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Search - "short-term-memory"
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Clients who keep calling in.
I'm a first liner and sysadmin, both (official title is Linux support engineer) so I do tickets+calls+server engineering.
It's highly annoying when you've got a busy day with loads of calls and I'm the first first-liner and I'm working on an important/high-prio ticket and PEOPLE KEEP CALLING.
Every time I can write like a few more words and then the fucking phone rings again aaaand so fucking on.
Your concentration is gone, workflow interrupted and my short term memory is shit so I entirely forget what I was debugging.
But, phone comes first 😞5 -
The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.
I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.
They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.
Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.
The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:
- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5
A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.
Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.
So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.
While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:
- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database
All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.
According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.
#TheValueOfEngineers2 -
Wow. I think I've got devrant fever.
I just browsed devrant. Closed devrant. Immediately saw devrant on my homescreen and thought, I need to check devrant. Then immediately after that I remember I just browsed devrant. *Sigh*.6 -
Just came back from a new café (to the pedantic among us, yes I know it's a bar.. get over it).
And I met some Apple fanboy 🤭
So the guy kept on bragging about his shiny iPhone 6.. and I figured that I'd chime in. Due to my short-term memory being terrible, I'll be paraphrasing here.
M: me
S: iPhone usar _/\_
M: iPhone 6 ey..? I've heard about some devices in which the old ones are throttled down in a system update "to save the battery".
S: Yes, biweekly updates!! You can even delay them to tune them down to the time during which your device is charging and can commence its system update.
M (thinking): You've clearly missed the point sir.. but on Android, system updates don't need to be willfully delayed even. They (usually) won't commence unless your device is 80% and charging. OnePlus has been an exception to this though, probably under the assumption that their users are mostly power users that know what they're doing.
M: You do realize that given that your iPhone 6 is quite old already, Apple will very likely start throttling your device during a system update in the next few months, right.
S: What the hell dude.. look, look how smoothly it's been going for the last few years!!! Nothing wrong with that.
M: Just wait until your repair bill comes from those Geniuses 🤭
M: Sir, you do realize that Apple quotes €600 for battery repairs nowadays, right.
S: What the hell dude!!! I can buy a whole new phone for that much!!
M: Exactly!! That's exactly Apple's business tactic!!! They design their phones as such that the battery replacement (one of the most common repairs) requires you to replace not only the battery, but the whole chassis!!! And on the XS, the battery replacement is nothing short of atrocious!!!
M: Here, have a look at this: https://youtube.com/watch/...
*shows Louis' newest video about him switching to iPhone XS*
S: Yeah that's just bullshit. I bet you're showing me this on one of those crappy Samsungs.
M: No sir. I'm showing this on my Nexus 6P, that is tethered to my OnePlus 6T. Speaking of which, let me introduce you to the Nexus 6P's (one of the crappiest Android flagships to ever exist) repair, the battery replacement of which I've done myself.
(you can watch the iFixit video about it here: https://youtube.com/watch/...)
*explains heatgun, screwdriver, heatgun battery replacement of Nexus 6P and the time each step takes - more than an hour combined*
S: Yeah that's because it's one of those crappy Androids. That'd never happen to this shiny iPhone, look, I've got a $20 battery right here!!!
*shows battery*
M: Sir... That's a battery for a MacBook. A laptop battery.... 🤨
I love how willfully ignorant these Apple users are. To them, all that exists is Apple and Samsung (both of which I hate because lockdown). And they apparently don't even know what repair they have to look for when they'll need one.. maybe that's why those Genius Bars exist? 🤭
I'd love to see the guy's face when the Geniuses quote him the price for battery replacement when his planned obsolescence time comes 🤭14 -
The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."4
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I have adhd and anxiety which means I cant smoke, drink coffee or drink alcohol because that fucks up my sleep and short term and long term memory badly for few days in a row. ADD symptoms become unmanageable. Fuck my life. I guess I will have to cut all stimulants if I want to be abe to function as a decent dev. I will have to cut most of my social circle because they wont understand me not going out for drinks... Fuck my life....14
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"Education" system is based on memorization. If you're able to memorize stuff short term, you'll pass the exam and be considered as "educated" academic citizen, not as "memory efficient" citizen.
Let that sink in11 -
Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".
Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM. -
I've tried so many ways for that at night or during walk spark of bug solving ideas:
- fluorescent ink on regular paper
- florescent mini whiteboards
- "alexa remind me.."
- writing down in my phone
- recording on my phone
-..
But all of those due to my short term memory made me forget half the things by the time I opened the fucking phone/app, found where to grab the pen or the whole dance for alexa, to remember the exact phrase I have to spell out, when it should remind me, what time,..
Earlier today I remembered how I had a little tape voice recorder I used to use a ton, thankfully that tech advanced by now and found myself a stereo mic setup little voice recorder that can also act as an mp3 player!
Went for a walk today, while listening to some podcasts, then it hit me as usual on how to fix and implement some things that were awkward at best on paper when I left home, pressed the record button, recorded it and went straight back to music mode, which remembered where I left off!
I'm so indescribably happy, I ordered quite a bunch of the same to just throw around everywhere, at the bed, in the bathroom, kitchen, for walking outside, everywhere haha7 -
I struggled with weather to post this but I feel like I have to. I didnt want to feed into the fear or give 'them' any more reason to argue against common sense but I guess it cant be helped.
The reason I was gone for a while was because I went and got my vaccination.
In less than half hour after getting the vaccine, I was in the ICU. The staff told me I had a stroke possibly from clotting and inflamation. I couldnt feel my arm or anything below my shoulders. Yes really.
Apparently I "died" for a little while and when they brought me back I was in a coma for almost a week.
I'm back home now and I still dont fully understand what happened. Still have numbness, and horrible headaches, and can barely think straight sometimes, but the doctors told me that I didnt suffer any permanent brain damage according to my scans.
Also they told me I had old damage to my left and right temporal lobe, which makes sense because I have always suffered problems with short term memory and other issues.
And I'm just at a loss how this could happen. I have no serious injuries. We were told this is safe.
And this is the exact reason I didnt want to post it, because now tards will come in and be "lololol serves you right vaxxer!"
If I knew the side effects were this bad maybe I would have changed my mind but no one told me! I mean I think I still would have got it because we have to protect vulnerable people, but still.
The hospital assured me it wasnt the vaccine and must have been an underlaying condition, but I'm not so sure. I just happen to have a pre-existing problem that I dont know about that causes a stroke and paralysis only half an hour after the shot?
And now I dont know if I'll ever be ok. And doctors warned me I may suffer more strokes and to avoid physically demanding tasks for a while. My primary job is construction (not by chooce). Now I face the prospect of not even being able to work my existing job or do the things I love, like hiking, anymore. So much of the world doesnt make any sense right now and I just dont know what to believe anymore.
Tards will probably be in shortly to suggest I check for microchips or test fucking magnets on myself.
No, just stop.8 -
Can we please pick a consistent pattern across the same app? I don't have enough short term memory to deal with this.
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When you get an assignment by mail,
- you do those changes exactly as being asked, albeit one insignificant extra visual thing,
- you send back exactly what's changed (which is exactly what was being asked, but naming things as they are, clearer than I can ever explain changes),
- you go to the person that has assigned the very thing, explain it, he seems to get it,
...
Then.. a few hours later.. you get a reply via mail:
"Come explain what you're saying here, because I don't get it."
🤨