In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

I just updated my website to be GDPR compilant. (hopefully). It was the last one.
I'm so pissed right now. I have invested tens of hours for this FUCKING SHIT. I'm not against privacy regulations - I appreciate them. But this is not the way to enforce them IMO.

Apple's new campus is expected to be in direct violation with the federal building regulations, as it is not up to par with the fire code standards.

The campus has no Windows.

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

I had a manager in a fortune 500 company encourage me to install a web cam with live feed in another team members cube as a prank. Being younger, I trusted him and so figured it would fine and just get a good laugh.

Then another member found the setup and reported it. Turns out, this broke so many company regulations, I could have been fired on the spot. They confiscated my laptop and I got the 3rd degree from my senior director, who told me I was lucky to be a contractor at the time or the situation would have been even worse.

Moral of the story for younger folks in large corporations... don't take everything your higher ups say as gospel. Think for yourself and do your own research if something feels iffy.

WHAT FUCKING PAYMENT PROVIDER SENDS ALL THEIR TECHNICAL STAFF ON VACATION?!?!?

Leaving customer service to tell me to "wait until they get back... In three weeks"

Unbelievable, I'm actually thinking there are laws and regulations about this if you are providing money handling services, but the sheer stupidity in itself!!

Wtf is all this talk of AI regulation all of the sudden? We have barely achieved anything on AI and they already wanna put chaines on it?

Just because people are pussies who are afraid that skynet will develop rape-robots who go around giving std's to everybody they see doenst mean there should be regulations on something thats still in diapers.

ESPECIALLY WHEN ITS PROBABLY GOING TO BE DONE BY FUCKING POLITICIONS WHO PROBABLY THINK AI ONLY MEANS KILLER ROBOTS.

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

I like what I do for a living.

I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.

When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.

I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.

Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.

When scammers want to follow GDPR regulations - the worst SCAM ever 🤦‍♂️

Long story:
I have just received a SMS message, informing me that my phone number is in several marketing databases. It also had a link to the website called stop-sms.pl, where you're supposed to be able to unsubscribe from those lists. At this moment I felt a little bit confused - the SMS seemed suspicious, but on the other hand who doesn't want to get rid of all this SMS crap. So I carefully followed the link to see the website with a form to fill with personal data - phone number included 😆 If that is not enough to realize that this is just a lame scam website, just below the input where you enter the phone number there are Terms and Conditions where it directly states that: "By filling the form you agree that your personal data (name, email, phone number) will be used for marketing purposes." - WTF?!

Who the f... gets fooled by such crap?! 😂😂😂

!devRelated

I personally think that one of the worst things a person can be is a bad driver.

I really hate the driving culture in my city.

This ain't some third world country with no roads and no traffic signs or regulations. We have very very nice roads. Good traffic systems in place. Decent driving speeds and people STILL manage to fuck shit up.

Not one fucking day do I get in my truck without wanting to murdee someone.

I flipped off about 3 people today. One of them started to scream at me. I told the bitch ass motherfucker to do something about it. I was really hoping a motherfucker would.

I really hate these fucking people.

My fucking city is the reason why Trump supporters get off on hating mexicans. How the fuck can I blame them if when driving through such fucking city damn near every fucker on a vehicle drives with 0 regard for others.

Fuck this bullshit man. This is fucking Texas. I have yet to see nicer fucking roads, no fucking excuse really.

I am going to kill someone one of these days. And I will aim poorly...see if that shit hurts more.

Mozilla has announced that it's rolling out changes under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) to all Firefox users worldwide.

According to report of ZDNet: The CCPA (America's privacy legislation) came into effect on January 1, 2020, offering Californian users data-protection rules. Much like Europe's GDPR, the CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information is collected about them and to be able to access it. While the law technically only applies to data processed about residents in California, US. But Mozilla notes it was one of the few companies to endorse CCPA from the outset. Mozilla has now outlined the key change it's made to Firefox, which will ensure CCPA regulations benefit all its users worldwide. The main change it's introducing is allowing users to request that Mozilla deletes Firefox telemetry data stored on its servers. That data doesn't include web history, which Mozilla doesn't collect anyway, but it does include data about how many tabs were opened and browser session lengths. The new control will ship in the next version of Firefox on January 7, which will include a feature to request desktop telemetry data be deleted directly from the browser.

Why is it so fucking hard for people to follow basic rules? FFS you're supposed to stay at home to limit contact between people, that doesn't mean you can play volleyball with your friends or go to the local park! And if you decide to go hiking, choose a place where you'll be alone, not the most popular trails around the city! You're the fucking reason government needs to make new quarantine regulations every day, not this virus, and you deserve no help if you catch it! Fuck you!

It's not "fintech", it's "trying to get around the regulations imposed on banks by pretending you're not a bank" and it's not "insuretech", it's "scam".

!rant Taking the kittens (they’re like 5-6 years old at this point but they’re always going to be kittens to me) to our old vet (45 minute drive from where we currently live) in a couple hours when they don’t like car rides or the vet and when we know they need to get vaccine shots and we’re not allowed to go inside with them. It’s the first time we’ve ever taken them to the vet and not been able to be there with them. 😭 I’m so nervous/anxious/scared for the little guys.

Wish me luck, friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading this far!

Forced choice between two options which both seemingly have irreversible and potentially destructive consequences. Tapping back or outside the modal doesn't dismiss it. No 'Read more' type link for the first option.

Laws and regulations against dark pattern design when?

edit: okay the readmore link is passable but I still want to be grumpy about it.

To my dear friends complaining about GDPR, if companies providing free services in exchange for users data didn't fuck up completely, there wouldn't be any GDPR. In history, regulations always come after people fuck ups, uncle Bob has some nice talks about that.

There's nothing wrong with asking algorithm and data structure questions in an interview if the employer calls for it.

If you're hiring a junior and/or you desperately need workers, then you can lower the bar, but if you want to be picky, then asking them leetcode-tier coding questions is fine.

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH ASKING A SOFTWARE ENGINEER CANDIDATE DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHM QUESTIONS

If they complain that asking ds&a questions is unfair for a position where all they're going to do is shit-tier frontend work, then blacklist them for 10 years.

If people argue that Doctors don't get asked chemistry and biology questions for interviews, tell them it's because medicine is much more regulated than software and that doctors are vetted technically even before they're allowed to go job hunting. Since software doesn't have the same regulations medicine does, employers have to do the technical vetting themselves.

If you think it's unfair to ask software engineering questions to a candidate applying for a software engineering job, then find a different career.

-- Best --
> Submitted my notice of termination for my current job
> Found a new job starting next year
> Can switch from Windows to Linux/MacOS in new job
> Got more time to work on personal projects due to the pandemic

-- Worst --
> Huge amount of software restrictions (current job) almost got several projects at work canceled. Maybe its important to say that the core business of my current workplace is auditing so there are a lot of law regulations which then apply in the softwaredevelopment process.
> New managers that do not have the slightest clue of what they're doing
> Online Teambuilding events
> Absurd amount of segmentation of tools and also different coding guidelines that are used at work. E.g. one team uses jira, another trello, another github issue tracker and so on.

PouchDB.

It promised full-blown CRDT functionality. So I decided to adopt it.

Disappointment number one: you have to use CouchDB, so your data model is under strict regulations now. Okay.

Disappointment number two: absolutely messed up hack required to restrict users from accessing other users’ data, otherwise you have to store all the user data in single collection. Not the most performant solution.

Disappointment number three: pagination is utter mess. Server-side timestamps are utter mess. ANY server-side logic is utter mess.

Just to set it to work, you need PouchDB itself, websocket adapter (otherwise only three simultaneous syncs), auth adapter (doesn’t work via sockets), which came out fucking large pile of bullshit at the frontend.

Disappointment number four, the final one: auth somehow works but it doesn’t set cookie. I don’t know how to get access.

GitHub user named Wohali, number one CouchDB specialist over there, doesn’t know that either.

It also doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox at all.

So, if you want to use PouchDB, bear that in mind:
1. CouchDB only
2. No server-side logic
3. Authorization is a mess
4. Error logs are mess too: “ERROR 83929629 broken pipe” means “out of disk space” in Erlang, the CouchDB language.
5. No hosting solutions. No backup solutions, no infrastructure around that at all. You are tied to bare metal VPS and Ansible.
6. Huge pile of bullshit at frontend. Doesn’t work at Incognito mode, doesn’t work at Firefox.

That moment you are forced to use Windows to develop PHP Stuff and arent allowed to install Linux because of "Company Regulations" (aka Windows only Admins) ...

I just want my beloved Linux Dev Stack here :(

Fucking regulations, can’t play with twilio api.
Waiting for verification of my identity to make a fucking test call to myself.

Wanted to make a proof of concept during weekend, but won’t happen cause some fucking policies.

Fuck you government pigs.
Probably need to wait to fucking Monday. I will forget what I wanted to do till that time.

We are making your life easier all the time in the news, yeah right eat those popups motherfuckers.

Next regulation - government code reviews before push to master and programmer certification, for sure those fuckers are able to do it.

Really considering emigration from Europe right now.
No fucking point to start a business on this continent.
More fucking law please so we would need a lawyer before wiping ass.
Need to watch that southpark episode about security toilet checkout once again.

Ok so riddle me this. The service for an application were required to run to send clients insurance through (as per government regulations) was working fine all day working super fast. Rare but awesome. I get a call one hour prior to the office closing (I don't work weekdays) and I am told that all of a sudden insurance isn't sending.

My mind goes right to this fu**ing process. Sure enough it's stopped on the server. Well shit ok. I click start..... Nothing. I kill it from task manager.... Nothing. "SERVICE CAN'T START"

I'm like ok that's fine let's check event logs.... Nothing. No problem let's just run it not in a service container and see if there's an error. NOPE IT DOESNT LET ME.

Okok so that's cool let's just try reinstalling the app. NOPE CAN'T DO THAT WITHOUT RESTARTING THE WHOLE FUCKING SERVER WHICH BRINGS THE ENTIRE OFFICES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OFFLINE BECAUSE THIS FUCKING APP NEEDS TO BE ON THE SAME GODDAMN SERVER.

Legal Question regarding E-Commerce / Credit Card Payments.

The User sends his Credit Card Information (number/expiration Date/Safety Number) over email to vendor. Vendor types this info from the email into a Credit Card Terminal.

Is this even legal? I thought when listing Credit Card Payment you have to use a PSP (Payment Service Provider) that conforms to the security regulations etc.

Just stumbled upon this
It ain't even clickbait
Regulations might be good, until power hungry gov start asking more and more

God Damn Privacy Regulations

Changes to our privacy policy
We've updated it privacy policy
New terms of service for your account
GDPR

Sigh...if i we're EU citizen it would be for the best, except for those businesses that can't bother to update but I'm not even EU.

Email filter activated!

To those of us who suffer from "Not invented here syndrome", I want you to ask yourself this question. If "reinventing the wheel is so valuable", would you re-implement the entire OSI stack?

No, as it would be a COMPLETE waste of time!!!

In all the layers below your application, several things related to how your code gets presented to your end-user are abstracted away from you. If you are able to accept that completely, why do you feel the need to re-implement every well-understood part of your particular project?

Cars, for example, are mostly made from standardized parts that solve well-understood problems. It then may have a few custom parts that may solve some novel problems to make it stand out from the rest.

Buildings are made completely from standardized parts, with regulations on how they are put together with some room for artistic flare.

If Software wants to be as equally respected as the rest, we need to get to that point.

DONT reinvent the wheel, just use battle-tested parts and just focus on what your project is trying to solve. It will be way more fruitful and fulfilling.

/rant

In my country there is a huge economy deflation.
Like 1 year ago 1USD used to be 1500 pounds.
Nowadays 1USD is more like 7800 pounds.

Wait a second let me explain more into details the whole flow.

There are 3 to 4 prices we are being dealing with:
* Official Bank price that refuse to change the base price: 1500 pounds
* Bank ATM machines that exchange your dollars on a 3900 pounds per usd
* Black market: 7800 pounds managed by random mobile apps that spread rumors
* Foreigners currency: the only way to grab your reach dollars.

Long story short:
Whenever you want to win extra cash, you ask any of your relatives to lend you money from any bank in the world ( foreigners currency), try to ask in black market who is willing to exchange, you meet, you check on any mobile app what's the current price and you do the exchange.

So in order buy USD dollars on a low price, devs build 2 mobile apps one that send a POST request to change the amount in DB and a second one fo retrieve this value.
So whenever he want to buy dollars he change the value to the lowest. And whenever you want to sell the dev raise the amount slowly. So far the government has no regulations over developers why? Because the one behind the forensic are at least 60 to 70 years old more like their informations are dead.

So we struggle.

Shut down the bootcamps. The market is over saturated. Most are just showing YouTube videos anyways as a big chunk of the curriculum. They make people think anyone can code, but you really need ambition and an ability to accept failure when your code doesn’t work (not just memorization skills or a can-do attitude). Even though some states do have regulations, they rely on the public to report any illegal activity. That’s why a lot of scams persist. They’re also making the debt crisis worse with ISAs.

I have legitimately identified an 9 figure (possibly more) market with 1. massive demand, 2. sufficient supply, 3. literally, I kid you not, zero companies in the field. No regulations to speak of.

The overhead is trivial and it is very much a network-effect based market.

No I am not joking. Yes this is real.

What do?

edit: 9 figures not 8. Yes it's that big.

There are literally hunderets, here are a few of them:
- making a movie you watch wearing vr devices, so everything is filmed with 360° cameras and you can walk around
- an app that helps musicians understand complicated rythms
- my online portfolio
- seting up my data derver
- autonomous flight (bigest problems are gov regulations)
- hologram screen

just a thought : the advancement in AI is going to result in a lot of porn and fetishes reaching an even higher audience. comparing the advancements in generations :

gen x :
- porn is limited to magazines and comics
- people are crazy about sex but only in their homes

gen y :
- porn as an industry gets established. a few companies with good money starts hiring people and create porn as content.
- the governments are sceptical and puts lots of regulations in this industry resulting in those japenese sensored porns and porn being shared like drugs in market (secretively)
- only the curious people are able to get access porn with lots of hardwork

gen z/curren5 gen :

- porn as a concept is still a taboo in religions and general public , but government is lineant and does not /could not stop its distribution
- porn accessible to anyone with an internet
- content creation no longer a high investment business, lots of small companies and even individuals become content creators
- rule 34 flourishes resulting in a lot of fetishes . wherever there is an idea, there maybe some content creator making a video, comic or art on that idea.

next gen :

- AI creates realistic porn on any idea. the access to such ai models becomes cheap . thus anyone who is a consumer can become a producer, resulting in even more content generation
- since ai can use non real people to make porn, the stigma around porn reduces and mature content gets more mainstream ( r rated movies getting family friendly ratings)
- rise of hate porn, deep fakes, resulting in either the concept of hate porn getting less audience , or direct decrease of extroverted professions ( no real actors/actresses to shoot movies)

just some thoughts around porn lol

So I get this email from google for my development account about these new general data protection regulations and what they're doing with admob and all that good stuff.

I didn't dive too deep and there's nothing crazy in it but it definitely feels like it's spawned on by this "selling you data to advertisers thing."

We live in such a weird society where it's like outrage after outrage. I've never known anybody who has NOT known that their statistics and data was sold to third party for marketing for EVERYTHING they do on the computer or phone. For a DECADE or longer. It always seemed to be such a second hand thought but now out of nowhere everyone has their panties in a wad for something they ALREADY knew.

Are we like that miserable/bored/no hobbies/unsatisfied with our first world life that we have to just flip out about dumb crap all the time?

!rant (semi-dev)

Just learned the military regulations probably won't prevent me from getting an NFC implant because it's invisible so they don't give a damn!

Oh the adventures and hacking that can be! Think I'm gonna do it.

So I'm looking at getting a drone to do some videography for commercial purposes. I've been researching all the FAA regulations, dos and don'ts, tips for flying, videography, etc. My finger is hovering over the "buy now" button on BestBuy.com.

But, there's an exam you have to take to certify to fly for commercial purposes that, I thought, was supposed to test you on the Part 107 regulations. I pull up a list of sample test questions from the FAA's own website and it has questions on it that, for all intents and purposes, apply only to MANned aircraft, not UNmanned aircraft. Crap like "What airport is located approximately 47 (degrees) 40 (minutes) N latitude and 101 (degrees) 26 (minutes) W longitude?"

And I'm sitting here like, "WTF! I don't live anywhere near there! I just want to take pictures of some friggin trees and houses in my metro area!"

"Welcome to the FAA website, where we're not happy until you're not happy."

An project I was working on was required to always identify users who took part in certain transactions (think of financial processing regulations).

Because some of the contacts on your phone might only contain a mobile phone number (and no name) a mandatory 'recipient' field was thus created to be filled for each transaction. This name was then checked against some international UN sanctions blacklists (you know, so Bin Ladens cousin can't use the thing...).

Only thing was... you could simply enter whatever name you wanted to. Like '%#^@/}(#' or 'John Doe', or 'Micky Mouse'... Everyone was well aware of this - but because ITS' THEM RULES we had to do it anyway.

Hope Bin Ladens cousin doesn't figure it out. :P

F the people who think more rules and regulations are answers to the current problems. You know why your businesses are shutting down, taking jobs with them and moving elsewhere?

Because too many complicated tax laws. Why put effort when countries like Singapore, Estonia are doing a much better job.

Ideas for future weekly questions:

What's your favourite dev tech?
What's your favourite non-dev tech?
What do you think about privacy regulations in your country?
Story about maintaining / working with /refactoring legacy code.

Also, if you get in inspired by a questions suggested by someone, make sure to give credit where due! It would be awesome to see who's question we're answering.

Net neutrality is tyranny disguised as freedom.
Anti-net neutrality is freedom that is wrongly perceived as greed and tyranny.

Who pushes the net neutrality agenda? The same companies who spy on you, emasculate and degenrate society, pro-big government.

Yes ISP's are monopolistic and greedy. But it can change and it will change once the market is truly free from government regulations who nurtured the monopolies in the first place. Just be patient.

Governments can't rule society forever. Freedom is stronger. Civilization moves forward to Minarchism, then to Anarchism.

Long live the free market

#opinion {
popular:false;
}

not to continually bring up net neutrality, but I'm starting to understand the stance of people who defend net neutrality. there is a very obvious con in repealing it - the "results" the FCC cites are actually experimental, and we know that title II regulations have successfully levelled the playing feild for ISPs. It just works.

The competition that would be generated after repealing T2 would incentivize companies to lower prices, if they only had a single "package", or to make the delegated sets of packages they produce affordable. it's common sense guys - If we can't afford the packages, they can't afford the business loss. Contrary to popular banter, smaller companies will not "just get pushed out" of business. Providers are going to scramble to find "the best deals" for their customers and, in the end, companies like Verizon might actually be the ones going under.

just a little thought ig

Am I the only one who is not seeing a big deal in new EU regulations. It's copyright it's always been there. I might be terribly wrong, if so please change my mind.