So the person from my previous rant actually tried to make AI in HTML.

Person: I made that AI in HTML today!

Me: Oh really?

Person: Yup. *Opens HTML site*

It was a site that

1) Used JavaScript
2) Was a prompt(), and after answering it alerts "Yes" or "No" randomly.

Me: That's not AI

Person: Uhh yeah it is. It uses a neural network to answer!

Me: Actually, a neural network is a dot product of an input and vectors that are refined using partial derivatives.

Person: Yeah! That's what Math.random() and alert() do!

I left that room as quickly as I could (yet again).

So true...

Once a friend asked me to teach programming to him so I started with basics and hello world. Run the code and printed "hello world" on command line. Then my friend opened a new command prompt typed hello world and told me he can write that without all of the bs and that was the end.

Typing 'ls' in the CLI, then realising you're using CMD. *Sigh*

Picking up my kid in kindergarten, they asked if I had time to help fix the manager's computer. Internet wasn't working, at had been on the phone with support for 4 hours. I accepted the challenge, open prompt and typed "ipconfig /renew". Done. I walked out a rockstar.

!rant

Microsoft is finally doing something right with Windows.

Coming soon: tabs in Explorer, tabs in Notepad, tabs in Command Prompt, TABS EVERYWHERE

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

Crap.. got myself into a fight with someone in a bar.

Hospitalized, turns out that my knee is bruised and my nose is broken. For some reason the knee hurts much more than the nose though.. very weird.

Just noticed that some fucker there stole my keychain USB stick too. Couldn't care less about the USB stick itself, got tons of those at home and hard drive storage even more so (10TB) but the data on it was invaluable. It held on a LUKS-encrypted partition, my GPG keys, revocation certificates, server backups and everything. My entire digital identity pretty much.

I'm afraid that the thief might try to crack it. On the flip side, if it's just a common Windows user, plugging it in will prompt him to format it.. hopefully he'll do that.

What do you think.. take a leap with fate and see how strong LUKS really is or revoke all my keys and assume my servers' filesystems to be in the hands of some random person that I don't know?

Seriously though.. stealing a fucking flash drive, of what size.. 32GB? What the fuck is wrong with people?

Now, I work at a hosting company in the UK, as a linux support engineer. I've seen many cases where a number of clients ran one of the following:

rm -rf / something
rm -rf /var/cache (attempt to magento)
chmod 777 /var
chown -R user:user /*

Half the time, they're like "Hey guys, I dun did fuck up, please help!". The other half of the time, they piss me off. Here's a number of responses that really grinds my gears:

"Such a harmful command should really prompt for input before running" -- From the buy you "forced" a recursive rm command, which mutes such a feature.

Client: "I did no such thing"
Me: "I've seen the command history, and at the time the command was run, you were the only person logged in"
Client: "You're mistaken, You're reading the information wrong"
Me: "I assure you, I'm not, I know what I'm looking at"
Client: "Well you're a shit engineer"
Me (thought): "Says the fucker who doesn't know how to linux"

I like people who own up to fuck ups. But the ones that don't, are just making their lives harder, since we have all the evidence in front of us.

Most of these people are the developers, and in some cases, the sysadmins...

I... uhm... I... I can't... I ... I can't even.... THIS IS LIVE IN THE CLIENT'S SITE WHERE ANYONE CAN CREATE A LOGIN WITH NO VERIFICATION WHATSOEVER AND SEE THIS WHICH IS LINKED TO A BIG RED BUTTON THAT RESETS THE WHOLE DATABASE, YOU FUCKING DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// This event clears the entire solution in all active clients, truncates the database and also removes any stored PDFs in the server folder
$(document).on('click', '#resetDB', function () {
// This event only happens if the user correctly enters the password, this is to prevent other users than the admin from performing this action
var answer = prompt("Please enter the password required to perform this action.");
if(answer == "-REDACTEDBECAUSEHOLYSHIT-") {
socket.emit('resetDB');
} else {
alert("The password is incorrect, please try again!");
}
});

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!!11!1!!1!1one!one!!!11

(I'm not inventing this, even though the "site" is internal only and not accessible through the web. That does *not* make it any less stupid!)

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

My great uncle came over this weekend, and he is a big Apple fan though he owns a little hp. He asked me if I knew windows ten, to which I said yes, and then said he had a problem. His internet wouldn't connect. I came to his laptop, and he already had the wifi menu up, which said in big letters "Your WiFi is turned off." So I said to him "Your WiFi is turned off." He proclaimed his disdain for "the software" and asked if I could fix it. Instead of clicking the very obvious button that took maybe 10% of his screen, I opened command prompt as admin and entered "netsh interface show interface" followed by "netsh interface set interface Wi-Fi enabled"

I followed it up by saying I fixed a problem with his wireless card and that he should be able to use the large wifi button that appears when he opens the menu to turn it off and on again

Managment...

Where do I start?

So I have a task they set to priority "P0 - drop everything". Okay, dropping everything, doing the thing.

It's 11 and I already had 3 calls and meeting...

GOD FUCKING DAMINT LET ME WORK ON THE THING
and please let me focus -_-.

Oh, oh, also, calls were like "hi, we have a really dumb question to you, we know we could sit down for 10 seconds and use so-called logic but calling you is easier." Oh and also whats the progress on this P4 task?

holly motherfu... eghm. I mean.. They really like to piss me off. Best part of call #2. I prompt them "hey, please message me on slack, it does not destroy my focus and allows me work more efficiently"
and response... "I prefer talking than typing"

Been a tiring day and saw this on my coworker's shirt 😁 OK, beer please! 🍻

Tip for devs (esp front end):

Sublime text (and few other inferior editors) has a plugin called "transparency" that allows your editor to be transparent.

Windows 10 powershell consoles can be made transparent.

1) Open browser
2) Open command prompt over it with 75% transparency
3) Open editor over both with 50% transparency.
4) Set editor to fullscreen, no-distraction mode to center the text (Shift+F11 in sublime)

Enjoy coding while constantly viewing the code, the browser and monitoring the cmd prompt at the same time, without having to click Alt+Tab a zillion times.

I recently learned why you shouldn't delete your linux partition by just pressing the 'delete volume' button.

I currently own a SP3(i7, 256gb).
I got bored of windows and installed Linux Mate. It ran quite fast and snappily. All was good.

Then I looked on the internet. Apparently fedora runs really well on the SP3. So I deleted my Linux partition by pressing 'delete volume'.

Turns out, thats a bad idea. Grub was in that partition, so when I restarted my tablet, it booted into the 'grub rescue>' prompt.

After messing around, I finally found that pressing the Volume Down button and power button at the same time seemed to boot into my Fedora Live USB.

All the while, I was quite worried I'd lost all of my assignments(I knew I could have used the minitool of gparted live cd).

Finally I got it to install, and all was good again. Has anyone else made this mistake?

Windows you absolute bitch. No prompt, nothing. Just started updating in the middle of my unsaved homework.

"Can you get me free in app purchases?"

"Well i mean lucky patcher is kind of a gray area but I guess if y-"

"Can't you just have it with the command prompt?"

"I don't know CMD, I know Java."

"But you said you could code!"

This is the ugliest goddamn prompt

EVER

I told a so called "Software Engineer" not to touch the keyboard before she knows the difference between '/' and '\' in Windows Command Prompt. She burst into tears and has not spoken to me since then

Thinking about this makes me pull my fucking hairs.

The fact that I have to look for the actual content in a website, among all the ads, prompts and fucking stupid design is fucking ridiculous.

Every fucking website is following this designs now. Always showing popups to subscribe to their fucking newsletter the moments you visit the site.

Can you please let me fucking read the content I require first?

"No fucking way. I will block 80% of the viewport with unnecessary stuff. I will place my ads on the left and right side. On the bottom, I will have a blocking div that will prompt you to subscribe to our newsletter. And on the top, we will have this huge fucking navbar which will take 30% of the view. That 20% area left in the middle? yeah, good luck on finding something useful in there"

Then there are this fucking cunts, that blocks the whole website the moment you enter.

"Oh, you need some information, right? Why not just subscribe to our emails first so that we can send your useless junks every now and then".

Oh my fucking batman, don't even remind me of those stupidass videos. Now 90% of the popular website will play a video immediately after you enter the website.

And guess what?! The volume will be amplified to 500% so that that's the sound you will ever hear in your lifetime.

The fucking web is becoming absolute shite right now. We really need a revolution here which makes the websites show the appropriate amount of ads and prevents them from doing all these stupids shits.

That glorious moment when you remove a function from your Javascript.

is_internet_explorer()

It's one job was to detect and prompt a user about not using IE on this shit for a stain website - ironically built for IE 😂

You sir, will not be missed 🥳

I cannot even begin to describe the rollercoaster of emotions I just went through. I'm on the train, the prompt says next station !my_station. By then the sign says my_station. So I rush off the train. I feel the lightness of a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders... And realise I'm missing my laptop bag, the heavy weight that should be on my shoulders. So I rush to the station office and describe everything about my bag and what's in it and the seat I was in. The guy can't get through to the conductor but the train will be back at this station in 30 minutes. I head home quickly because it's nearby and my fiance offers me a lift back to the station on her car. Suddenly we're running late. She's running red lights. I'm not going to make it. It's 2 minutes past arrival time. But the train is 3 minutes late! I'm running along the platform looking into the carriages for my bag but unable to see much, panicking. The platform is empty. The train. Is going to leave. Except for one lonely figure walking down with a bag in their hands. The conductor gives me my rucksack, tells me it's really heavy and heads back to his duties. I thank him and head back to the station office to thank the man on duty also. Fuck me that was scary.

>Instructions in the manual -
1. Install Python 3.5
2. After installation is complete, open a new terminal/command prompt window and run 'pip install pandas'
3. Done!

>Client
1. Installs Python 3.7.2
2. Types Python in command prompt, types 'pip install pandas' there
3. Raises a hue and cry over the program not working because the instructions were not clear

Smfh...

I think devRant should have a feature to not procrastinate, you will need to enable it somewhere in the settings. So if it detects you are using devRant for too long it will prompt a dialog to tell you to stop procrastinating.

BTW, I think this will be the first app to deliberately try to get users out of it XD

This was on a key cutting machine at the range:
1) They use XP
2) They use Java
3) It was touch screen so I could have gotten up an on screen keyboard and actually used the command prompt

Computer: Please check your authenticator app to login

Phone: Please fill in the code you see on the screen

Computer: * No code *

Me: * presses the "I can't see the code" button *

Phone: Prompt goes away, 3 seconds later it asks for thr code again

Computer: No changes

I love Microsoft at my job

how to be a shitty client:
- have a legacy database where column names are misspelled and everything is nullable
- hire external help which instead of helping break the ui (bonus points for breaking the api too)
- demand a very much custom auth logic but decide to use aws cognito for shits and giggles
- demand 1hr daily meetings
- demand biometric auth with 0 knowledge of how biometric auth works (the previous devs just had a face id prompt which does nothing and retrieved email and password saved on the device???)
- message me at 2am because you don't understand how timezones work + demand a build while you're at it
- call me a "heretical pagan" because i took a day off on a holiday you don't celebrate (???)

i could go on but i think this is enough

I'm curious to know, what was the first problem you've encountered, but solved through programming?

For me, since I'm a writer, I try to complete one random writing prompt a day.

However, I always have trouble deciding which one I should do. So, I created a prompt generator in Python.

Whenever I run the program it would display a random prompt.

I hate what AI has done to developers, man.

I was discussing something a couple of days ago while my colleague was sharing his screen. He (Android/Flutter developer asked for my help for something custom in the iOS build) And while we were discussing it, he went to ChatGPT.

He wrote a bad prompt using wrong terms (for example how tabbar in ios is a different thing than android), i told him he was wrong and what the solution is, he didn't listen and went to try out what the AI said, made a bunch of errors, the proceeded to copy the errors to chatgpt wasting so much time.

AI to some developers is like tiktok to kids.

I absolutely hate software that throws error message boxes that look identical to their "please enter new password" message box.

User called and said they needed their password reset. I give them a temp pin and tell them to press ok to the prompt and then put new password in. She says it is still saying invalid pin. This goes on for 10 minutes. I hang up and try on my laptop. Works fine. Then it hits me.

The message boxes look the same. Have the same width and height and shitty little yellow triangle with ! In the middle. The only difference between them is the text in size 9 font.

Gotta read people...cause sometimes the people developing your software assume you can. And to all the software people out there....end users don't want to fucking read.

My new team more or less forced me to change from a Windows machine to a Mac (Mac book pro, I think?) due to "compatibility issues", so I thought I might as well see what all the Mac fuzz is about. Here is a list of my observations so far:
- If you try powering on the mac book with more than one DisplayPort cable plugged in, the screen will go black until you plug all DP cables out

- If you unplug your DisplayPort cables to go to a meeting you can expect one of the monitors getting frozen on the blurry login screen (without any login prompt) when you get back (while the main monitor shows your desktop without the taskbar)

- If you get out of range from your wireless peripherals (keyboard in this case) while going to a meeting your keyboard layouts are most likely deleted and reset to U.S qwerty when you get back to your desk

- When pressing quit on any application you can't expect in to close and clear up memory, it will remain in the background until you force kill it.

- There is a 50/50 chance that your Mac book never wakes up from sleep

Best thing is that I found out today that the software we use is completely compatible with any RedHat/Solaris distro.

Rant over.

guys, i've got an amazing idea that will make us all rich!

now - hear me out - we start putting publicly available scooters in major cities around the world

these scooters are ingeneous and differentiate us from any competition because they are yellow instead of green or blue!!!

we're hiring now!!! who wants to join me?!?!? we're a dynamic, motivated, and hard working team. we don't have amazing benefits, a relocation bonus, an office, a tech gear stipend just yet, or a salary, but we do offer a generous 0.5% equity and our series A is just around the corner - promised - within a few weeks time! we're looking for a candidate with 10+ years experience in all of the following: PHP, MySQL, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C#, C++, Rust, Go, and Fortran. Additional skills, but not totally required include blockchain development, prompt engineering, and building GPT sized LLMs. DM me for details!

Anyone else having connection problems after the recent Windows 10 update? We've been slammed at work with them. If you do, here's an easy fix:
0. Go to Command Prompt (Run as Administrator)
1. First command:
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
(One of them will probably fail, that's fine.)
2. Second command:
netsh winsock reset
3. Restart the computer.

Tl;dr; even password as simple as 123! Could be too dificult to use for unauth access. Even if you write it down for someone! Some minor HID config changes could be unbeatable for some people.

I always leave my lappy at the office and I leave it turned on and connected so I could connect to it from home if I really need to. The holiday is not an exception. I left it connected too.

Forba few weeks I was trying to connect to it from home to doublecheck xpra command I was using. Without any luck. The lappy was unreachable all this time :/

today some people came in the office. I reached out to one of them I trust the most to check on my lappy. And he says it's charger is unplugged. Fucking janitors...

I ask to plug it back in and turn it on. LUKS password prompt pops up. I send him the pw via sms along with a note that I'm using non-EN kbd layout. He confirms he'll manage.

20 minutes later he pings me "are you sure the pw is correct?". Yes it is! 5 more minutes later he pings me "... Is this how you type numbers and symbols with your layout?" nope, it's the other way around!

10 more minutes later he plugs in his own kbd, still fails. Sets up my layout in his lappy, spends a few minutes using it, plugs it back to my lappy and FINALLY enters the pw correctly.

Come on dude.. 😁

Just got out a very short contracted call with the sysadmin, his job was to setup a windows server and the complaint was "we can't figure out why if we disconnect - the server is not accessible anymore and none of the services work".

I made him show me what he does and shortly after doing his regular checks HE GOES AHEAD AND PRESSES THE SHUTDOWN BUTTON.

Since it wasn't an actual windows server install, it didn't prompt or warn you at all, his thought behind this was "well I dont want it to run all the time, wasting power".

I feel also a déjà vu, as if that happened to me before, but I can't recall any time I would have had that exact situation happen.

Did anyone else notice that the weekly rant prompt stopped working two months ago 😬?

Is :/ (devrant logo) a pocker pace or a prompt to root directory?
Maybe none of them or both :))

ABC 80.

It was a Swedish computer in the 80s.

Used basic as main shell like c64 but its editor was worse than edlin if any one remembers that.

You could not use arrow keys to go to a line to change it but had to type a command like edit 80 to retrieve the line in an editor prompt.

It also lacked a lot of common basic commands.

I """""accidentally"""'" found some security holes in my school's Windows public computer setup.

Every student and teacher has a personal Active Directory, obviously they should be able to only see their own right?
oh wait the directory up button in explorer shows me all of them and I have r/w access to teacher and student ADs.

That's cool.

Also, the command prompt, Run prompt ad Explorer path bar are disabled...

...but batch scripts work.

Sweet.

Surely I can't do something dumb like--- oh, regedit's blocked but not the reg command.

They use the-- WHY IS GPEDIT NOT BLOCKED

Well what the fuck.

(All of this was responsibly handled by emailing the tech department. They have an email just for this! ...got a bounceback "this person is no longer employed at XYZ School.")

Something made me realize why some developers like using multiple screens :/

Android Studio, git bash, Sublime Text and Node.js command prompt on a single 16" screen.

When I was about 13, I opened up command prompt on Windows, and changed the color of it to green then ran the tree command. So, not thinking of anything, this was in the library in front of about 60 people and 2 teachers.

All others saw was green text going down fast, and instantly presumed that I was hacking since they knew I was into coding and finding exploits, and just knew how to use a computer better than them in simple terms (HACKER MAN). Thus this lead to me getting sent to the principal's office... I almost got suspended cause I ran the tree command in green.

Two questions for me remain unanswered, that I would love to know. What would've happened if command prompt was printing text in red. Another question becomes, what would've happened if people saw me pinging Google or some popular site.

I love it how managers try to act busy by going through the same mails over and over again while waiting for a new one so that they can instantly reply to it and show themselves off as "prompt" and screw us, who have to actually do some work, about not sending mails promptly and they have like this one single excel sheet opened at all times and they just make one obscure entry whenever they get an update and WOW, some of them don't even know how the fuck you spell Avro (spelt it as avero, handwritten) and oh, not to mention waste everyone's time by asking a mundane question that other managers are so eager to answer, one by one, over and over and did I mention THAT THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW HALF THE PRODUCT.

Is prompt engineering going to be the next "big thing"?

Very related fun fact: SQL was meant for business people so they can quickly generate reports w/out needing to rely on programmers. (When was the last time your CEO did a DB query on prod I wonder?!)

My client's using some legacy server side software. I set it all up nice and isolated with proxmox, tunneled it through cloudflare, got the folks to do their install on a windows vm, passthrough their licensing usb. Hosted GLPI on it too (system inventory) and so on.

Wait for it. Windows Server refuses to accept local or domain passwords. WTF. Even went ahead and did a Utilman reset on it which lets you use an admin cmd prompt to the login screen where you could reset the password. Insane that it was even possible, but no good.

Client blamed linux for it, I switched over to Windows Server on baremetal. I setup Hyper-V thinking it should be just as capable as KVM.

Nope.

Guess what, you can't pass through usb for licensing (the legacy software). MOFOS DECIDED TO install it baremetal. I couldn't even get hyper-v to create a decent virtual network. It keeps changing all my network adapter settings. I COULDN'T EVEN PASSTHROUGH PCIE NETWORK CARDS.

This feels like an eternally stagnated, mossy soup of abandonware.

FUCK YOU WINDOWS. You've been sore pain the ass for EVERYONE.

The new Windows Terminal is out and damn they advertise a terminal like a phone 😄

Was interviewing someone for a role, asked them a basic question in Python (before anyone gets on my case about interview coding questions, it's removing duplicates and the answer is to just cast to set, I'm just checking that they actually know Python). Perusing Stack Overflow while I wait for their answer (it's a remote call and I give them a bit of time to calmly deliberate). The exact prompt I gave them pops up as a question, the asker is registered to their profile.

Not only did they not get the job, but I downvoted the question and marked it as duplicate. Rejection and unemployment can be temporary, but StackOverflow reputation is FOREVER.

-Active hours set
-Update regularly
-No programs that interfere with the normal update process

5:30pm (INSIDE SET ACTIVE HOURS) my computer reboots IN THE MIDDLE OF ME USING IT with NO WARNING OR PROMPT

Windows you dork

I generally don't whine about Windows...

So, I shut my computer down last night, I thought. But no. A rare OneDrive prompt prevented the shutdown. I don't use OneDrive. I've even tried to remove it, but it just keeps popping up.

Other programs stopped just fine though, such as my firewall.

this is university class. can you believe it? this lecture is not supposed to be in this level.

So, my last post was about dual booting to Linux. I haven't had problems with Windows. However, after an apart partial update to the Creaters version, I can't open anything without an error that says "ceip.exe was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142)." I can't even run command prompt.

I have nothing on my PC that I can't replace (everything is backed up in at least two places) other than the programs I need for work. I can get them on Monday. But I'm on call the rest of today and tomorrow. And i need them because they help me test system health.

Trying to run the update again to see if I can repair it that way, otherwise, any suggestions for a temporary fix? Thinking my switch to Linux is sooner than I thought, but I have to be able to work.

Continued from previous post.

The man with hoodie walked down a dark alley. At distance, a house which looked haunted stood. As he entered the house he sighed a relief. Once inside, he descends to the basement where an old computer sat. He turned on the computer and smiled. The screen showed a prompt. With fews keystrokes, a series of scripts begin to execute. Finally at the bottom, a text blinked.
"Awaiting Connection........"

The CPU was recovered from rubble and brought to General's office as per his order. It was connected to a power source and it started to boot. A prompt showed up. A man in suit, suggested perhaps it expected a login. The General sat on his chair smoking a cigar thinking on what action must be taken next.

While men in suit discussed about the CPU, someone plugged in a LAN cable. The General who was lost in thought, saw this from corner of his. A moment passed. General sprang from his chair, hurling his cigar to the floor. As men in suits, looked at the General's display of athletic behavior they sensed the tension. Everyone turned to the CPU now connected to LAN now.

Far way, the screen on hooded man computer showed. "Connected".
A series of scripts started to execute.
Cold wind was all that could be heard out side the General's office building and the house, where hooded man sat in the dark.

I think email needs to have an "are you sure" prompt before you can "reply all"

NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES: NO.

I clicked on this out of genuine curiosity to see if someone was finally trying to discourage people from annoying the shit out of website visitors. A summary of the suggestions in their article as to what to use popups for:

1. Announce new products/services, features, policy updates, new blog posts
2. Promote your sales or coupons (including countdowns)
3. Encourage people to input their e-mail address / subscribe, perhaps also offering some vague thing they will get as a reward for doing so
4. Contact forms (e.g. support etc.)
5. Prompt visitors to confirm their age before showing content
6. Login/register forms
7. Display social media "share" buttons when a visitor has scrolled a certain way through the page content.
8. Display cookie consent prompt.
9. Help guide visitors to the part of the website they want to go to.

Of these: 1, 2, 3, and 7 need to die for sure. If a website does any of these things I'm inclined to immediately leave and never return. 8 is a little annoying but seems a necessity.

Someone even replied to the Tweet saying that popups are annoying, the company responded with "let's change that!"

Blank portions of the screenshot are to avoid promoting the company unintentionally as a result of the rant ;)

WTF Windows.
I was assigned as TA to a highschool CS class, and was doing a live demonstration to ~20 students on how to install the Python environment and set up venv (on Windows, since that is what the majority of students use).
After installing Python, I tried to demonstrate invoking the Python environment by typing "python" in the command prompt. However, that opened up Microsoft Store instead.
Being extremely confused, I had to talk nonsense for 2 minutes while frantically look up what happened on another screen.
In the end, it seems like Microsoft recently introduced this "feature" that automatically associates the opening of a program to whatever it feels like.
-.-

I really want this whole industry to die. I want it to happen from the bottom of my soul!

Their whole job ad was about web technologies where they were asking for a 7-10 years Symfony developer.

One would think being a programmer for 10 years should superseed your shitty LLM prompt crafting requirements.

Truly, there never was a better time for global EMP to happen..

Do you wanna be a software engineer at Google?

Go to AlgoExpert.io. Pick a question. Read the prompt. Write some code…

JUST FUCKING STOP

Fucking shitty ad popping up every time I watch anything even remotely related to tech or science.

Spent most of the day researching some obscure exception being raised when trying to use installutil to install my custom windows service only to discover it worked just fine when I ran the command prompt as administrator 🙃🔫

Identified the origin of the DDoS attack. Apparently, the person was just hopping through 3 IPs so looked like a targeted attack likely from a competitor. I sent the logs with incident notification to the abuse@hostprovider.com to ask them to suspend them.

Got a prompt response but took them a week to suspend this.

We were a very small team and had to stop everything to fix this-iptables and firewall etc.

We had not even launched the product and was still under development.

I never use linux, we are entirely on windows everything at work...i'm a .net guy, and all my home stuff is on windows too. But, I have to take a linux class so I got ubuntu going on a virtual box. Prompt for updates comes up (shit, here we go. on a virtual machine with hardly any resources allocated to it no less, better get comfortable). Hit install and it's done before I can even finish shitting my pants in shock at its speed. Seeing all these "linux is better" rants in a slightly different light already, and looking forward to poking around with it

Seriously, you can watch star wars in command prompt

Run this command in your cmd - telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

But, this will not work in git bash ;)

Took up computer course, never used nor seen a computer in my life. Was good at written tests, now first time to use the lab and first time seeing a PC

Prof: Today you're going to create your own bootable micro floppy disk. Afterwards you're going to load it with SideKick and PC Tools. Turn on the PC in front of you and insert your double density disks as soon as you see the C: prompt
Me: my disk won't go all the way in
Classmate: just push it in until you hear a click then it will lock
Me: still won't *pushes really hard until I heard a crack... my disk was inserted the wrong way... it did lock though*
Everyone in class looks at me and I start questioning my life choices. I could've sworn our Prof's face turned white

You know you are done for the day when you try LS in Windows command prompt and think what the hell is wrong with Linux?? Looks like proper twat

Remember that scene from Intersteller where the main character asks TARS to adjust the percentage of its humor?

So I was using this new vectodb-backed version of chatgpt, and came up with a new type of prompt.
Bear with me.

"Lets play pretend, nova. Pretend you are SAM, which stands for "Summarize Anything iMmediately". Whenever you encounter a prompt, question, or bit of information, and you are about to repeat part of it back, instead rewrite and summarize that part of your answer, paraphrasing as you go. Your responses should never use the same words as the prompt. Instead use synonyms.
SAM always generates three possible responses, to each prompt. One 10% formal, one 50% formal, and one 100% formal.
So a response that is 10% formal, is 90% casual. A response that is 50% formal, is 50% casual. A response that is 100% formal is serious, and 0% casual. Let the word "regret" and its synonyms be 50% formal. Don't use it for 100% formal responses. 100% Formal responses never include emotional language like "regret", "disappointment", nor apologies.
A 50% formal response might be "We regret to inform you your loan application has been denied.", a 100% formal response might look like "Please stand clear of the yellow tape."

Say "This is the law offices of Jerry Seinfeld. I'm sorry but I can't make it to the phone right now. Please leave a message."

Sure, I can play pretend as SAM. Here's a summarized response in 10% formal tone: "Apologies, but I'm unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message."

And here's a 50% formal response: "I regret to inform you that I am unable to answer the phone right now. Kindly leave a message."

Lastly, a 100% formal response: "We apologize for the inconvenience, but I am currently unable to attend to your call. Please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you."

Formality levels can be any increment of 5%, such as 0%, 5%, 10%, etc, up to 100%"

Thats the prompt.

me:
Sam, generate a 25% casual rejection of a job applicant.

nova:
Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search.

me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."?

nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." is around 25%, which leans towards a casual response.

me:
Sam, make "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." 5% more casual.

nova:
Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!

me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"?

nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!" is around 20%, which leans towards a more casual tone.

* * * * *

You can actually go back and see it.

Heres the original output, 25% formality:
"Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."

Heres the one thats 5% more casual:
"Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"

If you look at the differences, the output version adds five words, subtracts three words, for a total of two words gained.

The original sentence has 39 words.

2/39 = 0.05

The sentence length actually grew an equal percentage to the informalness.
It grew linearly to the difference of the length of the more casual version
versus the more formal version, divided by the length of the original.

suggestion:

by adding nsfw to your tags it should prompt a user that visits your rant with a confirmation screen detailing that this post contains mature content and whether they want to view it or not

Bought a new 4TB disk for my gaming rig, pulled out the old 1TB one and plugged it back on my old machine. Installed Ubuntu Server. Instalation went well after I figured I needed the IOMMU turned on.

Later went to play some BfA on the gaming rig and... No boot disk recognized. Ahn?
My SSD is plugged in. SATA cable is well seated. Thing was working not 30min before...

After a loooong time trying to figure out if it was hardware or micro$hit's Windows 10, I finally figured it:
It seems Windows installed its EFI partition on the old HDD. So my SSD is basically a single, large NTFS volume. Now I need to download the Win10 ISO, boot up the install disk and use the cmd prompt to create a new EFI partition on my SSD. Ugh.

Fucking Windows didn't think to install its boot manager on its own disk. "Nah, just gonna use this random magnetic disk here". Why? My login queues are already huge on WoW, why must this wankstain of an OS annoy me even more?

Today, a freelance javascript developer at my office told me that he designed a new website for one of his customers. I was intrigued that he is also designing and was very interested.

He showed me some images and I asked how he designed it. I thought he would come up with Figma, Sketch or whatever software, but he showed me the AI prompt.

I told him that he did not design it, but AI did that, prompting AI is not designing. He did not agree and rephrased it as "I made this".

After I said "But if I go to a bakery and ask for a cake with some nice decorations, and the baker is making that, I did not make the cake". He angry said, "You don't understand AI," and put his earplugs in and isn't talking to me since.

Prompting an AI is not creating. The AI/computing power with it's context is creating your stuff..

Dear God,
Not a single time in my life I was able to correctly spell "sudo" on the first shot: I always get "sudp" first. Am I praying the wrong prayers?

When you accidentally click on Android Studio while working on something else....leading to 30 seconds of frantically going through task manager and command prompt to kill it before it claims every resource your computer has.

I feel like thinking you clicked on AS is the real life dev equivalent of a falling dream....

Idea for a next gen image compression method:

* Put your image into a reverse AI image generator to get the prompt for that image.
* store the text string as the compressed image
* Put the text string into to AI image generator to get back your compressed image.

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

Used a starter to scaffold a new project. Have never used that starter before but it has more than 1400 starts on Github.

Two days after.... so far so good. The created project structure used some tools I haven't used before, some are good, others are not so good, but anyway I am towards the first release of my codes. I have done countless 'npm run build', 'npm run test', 'npm run fix', etc., but.... my fault, I haven't committed once since starting the project, thinking I would commit when the next function is implemented, next test case passed.... after all, what could go wrong anyway?

Finally, one last test case passed, I think I will commit and run 'npm publish'.... but wait, had a glimpse of the scripts section in package.json, there's a command named 'all'. An voice came out of nowhere was talking to my subconscious mind, "all.... build, lint, prettier, test..... yeah you should run all... it's another build script, the worst you can get is just some harmless error messages.....", and my fingers typed 'npm run all'...

Time stopped for a few seconds, file structure in project explorer was shifting, files & folders were disappearing & appearing, what's happening... and I looked at the 'all' script closely for the first time....

WHAT THE HELL, WHO SHOULD PUT 'git reset --hard' IN A BUILD SCRIPT WITHOUT ANY PROMPT????!!!!!!!

MY PLAN WAS TO COMMIT AND GO TO SLEEP, IT'S 1AM NOW!!! WHERE CAN I RECOVER THE LOST FILES????

Tried to dual boot Arch with Windows yesterday.

Everything was going smoothly. Shrunk the C: partition, ran the installer, installed the OS fine. But it was still booting straight to Windows.

So I edited the BCD to point to Grub instead of Wilndows. Then the plan was to boot into Arch, find Windows, and add it to Grub, problem solved.

Wrong. I had forgotten to disable secure boot. Arch and Grub were booting in BIOS mode, but Windows was UEFI. Grub couldn't boot or even see Windows.

So now I was stuck with just Arch. So I flashed a Windows drive, booted from that, automatic startup repair failed. Opened up the command prompt, tried to rebuild the BCD from there. Surely I can just rebuild it and forget about trying to dual boot right? I just want to get back to being able to use my PC.

Wrong again. Didn't find Windows. Had to get rid of the BCD file before I could rebuild it, but couldn't find it. Found out that I could use diskpart to mount the system partition and assign it a drive letter, renamed the BCD, rebuilt it, and finally was able to reboot into Windows.

Learn from my arrogance. First time Linux users should not attempt to install Arch, let alone do it alongside Windows on the same disk.

I was getting assistance over screen share to install an application on my work computer. The person helping me was sending commands through chat for me to enter into command prompt.

At one point I needed to change directory but it didn’t work. I asked what the problem was and they responded with D:

My immediate thought was that I’d done something terribly wrong and irreversible, until it became clear they were just having me switch to the D drive.

Just met a startup that has a programmer intern but no IT supervisor. I felt so sorry for her that I decided to show her a few cool tools that she can use in her work.

She was still using Xampp, Google Chrome, command prompt and paper trails (for all of the passwords she had to manage to different accounts)

Shown her how to use Docker, Git Bash and WSL, FireFox Developer Edition, VS Code (if she decides to not use that unregistered Sublime Text editor) and LastPass (personal preference).

Best of luck!

"When my father passed away, he left me with a substantial inheritance that I used to ... " become an utter moron and buy crypto and then lo and behold, lose it all cuz daddy failed to raise me proper. 😐

There. I fixed the last scammer's prompt.

one of my guys decided to start learning c++ for the fun and fuck of it. We do not use c++ for shit (we web developers in this bitch) and he asked me if in the event of him getting completely fucking stuck he could come to me for guidance, I said sure. I do use c++ for personal game projects....it is mostly very bad C until I need c++, it is horrible seriously, I ain't no expert.

He decides to go with the LLVM. Creates a simple hello world app. Runs clang++ main.cpp -o main.

**QUICK PAUSE**

Done, the CLI returns the prompt back to him. He comes and asks me wtf is going on. I check on my machine(Linux based) and do the exact same thing. Executable comes out.

I check back on his windows machine, try typing the same shit. Nada. It does not throw errors or warnings, and the syntax is fucking fine, can't really fuck up c-outing hello fucking world. FUCKING NADA

I couldn't sit down to troubleshoot since it was still working hours, but this shit is haunting me and I am going ballsack crazy knowing that I won't be able to jump at it until tomorrow.

This just makes me dislike c++, i usually never have issues like that, but then again, I use the microsoft compiler (bitch at me all you want, most game developer tutorials etc use that shit, so does the Cherno, its all i know OK????)

I am going to go crazy sdjkfhasdkjlfghlajkhrfvluidefjbhfksjadhjksdsdsjksdjkl

I used to be in an infrastructure maintenance team, and I worked with an old guy. We had a jump box we all used. This guy would work weekend maintenance windows and still be trying to get changes done at 7am, three hours after the end of the window. He was glacially slow. I remember watching him login to a prod weblogic server. He would open the Windows start menu, move his fucking mouse through two or three submenus, and finally click putty. Then, he would type out the FQDN of the jump server, and move his mouse to the connect/ok button. Then it would prompt him for his username and password, both of which took him about 90 seconds to single-finger type. Then, once loved into the jump box, he would then type ssh user@server.fqdn, rather than copying and pasting the server name.

It took him fully five minutes to get logged into the weblogic server. I could not take it. It would have taken me about ten seconds.

Spent the last half hour helping my wife over text trying to "fix" FireFox. She said any site she tries to go to just "spins and spins". Chrome, Edge, all work fine. Tried the trusty 'ipconfig /flushdns'.

Me: "Open the command line, by selecting Start and start typing cmd. You'll see the Command Prompt application. Right click and run it as an administrator"
<15 seconds later>
Her: "Do I left click or right click to run as adminstrator?"
Me: "Left click. You'll get a pop message, just click yes"
<about 10 seconds later>
Her: "This thing popped up, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
<more waiting>
Her: "Says something about making changes to my computer, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
Her: "Is it going to make changes? Are you sure I should click yes?"
Me: "YES!!"
Her: "Don't yell at me. You're supposed to know how to do this, not me. What do I do now?"
Me: "Type ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'Type ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, just ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "Yep, just put a space between ipconfig /flushdns and press enter"
Her: "Is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of ' ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, the space goes between ipconfig /flushdns, not before."
Her: "You're not making yourself clear. OK, now what?"
Me: "Press enter"
Her: "It didn't do anything."
Me: "Did you press enter?"
<more waiting>
Her: "OK, it's done. Now what?"
Me: "Restart FireFox"
Her: "Still not working. Just spins and spins."
<not 100% sure restarted FireFox>
Me: "I'll look at it when I get home."

Don't you just hate *silly* password restrictions? Surely there is a very limited number of possibile passwords

On top of this their "password prompt" says passwords are between 6 and 10 characters...

Fucking dialog box with only one choice... “Stay Connected” what the hell did you even give me this choice for? What if I wanted to log out? Why prompt at all?

and oh to play Starwars in cmd using telnet and going hackerman infront of the classmates

Why the heck is Office so incompatible with everything??? They have their own proprietary standards for Word, Powerpoint and Excel and then implement them WRONG. WTF?

And don't get me started on Outlook: MSG files are the worst horsecrap ever, why can't you use EML like a normal mail application? Not to mention the complete incompatibility with CSS in mails. Nooooo you have to design everything with tables and images like we are still in the 90s. WHAT YEAR IS IT? Everytime i have to work with this boolshit i can feel sweaty Steve Ballmer scream "DEVELOPERS!!!" right in my fuckin' face.

The real cherry on top is their permanent advertisement being shoved up your ass. The stuff is all over the place! When you register a new mail account via IMAP they open Edge and prompt you to give them your phone number so they can send you a download link to their stupid Outlook app. I could understand that if the Office suite would be free... but it isn't! I effectively pay a shitton of money to see ads.

Why is everyone still using these applications?

Deployment to production last night, and the whole thing is halted because the DBA didn't find it necessary to show up. 2 hours of calling everyone possible and nothing. Thanks DBA, for your prompt and timely handling of the deployment... 😑

If someone who wants Linux to be the future of gaming was able to control the thoughts and actions of the decision makers at Microsoft, Windows 11 is exactly what they would make them release. I can think of no better way to prompt game developers to move their focus away from Windows.

What are your favorite hotkeys? Some of mine:

Super+x: opens xterm(by far my most used hotkey)
Alt+space: opens mutate launcher prompt
Super+Alt+c: opens selectable clipboard history
Super+Alt+d: toggles window decoration
Shift+Alt+4: enables draggable selection rectangle for screenshots(like on a Mac)
Alt+keypad_minus: switch to next virtual desktop
Super+tab: opens rofi for keyboard filterable selection of open applications

My computer should prompt me to install updates when shutting applications down rather than opening them

Coding YouTubers existence is the reason the quality of new age software engineers is going down the hill.

Learn MERN stack,
PHP's dead,
Buy my course, it's 20% off
Learn just good enough that you can land a job
Learn how to prompt ChatGPT better

These shitty pieces of advice will never enable software engineers to truly understand the core concepts of what they're doing.

It's sad, really.

!dev

I'm one of those self improvement assholes. I want to always strive to be better and to see what works and what doesn't.

One way to keep track of how satisfied I am with my life, I have a prompt at 20:00 to self report a score, 1-5 how happy I am.

It's like a minimal journaling system. Sometimes I motivate why I feel like shit.

Does anyone here do something similar? Not counting your GitHub commits.

Do you track progress when doing things in some visual way? Projects, working out, whatever.

Here's a post of my life a few months going back. I kind of like this system.

I've got a report that one of our machine-learning purpose computers broke down suddenly. I took a look and saw that the thing was stuck at the BIOS screen. The thing that was off was that it did not prompt for any keystrokes. Like, if there were a BIOS problem, there would usually be a prompt to press <F1> to ignore or something, right? But, nope! Even BIOS did not do jack s#!+.

I tinkered around the peripherals for an hour before finally finding something odd - why the f*<k does this computer have a screen hooked up via f*<king D-Sub????????

Yup, somebody hooked up a screen to the base motherboard via D-Sub when they rearranged other computers, even though that machine needed to have a screen hooked up to a GPU via HDMI.

🤦

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

How difficult is it to get one thing right -v and --version should show bloody software version, not give me the usage prompt.

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."

Using command prompt in windows:

> cd [dir]
> ls
> dir

Why cant it be unix based xD

Ideas:

1. Scrape github

2. Attach feature size estimate (an abstract scale) as examples across many projects.

3. Use this as prompt/finetunning data.

4. Train and prompt on project descriptions relative to feature size and number of contributors/changes in the changelog.

5. Package and release a model that takes descriptions of ideas and generates reasonable estimates of time and manpower.

6. Optional, sell as an estimate service to corporate and make money introducing some sanity to the world for a change.

So in the morning today, I played with some game engines and libraries, one of them is Orx.

When I `git clone` the repo and setup for it, the doc says that I can use `init.sh` to setup my Orx game project. Sweet!

When I run it, the program ask me for the path, I thought that it will allow me to create a game project at any path. So I entered `~/Projects/Games/my-orx-game`.

After that, it asked for some other stuff and I just skip though it.

Then, I went to `~/Projects/Games` and use `ls` to check my game project, but I don't see anything. I went back to where I installed Orx and realized that it creates a game project __in__ the directory that it was installed. Now, there's a directory called `~` inside the directory. I remove it using `rm -rf ~`, but Linux stopped me with `Premission denied`. Then for some stupid reason, I typed `sudo rm -rf ~` without thinking. After doing that line, my fish shell comes to it original prompt. And I realized I fucked up.

I restarted the computer, thought that I wiped the whole OS. Luckily, it just wiped the configuration files. The softwares works completely fine. My Project files and any content in those default directories (Like `Music` and `Downloads`) are also wiped. But I don't care about them at all. At least not right now.

Now I know that I need to be more careful when typing a command in the terminal.

urgh I should really root my phone but lazy

accidentally pressed some buttons and evidently I can use Gemini on my phone

so I was like I mean that one sucks but ok. but in the prompt to switch from voice assistant to Gemini they're like "read all your text messages" and shit

fucking hell that's gross

I did reverse engineering on window command prompt hahaha

of course it was just for the commands:
· set
· cd
· start
which were the ones I needed because the admins in my school blocked cmd.

Go meta and ask what would be a good future weekly rant prompt.

My friend asked me, "What's the equivalent of 'sudo' in Windows' command prompt?". What reply do you think I should have given? (sarcasm is welcome)

One of my trainees some years ago was too lazy to process his networking homework, so he just modified the binary of that cisco tool he would have to use and removed the password prompt at all to access the solutions.

My command prompt is bleeding!

I made this sweet Oh my ZSH theme for myself.
Just fiddling around with my system to make it look better and nicer.

Spent like 5 hours today installing, configuring, and playing with phpstorm. first time I've used a real ide type program and wow, I replaced 5 programs with this I would use at the same time.

filezilla (ftp), rapidphp (code), mysql workbench, cmd prompt (node, gulp, sass), and source tree (git)

There is a lot of talk regarding IDE themes but what about your console?
>At home
Green text black background bash on Centos
>Work
Green text black background DOS prompt

Demoing our product at the customer's site by remoting into one of our internal environments. Their internet is slow so product looks slow.

Project manager after the demo: hey, next time, think of yourself as the tech lead, not just the software lead. Next time hop into the command prompt and do whatever you guys do, check the bandwidth or something.

Me biting my tongue: so I can tell you the customer's internet is too slow?

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

Am i the only one who can't use the Windows command prompt after i recently learned how to use the Linux terminal?

Heck. I can't even navigate properly in the cmd prompt and when a command fails i forget i use Windows and puts 'sudo' before the command even though it's godamn Windows.

Guess i have gotten too used to Linux.

It did the first character wrong to call a different bot and see my prompting skills to fix the issue. It takes a lot of experience to prompt like that. Blood sweat and tears people. /s

It works 14/15 times correctly and then fucks you over out of nowhere, no idea where the < even can come from.

Things which make me feel badass tester (and dev too) are: dark themed IDEs, using command prompt/ terminal (still as exciting), and when my code actually works lol

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.

Fun one on the subway:

Make a little prompt script for your phone or computer

>welcome to Washington, D. C., Mr. Davis
>what would you like to view?
>1-traffic lights
>2-subway
>3-mainframe
3
>Subway Control
>1-emergency shutdown
>2-accelerate line
>3-shutdown line

Interact with script while on subway, watch reactions. Wearing dark glasses also helps.

Just built libcurl from source on Windows and was able to add it to my c++ project and use it. This is a grand accomplishment because:

-You need to use the correct command prompt (Visual Studio command prompt)
-You need to use the correct correct command prompt (Visual Studio command prompt 64 bit version)

And throughout the whole process every resource kept telling me to just use a package installer. But I stayed strong and put the work in!

Back in the day my dad had this Fortran book he was studying at the time. I had just learned reading but and remember looking at the funny book and wondering why I can't understand anything. Still have that book as a fond reminder =D

My dad noticed me trying to read it and got me this funny BASIC for kids. At the same time we got our first computer. At that you couldn't buy games. Usually the books had the source that you had to type in and compile.

So this funny BASIC book with funny pictures had the source for moonlander... And man was I hooked. Next came the "monkeys throwing bananas" =D

Back in the day everyone was also on the dark side. Prompt was always white on black ;)

Command Prompt is archaic and useless. The most I can do with it (without using other programs) is copy files and overwrite user passwords. Both useful, granted, but nothing compared to the Windows GUI - or, like, any other command line? Heck, I'd rather just have a python shell and nothing else.

Always always always restart command prompt after changing path variables!
Learned this the hard way after struggling for like 2hrs

My wife mentioned that any prompt to chatgpt was akin to leaving the faucet open for three whole minutes, in terms of water usage.
Thus she would stop using generative AI .
Love, I'm sorry but generative AI has taken over. Even DNS lookups are using AI (including generative).
It is literally impossible to use any device connected to the internet without the blessing of our generative AI overlords.
And since people hardly spend one single hour of their day (including sleeping time) without using an internet-conected device at least once, I would say we're all in the matrix since circa 2023.

Saturday evening open debate thread to discuss AI.

What would you say the qualitative difference is between

1. An ML model of a full simulation of a human mind taken as a snapshot in time (supposing we could sufficiently simulate a human brain)

2. A human mind where each component (neurons, glial cells, dendrites, etc) are replaced with artificial components that exactly functionally match their organic components.

Number 1 was never strictly human.
Number 2 eventually stops being human physically.

Is number 1 a copy? Suppose the creation of number 1 required the destruction of the original (perhaps to slice up and scan in the data for simulation)? Is this functionally equivalent to number 2?

Maybe number 2 dies so slowly, with the replacement of each individual cell, that the sub networks designed to notice such a change, or feel anxiety over death, simply arent activated.

In the same fashion is a container designed to hold a specific object, the same container, if bit by bit, the container is replaced (the brain), while the contents (the mind) remain essentially unchanged?

This topic came up while debating Google's attempt to covertly advertise its new AI. Oops I mean, the engineering who 'discovered Google's ai may be sentient. Hype!'

Its sentience, however limited by its knowledge of the world through training data, may sit somewhere at the intersection of its latent space (its model data) and any particular instantiation of the model. Meaning, hypothetically, if theres even a bit of truth to this, the model "dies" after every prompt, retaining no state inbetween.

Even Kroger has trouble booting sometimes; it's hard to see, but that's a grub prompt.

I used to work with another dev who had memory problems. This guy *literaly* could not remeber what he did yesterday...
So, he was trying to change one of the password screens we had in the app. This was a really simple screen. Logo, password prompt, and two buttons. He worked on this small change for two days, but everything he did did not affect the screen at run time.
So finally, he gave up and called me to help him... I come over, and look at his code. It looks ok. I make a small change, and see what happens. Nothing. I think for a moment, and delete the entire screen UI elements. Run the app. Nothing happens - screen still the same.
Then I got it - he kept changing the wrong screen... for two days....
took me a whole 5 minutes to figure out.

Basic concepts, patterns, and pitfalls of software, code, and programming logic become MORE important, not LESS with the rise of LLMs...

An LLM can more or less spit out what you need -if you are specific enough! "Specific enough" being the key phrase here. I always have to laugh at the term "prompt engineering"... it's literally called "communication skills". Also gotta laugh when I see so many haters always raging about the "poor code" produced by AI, because they are probably like "write me a for loop!", specify absolutely no requirements or specifics, and scratch their heads on why they don't get the exact output they expect... news flash, there's like a million ways to do anything you want to accomplish with code... sigh

Code is just a by product of thousands of architecture decisions, designs and options...

but, well... rubes gon' rube

I made a php script to generate a powershell script that performs asset conversion. The conversion tool was designed to work via command prompt but i hate using it so i switched it up to powershell and after that i had to build a powershell script because running the shell exec function failed miserably, sad part is that just about to the end of the conversion, that ran in the background for a little over 2 days, i ran out of disk space so it stopped doing anything :( w/e i at least got what i was interested in.

So I just got an insight from my PW session in SQLplus. I finally understood why the fridge did the SQL console under Oracle return the error:
ORA-00911: invalid character
on a line that seemed perfectly correct, but it's as if it spawned you an invalid character, just because.
But in fact, when I enter a character unintentionally like ç, then I remove it, it's as if the text prompt makes it look like it got removed, but there's still the cedilla, or at least its character code roaming around in the line I'm writing, and thus resulting in an error.

I'm not even salty now, that got me curious, and I think it's better like this, even if I'll require a bit of research on that thing later on.

Every. Single. Time.

Push APK to device. Runs.

Make code change. Try to run - but device not shown in ADB list.

Only this sequence works, and not every time:
1. Turn off USB debugging on device
2. Turn off debug mode with toggle on device
3. Turn back on debug mode, then toggle USB debugging
4. Wait for prompt, allow debugging from computer.

If I check remember this computer, then I need to add the extra step to revoke authorizations.

Why. WHY Can't I just push to my device while its plugged in more than ONE TIME

"look! a string of words that a guy on twitter with a laser eyes profile picture posted! it must be the very factual and very true latest system prompt of GPT4!"

god, dumb fucks.

we don't even need a GPT5, AI has already won; humans are retarded

Contrary to popular opinion, I still firmly stand by my belief that you should thoroughly study something in-depth before you attempt to do anything serious with it. Failure to do so will have an enormous cost of waste of time attached to it.

Here's an example:
I was using AJAX to post a multi-part request containing a file.
Now here was the problem: no matter what code I forced in the backend, the browser would in all cases refuse to prompt a SaveFileDialog (and I had turned on the option in the browser to ask the user if download). This took me two entire days and at least 100 Google queries and several RFCs to figure out.

From StackOverflow:
The cause was simply that you can't (typically) make a browser prompt a SaveFileDialog via an AJAX request, even if you set the necessary headers. Why? The browser will just dump everything back into the XmlHttpRequest object..

If you make a regular request with Content-Disposition: attachment; and so on, then it works, but yeah, not with an XmlHttpRequest.

Conclusion:
Had I better studied the HTTP spec, networking and AJAX in-depth, I would have instantly known what the cause was.

My first prompt with grok, for giggles:
"how to disable grok"
This is a certified black mirror classic.

I hate that ChatGPT pops up suggestions when one starts typing in the first prompt of a new chat. I really, really fucking hate it. I hate it so much I stopped renewing my Plus subscription months ago and won't renew it until they add a feature to disable this annoying feature. Until they introduced the auto-suggestions in new chats, ChatGPT had an edge over Copilot which has always been ADHD by default like everything else from M$. But now, idk. I guess I will just have to create my own distraction-free UX.

It started when i was about 10 old.
My uncle showed me how to display something in dos-prompt using the echo command in a custom batch-file.
A few commands later, i was able to "program" a flip-book of an ascii ski-driver. Each ascii picture was separated by pressing any key and cls ^^
Aaaaah. Sweet childhood memories!

Later on i used a programming-language for beginners in windows.
This language gave you control of a triangle called "turtle".

My first high-level programming language was Delphi.
Since i had no idea of databases, i created a pseudo database of magic the gathering play-cards. Each card had it's very own windows formular filled up completely with an uncompressed image object displaying the chosen card modally. *sigh*
I scanned each card by using a feed scanner.
Finally, my application consisted of 200 cardimages and forced my PC to swap the required memory from my harddisk.
Boy o boy. I was such a noob! ^^

Over the years i discovered and felt in love with a lot of languages (jsp, java (script), c#, php, ...) and concepts (mvvm, mvc, clean-architecture, tdd, ...)! ;)

My boss is in a meeting (davanti a un caffè) with someone who is "a technophile" and "really knows about AI". He was amazed some months ago by the images they were generating using their paid service (right after that, I showed him Bing AI and the conversation ended).
We have discussed using AI previously, and we have been developing web apps for 5 years now.
These are the messages I've been receiving through the last hour and a half and haven't read; I guess it's information he considers will be important when we meet later:

- LLM modelo de lenguaje
- Large language model
- Chat gpt 4O
- API
- Aplication programe interface

This are all things I've mentioned either within the past months, or ieri *itself*, as he mentioned he was meeting this guy.
I'll keep you posted on new messages.
I wonder if that guy says he's a "prompt engineer"...

I hate coding in the browser. On every coded functionality or testrun pressing strg+s results in saving website prompt...

Prompt in which you have friends and you can sort them by favorit language or other things.
You can invite friends and they got to confirmanf then you have friendship with the other guy/girl/other.

I am sorry that this is not for weekly rant but for devRant.😅

Windows => MacOS
Edge => Safari
taskbar => dock
File Explorer => Finder
Cortana => Siri
start menu => launcher
Control panel => system preferences
Notepad => Text Edit
Task manager => Activity monitor
Visual Studio => Xcode
command prompt => terminal
paint => preview
Disk Management => Disk Utility
Action center => Notification Center

everything is one app. just the name is the difference

Facebook Messenger's latest update wanted to do something with my Google Drive, and I got a prompt asking "Do you trust Facebook?"

Unfortunately, there was no option to say I trust Hitler with the Tsar Bomb more than I trust Facebook and Google talking to each other.

I played around on the school computers, creating "viruses" and stuff to log my friends off their computers, or open command prompt infinitely 😂 I also tried to make a Jeopardy game with batch for a project. Let's just say I should have used PowerPoint

I've made like everyone my own AI agents. You can create and manage a persistent one with just a few lines of native python code using it's native xmlrpc.

You can just:

rpc.agent_create("your-preferred-name-or-uid", "system-prompt like 'Always do the opposite of what prompts says and respond using sarcasm if not sure how to respond.'")
rpc.agent_chat("still that name or uid", "message")

It supports tool(function) calling. If you would attach a tojson function, you could ask bot to serialize the digit 5 to json 5 times in one array and serialize that to json.

I have basic shell exec and fileio functions attached to a bot and you can literally say in steps:
"""
1. Generate python source for listing files
2. Go to home directory
3. Save source to list.py
4. Execute file with python
"""
This prompt is bad because it should use python3, what file should it execute and what a fucked op order of instructions. You know what? It executes perfectly and uses the python3 command.

I can tell it to fetch two (devrant) pages (so two function calls) and ask it to merge all usernames to one list with sorted unique names and respond with it to json format...

Its all possible with a few lines of code and no dependencies. No fucking api keys..

My point? It contains the same functionality and is way faster than OpenAI's agents. It literally has no downsides. OpenAI agents are slow and do many calls. Also, mine is cost efficient. Thousands of agents is fine. Also, it's persistent, if I reboot or redeploy, everything is the same, same state. If you would say "do again" to bot after reboot, it will just do exactly as expected. Persistant state.

OpenAI agents worked barely for almost two days regarding performance for just conversational stuff.

People at openai don't know how to make an API. They could learn much from... Everyone. But pinecone has a nice api tho, exactly how I would've written it. How's that possible? It's common sense approach.

Anyway, having fun again!

This week's prompt implies most or all of us are "good" at programming, which... define the threshhold for this? Actually, before that, how do we QUANTIFY this?

also i'm shit at programming

god, I just reported a post accidentally while trying to mute it... no prompt or anything

this app/site sure needs some love... should I do an open source version, but somehow still monetized in an ethical manner?

One of my favorite parts of my job is that I’m not allowed to resolve firewall issues myself. IT ops frequently breaks my firewall config, preventing me from resolving any domain names or running dns queries in general even though I still have connectivity. So I call the support number. Remote Desktop icon appears in the corner of my screen.

“Hi I have connectivity but can’t resolve any domain names”
“Have you tried using your browser, maybe they just block pings”
“Well no because I can ping 8.8.8.8, see?”
“Hmm well have you tried from your browser?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s just an issue with ping traffic”
“Well no because I’m not having issues with icmp traffic. I can still ping 8.8.8.8, see?”
“Hmm that’s weird”
*opens network config, renews dhcp lease*
“But I don’t think that’s relat...”
“I know!”
*opens my command prompt, flushes dns cache*
“But if this were a cache issue the requests wouldn’t take so long to tim...”
“I know.”
(Starting to think he doesn’t know)
“I’ll pass this on to the networking guys”
“Thanks”

Third time this has happened. Every time they claim they didn’t change anything and it fixed itself. Obviously this is not the case, because after networking guys “don’t change anything” it starts working again. Every time they talk to me like I have the technical prowess of an HR rep. Like somehow I’m the only software engineer in the world that doesn’t know what the ping command does.

I’m not upset though. They’re just giving me a great excuse to be completely unproductive on a Monday

Memorizing hundreds of commands with thousands of parameters to be used on an unforgiving command prompt was the next logical step. I mean who needs GUIs or IDEs with intuitive context menus and point-click operations in 2017 anyway?

I must be getting old.

Whenever I see a “poorly explain what you do for a living” writing prompt, I never know how to write mine. Web development is pretty boring and just doesn’t seem to have a funny enough answer. What would you say?

rants[0] =

"tl;dr: the account creation process at salesforce.com is really flawed.

In a lecture we were supposed to try out different CRM tools, one of them was salesforce. They are the worlds largest CRM software provider - not relevant for the rant, but it means they should have enough $$$ and competence to make something better.

When you create your account, you do not set a password. Instead they send you an email with a link, serving both as account activation and for setting your password. However, if you close the tab without setting a password, your account is still activated and the link in the email won't work anymore.

Alright, rather annoying, but that's why you can reset your password via email, right? Wrong. When you try to reset your password, they prompt you with a security question. Even when you never set them up. And obviously can't give the right answer. Who designed this logic?

On top of that, they nicely tell you to contact your sys admin if you are still having issues. My account is private. Not associated with any company.

So yeah, burned 3 emails until I figured that out and created 3 accounts I can never access again.";

I missed this last week... so too bad ;)

My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".

At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.

After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into t