to red card not found, i search in my smartphone and say the apt-get needs internet to download, yes my life is a circle.
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