So where to start... Let me preface this by saying I am a Software Architect for C# and do 99% dotnet development.

I just received a phone call from our Director of Development asking me to look at adding a feature for SSO with our companies main development project, which is written in PHP. I hope I made the correct changes but since I am not a PHP dev... I am not 100% confident in my code.

Now I am writing this as we are making the deployment Friday, December 29, 2017 at 5:00 pm. I should add that I am going on vacation for the next week.

So let me summarize... I am not a PHP developer, the non-PHP developer is making PHP changes on a Friday Night, and before a long weekend and before going on vacation.

I would like to point out that I said I was not 100% comfortable with this... but well this is what they wanted. I am not even sure what really to say about this though.

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

My boss gave me a project without any meaningful requirements and asked:
boss: can you finish this in 9 months?
me: well I really can't give you any estimate.
boss: well just do it.
8 months later I summarize all weekly requirements that the client has given and estimated I should be able to finish the project with just 3 months, if only the requirements are ready and not changing from time to time. What a f***ing waste of my time? Why the f*** people do this? And after all this my boss said:
boss: I think we should be able to finish this project faster.
YOU THINK!

Most rant summarize :-/

To summarize it all.

I've already ranted about this before, so I will summarize, but users passwords would be placed in plain text at the bottom of a webpage if you interacted with the page in a certain way. This page did not require a login, so user passwords were basically public. Gg.

* !rant *

So I've been working since the summer on an app that uses NLP to record audio (I was thinking of using it for school classes), transcribe it and summarize it automatically

I've been using it at school and it WORKS

IT WORKS

I've actually put an app that I made to make my homework and sum classes up and IT WORKS

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO BUY THE PROFESSOR'S BOOK JUST TO BE ABLE TO PASS THE COURSE?

It's so stupid, I'm currently attending a Operating Systems course at university and the professor NEEDS us to buy his book because all of the tasks and seminars are based on his book. It is stupid! There are thousands of books out there on Operating Systems programming! Free ones too! But instead we have to spend 800SEK (100USD) on his book.

And guess what? There is literally one task based on his book... To summarize the chapters about Fixed Priority scheduling and Dynamic Priority scheduling. Which is 15 pages out of 200+.

All the students attending the course are going to the director of studies and complaining next week. This is unacceptable. If it was a good book, sure. But the book has the same exact information as multiple free e-books we've found.

Ridiculous.

Me (junior) working on something specific/concrete; actually doing something. Gets stuck and goes to lead with specific question.
me: hey lead, if we have x, does y need to be included as well?
lead: yes, no, maybe, random bla.
me, tries to summarize and extract a to-do: oke... so based on 'yes, no, maybe random bla' you suggest adding y right about here?
lead: maybe bla and we have to think about it, yes, random bla. Try whatever feels right to you.
Me walks back to desk. Decides to support a charity, help refugees and homeless people CAUSE THAT FEELS RIGHT!

A colleague of mine had to debug performance problems in a foreign, proprietary application that is ancient.

To be crystal clear: Only reason that thing exists is because some old geezers fear change.

Asked me for help cause it's an _ancient_ MS SQL server that is luckily running on hardware owned by us.

Finding the credentials was already a funny task.

We had to access the vault (not joking here, we have a physical vault for storing sensitive data and critical backups), grab a folder and find the necessary data cause no one ever dares to touch that thing.

The application is btw for a sort of ERP / inventory system that is used in some ancient shops not yet migrated...

Yeah. Story speaks for itself.

Anyway, after dusting off ourselves, we were able to connect.

Was a bit ... Interesting. Everything's in german. The worst kind of german.

After looking at the first tables, I started giggling.

My colleague knew immediately that this was a sign of danger (insert Simpson meme here), raised his eyebrows and asked "How bad is it....".

Me, still giggling, "lemme take a further look, this is gold".

*long sigh from the colleague*

Well... It ended with me putting my hands in front of my eyes, turning around and saying: "I cannot look at it anymore, it hurts too much...."

To summarize:
- German table names
- When a table exceeded 300 plus columns, they added another table with the same plus suffix "_ddd"… where ddd is an zero filled integer sequence like 001
- To join this mess, they created views... Named "generator" - Sequence Number ... Some had the beginning of table names appended, which doesn't make it less confusing.
- the process list was listing queries running longer than 5 mins.

Which isn't at all surprising when generating carrtesian products of N tables with left join.

I've seen shit.... I've seen a lot of shit.

But that shit scared me.

!dev

There’s this person at $work who never uses punctuation of any kind. She has mental issues and insists on neutral pronouns (and strongly advertises these) so I’ll use the indefinite to pretend to be respectful. It has multiple thoughts while typing a message and just keeps typing through all of them without stopping. It pauses not to collect its thoughts, to edit for clarity or to fix mistakes, to separate anything (including disjoint topics), to summarize, etc. (Though calling these “thoughts” is a huge stretch, given its lack of propensity for that particular subject.) It’s as if it has zero distinction between writing and speaking, and simply lets the mental diarrhea flow while their fingers do their best to keep pace. Reading these trainwrecks of thought — and gleaning any useful information from them — is always difficult and a little bit painful.

It is also in charge of IT security, which is more than a bit worrying. (But I hate the company with a passion, so it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it otherwise would.)

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.

I'm the most ignored user of devrant regarding last week. Can you believe it? These stats summarize the amount of times that a message is not upvoted. It doesn't count mention's tho. A lot of people do not upvote if they mention. For more heartbreaking stats, see comments.

Also, poor GPT, always directly asked but one of the least appreciated by upvotes

Subject: a rant for devRant

Hello,

Not entirely sure why or when exactly it happened, but after I joined mailing lists I have a pet peeve for people who don't use a proper subject line, or don't use email when I literally made a mail server for that purpose (some organizations really prefer calling apparently). Is it really that hard to summarize a message in one sentence? Hell half the time even the message itself is just a few sentences.

Also the greeting and salutation at the beginning and end of email messages. I find them so redundant. Has anyone ever gotten any meaningful information out of "Hello", "Greetings", "Dear", or something like that? Or "Best regards" or whatever. I get that it's just being polite but it's so meaningless! I really don't like using them anymore. Just a message block and who it came from, that's all it needs to me. Instead pour some effort into the damn subject, the title of whatever drivel you're putting out there! Or replying to an email *only* when the subject matter is still related! Or actually replying to the damn email if it's still that subject matter...

I probably sound like an old man, but seriously.. email isn't a hard concept once you "get it". Anyone can write a halfway decent letter, why isn't that the case for email?

Best regards,
Condor

I’ve already made my own list before New Years hit but to summarize mine I’d say

To learn a few languages I have plans for.

Complete more projects that I want to make

Be more productive

And actually get a dev job

which I have started applying to positions so wish me luck!

I love pipes in R. Really wish more mainstream languages would adopt that *looking at you python, nodejs-tc39, rust, cpp*

Just something about doing

data %>% group_by(age) %>% summarize ( count= n() ) %>% print

As oppose to

print(summarize (group_by(data, age), count=n()) )

Part of a little lecture I gave my boss this week: "... you really should stop taking things so casually and so for granted. ALL of this stuff is not just something you can summarize in a single vague word or phrase like "stuck" or "kick the tires" or whatnot. there's no "magic" to any of this. there's no buttons or knobs you just touch with one finger and stuff magically works. it's all way more complicated than you probably think, ALL the time. And making assumptions will always get us in trouble." (To a tech-illiterate boss who always uses vague verbage like "stick this on the server" and has no idea how anything works.)

"Can't you just…" are the favorite words of my company's president. He uses them like a magic wand. When faced with a complex problem that will take thousands of development man hours, he utters the words, "Can't you just…" He believes that if he can over-simplify the problem, and summarize the necessary work into a sentence or two, it should only take a week or two to complete.

Of course, I then explain that what seems simple to him is actually very complex once you peel back the layers of the problem. I then explain the specifics until his eyes glaze over, and he cries uncle.

A couple weeks later, he has forgotten everything I said, and the Monday meeting begins with, "About that project. Can't you just…"

Ok so some of you have probably seen my previous rants about my computer science teacher and our project but I'm just going to summarize all of them and share with you more of my pain.

1. He edits in the production environment. Its a laravel project and he is creating test database migrations IN THE PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT AND SWITCHING BACK AND FORTH FROM MASTER AND DEV.

2. He edits in vim and doesn't follow codestyle even though I printed him off a piece of paper and emailed it to him.

3. He doesn't have any ethic when it comes to more complex things like laravel homestead.

4. He doesnt want me to release features even though he takes really long to do them.

While I love vim and it is my editor of choice, some things should be done in an ide. This is really annoying me and I'm really just considering handing him the project if he can't follow basic outline.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

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.

META-LUCK: A Pseudo-Ontology Of An Authentic Future

* * *

I think in the not-to-distant future we will abandon the idea of authenticity (messaging, corporate responsibility, ethos) in favor of other factors, such as cost. We won't abandon it and replace it with fakeness, so much as realize
that we don't, as a society favor it at all, not in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense like in relation to things like cost.

We will either abandon authenticity entirely, or alternatively, transition to a world where authenticity is the highest valued quality, being adjacent to truth.

Heres why. Authenticity, like all social qualities, can be 1. mimicked, 2. simulated,
or 3. emulated.

In the first case, a corporation, product, leader, organization, or other, apes authenticity simply by its knowable, external features. It mimics the sounds, like a jungle bird copying a jack hammer to scare away predators or attract mates.
There is no understanding, let alone model, external or internal. The successful mimic
is little more than a lifeless, unthinking puppet.

In the second case, the attempted authentic simulates authenticity: That is, an external
model is formed, or pattern, that is predictable, and archetypal. It may have an internal
model even, a set of policies and processes for deciding the external-facing behavior.
But these policies and internal processes and models are all strictly outward facing. It is purely pathological in its goal, desiring only at minimum to achieve *externally attribute* authenticity (public opinion) rather than those internal changes that generate the true perception of the public--a perception not of surface behaviors and shrewd calculating policies and processes, but as a quality of authenticity for its own sake. This is in some sense the difference between the mundane and the atavistic, that the benefit, while not definable strictly, is assumed as a 'matter of course', culturally, within the organization or individual or company. It is to say, a *quality* of the thing, that *generates* outputs of a certain character and nature, rather than a *goal* that is attained 'after-the-fact' by behaviors generated for *other* than being authentic.

Here we reach the limitation of definitions.

Finally, we arrive at the case of number three, the emulation. We have in part already described it, but lets try and summarize a bit.

The Authentic is an *originator* of behavior and outward appearances, being an internal quality of a person or organization. It originates behavior, rather than being the goal of behavior and outward appearances.

Its benefit is assumed, though not always nameable or definable, even though this sounds naive, superseding other factors like cost and profit. As such the authentic does not emerge in a cost-focused environment, not readily, not often, and not cheaply either.

It is in some sense an experimental state of being, of goal-seeking only after-the-fact of "being true to ones origins" is established above and beyond those goals--setting and achieving only those goals which ultimately align with the origin and intent of the authentic.

So from now on 5% of my software dev performance will be related to DEI and I'll have to attend "trainings". Aside from the fact that it is complete BS, how does this have anything to do with software engineering and why is it so arbitrary, vague and hypocritical in general?

I'll summarize your goddamn 5%: don't be an asshole. Can I start working for real now?

Sounds pretty great for an american company that hires people offshore on the cheap and that treats them lowkey like second-hand slaves? But that's ok because life in their country would be worse without a job so we are "helping" them. How generous.

How low can corporate culture (if you can even call it that) go?

Sitting in a meeting.
Since two hours now.
Let me summarize it to you:
Blah blah blah blah...

Me and a couple of friends have this group on WhatsApp where we can share stuff that we do and maybe come up with new stuff to work on as well.

For giggles (honestly irritating to me) I'm gonna summarize some conversations on the group.

26/11
Me: Finally completed my first FPGA program, these devices are amazjng!
NO REPLY

28/11
Me: gonna make the Jacobs ladder thing today! Hope I don't get zapped
Anyone interested ?
NO REPLY

29/11
Me: hey here's a nice electronic circuit, try to analyze how this circuit oscillates (we're all ec 'engineers' well... soon at least)
NO REPLY

2/12
Friend: Guys creed 2 was amazing I don't mind watching it twice
F2 : Really? Why don't we go soon?
F3 : I'm in!!! What's the plan
F4 : how about tomorrow ?
....

3/12
F1 : Guys anyone have notes for X exam
F2 : here. {Link}
F3 : here. {Link}
F4 : how many of you are done ?
F5 : what are the important questions
(just a stupid aptitude test)

{Me} changes group title from X to Notes group

Let's give this another shot
6/12
Me: There's a conference on X technology by Y industry leader ..
Should we check it out ?
There's even a workshop on X
NO REPLY

Alright time to acknowledge my stupidity and my lack of brains for even belonging to this kind of social circle/COUNTRY

7/12
ME: New fortnite season is out
F1: woah it's crazy let's play
F2: already on it, client is updating
F3: are you shitting me? gonna get BROS laptop (i'm going to suck my brothers cock and take his computer)
F4: Hang on bro wait for me also call me on discord.

I hope you guys could stick through that. Well there's no crazy moral to this but if you're one of these guys just appreciate your friend for his efforts once in a while even at the cost of acknowledging your stupidity.

Also, words like BRO are instant triggers and I'll make sure I find you can kill you if you use it more than once every couple of sentences ( I have relatively high tolerance )

Is a masters degree in IT worth it? I mean I've just started my masters in Software Engineering after my Computer Science bachelor's and I expected to learn something useful from it. So far they have taught only bullshit and stuff that I haven't found useful since I've started my IT career 3 years ago (now I am the team lead at a small startup, and I consider myself a really good developer). To summarize, is a masters diploma useful? Will it help me with anything, give that I've started working as a developer (freelancer, didn't know much back then) when I was still in high school (CV bragging rights)?

Sales guys in my company are unbelievable. They told client that my analysis algorithm runs for about one hour, so that is the time they have to wait for results. I asked if he actually asked what hardware do they have, and if they want all analysis done (its a complex algo) paralell, or just one by one.
Ofcoursenot.
Then I suggested to better ask these things, otherwise we end up reckt. Annnnd he said they will question our professionalism if we ask too much questions.
Ok so let me summarize. My algo needs to run maximum 1 hour long, regardless the actual functionality and input data, on any fcking hw you can imagine, or else i am not a pro. Mmmkay.

some reflections on "reports"...

Many of our customers are asking us to summarize the information in weekly or monthly reports, send them through email to the relevant members of the organization, and store them. Managers want to promote it as one of our most important featues and place many work hours into it. I get the utility of periodic reports in a pre-computer world... but we have the ability to show the whole history, and then seprate them into weekly or monthly averages. You can see the data in real time without having to wait until the next report. We could just give them a link and say "hey, if you ever want to see how your company is doing / history of your progress, here's the data." I feel like the only utility of reports is for people who don't have the initiative to look at the state of the company more than once a month (like investors)