- Sir, you must put away your laptop before the flight takes off.
- Is a tablet okay?
- Yes
- *Uncouples keyboard from Surface*
- ಠ_ಠ
- (⌐■_■)

Just saw a recruitment post for a female speaker to join a female panel at a "women in tech" event. And it's by an organisation called "codelikeagirl". 😒

As a female developer, it gives me the upmost cringe to hear about any #women or #girlpower events. Do you really need to validate your ability and support because of your gender? Men don't go to #menInTech events, so why do you need to go #womenInTech events?

On the surface it seems all friendly and gender equality fluff. But if you segregate yourselves into an all exclusive group, isn't that the opposite of what your trying to "achieve"?

When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.

The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.

No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.

Me wanting to board Plane,
Goes through security Check...
"Sorry sir Laptops are not allowed."
Me
"Why?"
Security
"It could be a modified bomb"
Me
"But this is a Tablet!"
Security
"No sir, it has a Keyboard and Trackpad attached to it, its also running Windows..."
Me
"Excuse me, but this is clearly a Tablet"
*Detatches Keyboard from Surface Book*
"See? Tablet."
Security,
"Sorry sir, but no. You cant board the plane with this, only Tablets and Smartphones"
Me
"WTF? you dont allow Laptops because they could be bombs but A FUCKING SMARTPHONE IS ALLOWED? AND TABLETS TOO?!"
Security
"Yes, because the Battery is not removable..."
Me
"But my Laptop Battery is also not Removable..."
Security
"I dont have anymore Time for an Argument"
Me
"So I can board the Plane?"
Security
"No, the Ticket will be refunded"

WHO THE FUCK CAME UP WITH THIS BULLSHIT? LIKE RLY? WHO!!
I MEAN WHAT THE FUCK IS ALLOWED?!

Today,
First day of new dev class...
Teacher, "As you know Tablets, Smartphones, Smartwatches etc... Are not allowed in class, except Laptops."
Me,
"Is a Surface allowed?"
Teacher,
"Is it a Laptop?"
Me,
"Yes, but also a Tablet.."
Teacher,
*Furious*
"NO TABLETS"
Me,
"Bu.."
Teacher
*Still furious*
"YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN HOW TO BE A GOOD RELIABLE DEV, SO LISTEN"
Me,
*Proceeds to Lift up surface from Keyboard*
Teacher,
*Rips surface out of hand and goes to secretary*
"You can have it after school"
Me,
*Sitting there speechless with nothing to develop with*
10 Minutes later
*rector comes in and gives me surface back*
Me,
Thank you
*Proceeds to use surface*
...

The Teacher hates me...

"You look mad."
"I'm running android studio on 4gb."
"What does that mean?"
"God hates me.."

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

Looks like Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple...

I remember when every release of Windows was a catastrophic mess and you had to wait until at least SP2 to get the OS to work in a stable way. And Internet Exploder was *the* browser that broke everything, every time. And there was the whole embrace/extend thing, where they tried to impose their vision of web standards and compatibility, and *everything* you used *had* to come from Microsoft...

And now, it's Apple who fuck up every single OS release, on mobile and desktop, and whose browsers openly shit on web standards (ever try developing anything for Mobile Safari?). Apple's stuff that only works with Apple stuff (down to things like headphone jacks - OOPS, forgot, they dropped those now).

Microsoft is making interesting, beautiful hardware (Surface machines) while Apple is pushing un-innovative, overpriced garbage year in year out. And they're open-sourcing more and more, while Apple walls itself further and further behind its walled "garden". Bleh.

Be interesting to see in 10 years what will have shifted, because it'll change again by then.

Bought a Microsoft surface (3 pro) from a colleague (more about how that runs later).

It had only one USB port and I definitely need more so started searching online for docks. They mostly seem to be about 100+ euro and all have hdmi ports and other shit other than USB ports as well but I don't need that.

Fuck it, let's get creative (and fuck 100 euro for something like this)!

Double sided tape (however you call that) + 2 euro USB dock:

Works like a charm!

Check this beauty!
Surface Pro 6 ❤️❤️❤️

First day at CERN: done!

Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.

The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!

OK morning rant from yesterday.

Get into the venue, connect my surface to the dock, keyboard won't work.
Try more USB ports, try another machine, keyboard (corsair k70) is totally broken.

Ugh.
Fine.

Disassemble keyboard, someone asks me a question, turn around and knock full coffee cup over my surface book.

Fuck sake.
Now I need a new laptop.

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

Fuck XBOX
Fuck surface
Fuck cortana
Fuck office 365

Fuck Windows

FUCK MICROSOFT

Yet another Windows rant but boi Redmond deserves it.
For our new office I took a leap of faith ordering 15 iMac 5k. (btw HP quoting us €10k each pc for same spec).

There are two young guys insist on Windows. Good for you so we ordered two top of line surface book. He religiously unwrapped and said “who want apple trash more than this beauty.”

It’s been 5 hours that shit spent on “Getting Ready Windows for you”, once done it prompted another updating at 4% until we all left work.

So this morning I’m ordering another two MBPs...

[Microsoft documentation]

* click here to know more about ShitException *click it*

* discover the new Surface Pro, click for purchase..

what the shit !!

Guys see a router.
My wife sees a flat surface to set up a manger scene for christmas....

Yo.

His palms are sweaty
Knees weak arms are heavy
Bugs littering his code already
Cold spaghetti 🍝

He’s nervous but on the surface he looks calm and ready to git push

(Hit a blank with thinking of code-related lyrics, anyone got ideas?)

I'll be buying a second hand Surface tomorrow.

Will put Linux onto it right away, found good instructions on doing that including making the touchscreen work.

If that doesn't work, I'll sell the fucker again because I'm not running windows. I'm just not. That malware can go fuck itself.

Looking forward to transferring that windows machine to a Linux one!

!dev

Being an introvert 17-year-old is tough at times :/

Have yet to find someone who shares my interests and has the will to get to truly know me.

Most people just barely scratch the surface and judge for what they see, but after all, I cannot expect any sort of deep relationship to take place with any of my peers.

Oh my word, shut up everyone about the ESC key. In interface design do you keep something around that 1% of your user base uses, or do you make something better? It's not even gone. It's on the touch bar for fricks sake.

And while we're talking about it, stop calling Apple so innovative. Innovation at Apple died with Steve Jobs. "We developed this awesome new iPad Pro!" it's just a bigger iPad with the same stupid limitations of all iPads. If you want a real portable work tablet, go buy a Surface. "We added a touch bar to the MacBook Pro!" some manufacturers of Windows laptops have had that thing for years!

😰

Watched a show where this girl downloaded "7 Teraflops of data" to her windows 10 surface computer in the period of 10 minutes.

What an Uber leet hacker

I have the urge to fucking smash all of the mosquitoes on the whole universe.
I tried to sleep many times after killing 2 of them. But there are still more of them. Anyways, "since I am fully awake, let us do some research" I thought lol.

-In the research I found that only the female mosquitoes are the ones who are annoying us.
The male mosquitoes dislike drinking blood and eat nectar instead.

And not only that...
-There are approximately 3.5k types of mosquitoes and only a few hundred of these are the bad guys, even if they look all the same.
-Human-biting mosquitoes fly at heights of less than 25 feet in general.
-Mosquitoes are hunting us, because of a specific substance. Carbon dioxide. Every time we exhale CO2, we kind of create a path for the mosquitoes to find us :). They think about it like this:
>co2 detected
>there is probably going to be a meal
>let us fucking get it
-Female mosquitoes flap their Wings slower than male mosquitoes thus it makes it easier for male mosquitoes to detect female mosquitoes.
-Male mosq. do not touch female mosq., when they are resting, but once a female starts buzzing the male recognizes that pattern, flies to her and starts making love.
- A scientist who was working for the US Army found out that the male mosq. will even try to mate with recordings of female mosquitoes' sounds.
-They can not fly until the 10th floor as someone has observed it.
-But then again they have been found breeding up to 8k feet in the Himalayas.
-They live in the water and barely come to the surface for food and o2.

Ps: While I was writing this rant, another 2 mosquitoes bit me and I fucking killed them.

(Senior level engineering course and our professor used to work for NASA. This can lead to some fun anecdotes during class.)

Professor: “Because the ends have such a small surface area, you can neglect them in your calculations.”

Student: "What would NASA do?"

Professor: *without missing a beat* “They'd probably use the wrong units and crash into Mars."

Surface Pro 6 in action...
Bedtime!

That keyboard, beautiful!

100% focused, balls-deep in the zone, not sure I could have recalled my own name if you'd asked me...
Suddenly out of nowhere, someone's asking me about a job I worked on over a week ago. I'm mostly answering in just a few syllables, struggling to surface from 20 layers of Call Stack.
This goes on for a full 5 minutes before they say, "sorry were you busy?"
No, I was just about to beat Solitaire.
Of course I was fucking busy jesus fucking christ, did you not see all that code and shit on my fucking screen when you suddenly and urgently had to disturb me?

Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake. But that’s bullshit. Debugging is actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with. About knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you, to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you’ve secretly known all along.
-Mr Robot

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

How does the new MacBook pro outsell Microsoft surface and dell XPS 😖 are there so many "sheep" out there who buy a 1300+ machine with 2 (max 4 ports) not including the 17 dongles you'll need?

Sorry if I offended anyone but I just think the new MBP is ridiculous and is definitely not "Pro"

"I strive for code quality and maintainability. I actually do. And i will not work for a company that does not care about it and just wants something done as fast as possible.
The only time i will do something quick and dirty is if it's actually urgent. And even then with one condition - my next task will be to fix it properly.

I do not care about your deadlines. I will do my best to meet them, but not at the expense of code quality. I've seen too many projects fall into technical debt, where productivity is so low, that the only way to move forward is hire more people and start working on a project 2.0

And please do not lie about how great your company is, if it's not. These kind of things surface very soon, and you will have wasted both of our time, because as i said - i will not work for a company that does not care about code quality."

you think i'll ever get a job again if i put this on my CV ? :D

This is how you make a Surface Pro 4 look good.

So I've been playing some DnD with friends.
And we've been working with some lego characters, whiteboard markers and plastic sheets to draw on.

But that's always a mess:
The ink was old and did not come off again for the most part
The sides of the map curled up and and made the lego character fall over
The lego characters were too big
And more...

So I thought, why not make it digital?

And so I did.
I used UWP to make a master and a client, both using the Windows Ink api to be able to draw.
Some circles with an initial served as characters, and everything was synchronized using a TCP library I wrote half a year ago.

Yesterday we tried it out.
We all (including me) were sceptical if it would work well because the 'analog' clumsy way we did it before does have a certain charm.

But at the end we were all very enthousiastic about it and we'll be using it next time too!
It's awesome to be able to create programs for your own use :D
That's why being able to program is such a great thing!

Now I need to restructure everything, make it more efficient, add a turn order display, make the map zoom- and moveable and more and more....

Right, you pesky type initialization bug, I'm gonna find you. Hiding by throwing your exception in an external library won't help you. I'll download the sources, library by library, and look for you there too.

I *will* track you down, bastard, and exterminate you locally. Then, I'll make a pull request and kick your sorry ass off GitHub, off the internet and off the bloody surface of the earth. Oh, you have no idea how dead you're going to be when I'm done here!

!Story
So I Met this kid (11 or 12) when I was younger
15or so
And he asked me what I wanted to become I said:
Programmer...
He was AMAZED by this job and INSTANTLY wanted to become one too...
So I showed him the Basis of programming with Scratch for EDU, he was pretty good and Made some "good" Games.
Then I wanted to work on my little unity Game...
So I started to Programm on my surface pro 4
He looked at me and asked:
What are you Doing? What is this?
I explained that coding isn't always Scratch and that there are MANY ways to code,
Some are like Scratch and other arent...
He FREAKED THE HELL OUT!
And was Like:
I WANTED TO LEARN CODING NOT SOME OTHER BULLSHIT LIKE SCRATCH!
I WANT TO BECOME LIK,E YOU!
We never met again...

A Microsoft Surface is not a computer it’s Windows installed on a crêpe

Ducks are just like programmers. They might seem calm on the surface, but they're flailing wildly underneath

Two years ago: company exec (Mac fan) buys a Surface Pro to show off our .NET application to customers as he travels. Hands it to me (I build releases) and I iron out a few Win 8 bugs since we'd always used Win 7 before. Get it set up, get to like the device a little, he takes it home... and returns it within 24 hours because he didn't mesh well with Windows. (Again, Mac user.)

8 months later he buys a Surface Pro again. I install our latest release, verify that everything is working as expected with hardware we normally don't use, and give him a controlled setup that will just work when he's at a customer site. Once again, he returns the Surface within 24 hours because he can't get used to Windows.

At least we verified Windows 8 compatibility, I guess.

Today I got myself a "Surface Go".

I thought that it will be too cramped/small for web-developement, but now that I have one I am really surprised about the power/flexibility that this thing serves.

GG Microsoft, you have done something right.

Found an astronomy book from 1837 with instructions on how to build telescopes and drawings of the moon surface.

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

I'm the guy who posted Surface Pro photos recently, just in case you see some similarities.

=========

This, is the Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse.
It is beautiful. Magnificient. Minimalistic. Fast. Accurate.

I first thought it would be my future mouse.
I thought I would use it for years.

I used for an hour, and literally threw it away.

I thought it would be comfortable, since i used cheap logitech mouse which of those were all too high in height.

But, this mouse, is so low in height. It literally puts your hand in the floor.

You, the devRant members, pointed out at my previous rant that it looks, and would be uncomfortable, and I literally said shut up!

Well, sorry about that, I regret my words.

It is piece of beautiful trash.

The click sound is very quiet, the scrolling is very good, but the height of the mouse....

If I keep using this mouse, I would probably get a carpel-tunnel disease(is this correct?).

I guess I should only use this mouse when I need to use it quickly outside, since portability is number one among all mouse in the world.

Next coming, some more Surface pro coding sessions, and Surface pen.

Anything interested about the surface pro? Leave in the comments below!

What would you do?

2 job offers...

Job #1 a big sports betting company as a junior software developer with a salary of 22k plus a yearly bonus of 10%

Also uncapped holidays

Or

Job #2
A small IT company with 2 other developers with a salary of 19.5k working on multiple projects and being instantly promoted to mid level developer, also a signing bonus after 3 months of a high end surface laptop.

Question: I'd like to choose a new distro for my surface.

Although I do shitloads of terminal stuff, I'm an eye candy lover. Debian based please :)

I can deal with problems myself if they occur.

Anyone any ideas? (KDE neon/kubuntu/nitrux/mint have already been tried)

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

How my year has gone so far...

Management: Bobby, we are replacing your old hammer.
Me: Ok cool.
Management: Well actually there's so much going on...here is a wrench instead.
Me: But, this isn't a hammer.
Management: Yes we are aware but we are busy and cannot buy a hammer for a several more months.
Me: How the fuck am I suppose to hammer nails with this?
Management: Oh gosh you are right. That sounds difficult. We will grind down one side of it so you have a flat surface to hammer in those nails.

Management: Oh and by the way, those nails are super important so don't screw anything up.

"Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake, but that's bullshit. Debugging's actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with, about knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you've secretly known all along. A bug is never just a mistake. It represents something bigger. An error of thinking. That makes you who you are. When a bug finally makes itself known, it can be exhilarating, like you just unlocked something. Because, after all, a bug's only purpose, it's only reason for existence is to be a mistake that needs fixing, to help you right a wrong. And what feels better than that? The bug forces the software to adapt, evolve into something new because of it. Work around it or work through it. No matter what, it changes. It becomes something new. The next version. The inevitable upgrade." - Elliot, Mr. Robot

Got the surface a week ago, so this is my first sticker on it :D
Let's spread the Swag :)

Yet another Surface Pro bragging rant.

Bought a Designer mouse, Surface pen is coming soon!

I managed to get a new dell XPS 15 with uhd display, 16GB RAM and a nice i7 for work.

My boss previously asked for advice from me for which laptop to get, he ignored my advice which was for him to get a nice surface book pro for his excel activities

Instead he got a shitty Mac book air (who are these people who like the airs?). As his cto I was upset he didn’t trust his tech guy to choose him a powerful laptop that was useful.

Anyway, he saw my new laptop this week and a contractor was admiring it. My boss then said why didn’t you tell me to get this one? (The surface pro is the same spec but with tablet and pen ability).

What a dick. I’m still mad he didn’t listen to me. And now he is saying I never told him.

Macs are shit btw. This dell is great and I don’t know how we lived without uhd screens before.

Once while making a automation program for a friends errr academic betterment. I realized I had taken three of the sacred caffeine pills and chewed them unlike normal. Needless to say this increased the surface area tremendously. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack right there at the age of 20. And all I could think was, "fuck my screen has a lot of dead pixels."

Looking good ❤️
Thank you @dfox @trogus! :)

It was a Monday morning, and I did what most people do - I got up late. When I came to senses, I realized I have an important client meeting today.
I ran towards my closet and grabbed my favorite shirt, but it was a mess, badly wrinkled.

But no problem, I decided to put this task on my old but trusty laptop, I waked up my laptop (Which has just celebrated its 12th birthday yesterday), it literally coughed 100 times as i opened 3-4 chrome tabs and android studio on it. Within a minute , my newly found laptop-iron become as hot as the surface of sun, i gently placed my shirt under it and in 5 seconds my shirt was looking brand new !!! I quickly got dressed up , while my laptop was cursing me at the back.

Luckily my meeting went well and we secured a new project, on my way home I was happy and satisfied that my oldy has found a new purpose of life as a makeshift iron.

I returned home, and to my surprise my laptop was'nt turning on....!!! I though maybe its tired from todays work so i let him rest..........

I never saw this coming

Won a new job; 50% payrise which, for a junior, is a pretty big deal.

A bigger team, with more established practices, a commitment to testing and code coverage, code reviews, and a smaller learning surface area as I go forward (focusing entirely on the js ecosystem, 80% frontend).

So this is all good.

But I *have* to go back to Windows. Windows *7*. Their infosec practices move at a glacial pace. After two glorious years on mac/linux I feel like being sick.

Thank you Syncex for one of the best powershell scripts ever. This literally sped up my laptop and surface :3

Taking a database class, prof insists on using Microsoft Sql server 2014. "Okay cool" said the Microsoft surface fan boy inside me as I installed it. "Holy shit this is using 6 fucking GBs?? Eh it's okay I trust" again said my Microsoft fanboy self. Finished installing, makes queries and it works. Cool.

Go to run Sql server again next day and get an error (nothing displayed, just a box pop up and then a crash) I use some Google skills. Change a bunch of shit and still it persists. "Just uninstall it and reinstall again" says my prof. I do so except random errors during installation saying Sql already exists even though I just uninstalled it. "Maybe it's some registry keys messing with it!" do some digging, remove unneeded registry keys and try again. Installation finished but a whack of features say failed to install.

I sit and try to work this shit out for the next four hours (not paying attention to my class) and still can't get Sql to completely uninstall itself. I try iobit uninstaller, command line uninstalling, fucking everything but still not working. Slowly my fanboy side is wishing that the windows symbol on the back of my machine was an apple.

I ended up having to backup all my files and reinstalling windows to get it working properly. Holy sweet fuck. The worst part is when this class is done ill probably need to reinstall yet again to save the 6gb it's sucking up. So if you're not sure whether you need something as heavy as Microsoft Sql server or not for your application, don't use it! It's a fucking virus that is super difficult to remove.

Tldr: life long Microsoft fanboy becomes apple convert in a day of using Microsoft Sql server.

Look, I've given Microsoft and Windows a lot of shit, but I just have to be fair and say the one piece of hardware that I absolutely covet is the Surface Pro... If that is the direction Microsoft is heading in the coming years I'll have a lot more respect for them...

Just wanted to spread awareness about a Windows 10 devRant app called "devRant Unofficial". It's literally a 1:1 clone of the Android and iOS apps.

Maybe the devRant team could contact the dev for come co-operation and get an official app for Windows 10 with little to none effort?

It works on mobile and PC so I can easily use it on my Lumia and Surface. I know most of you guys here use macOS, but for us Windows devs, having an official app would be cool.

I know Valve talked to an unofficial developer of the Steam app for Windows Phone, and gave him approval for removing the "unofficial" tag. I suggest you guys do the same.

Happy 2016's death everyone, and sorry for the long and boring post!

In some other rant I told @rusty-hacker about the "not a MacBook" I use for work (and play), but apparently you can't attach an image to a comment, so I thought I'd post this here.

well, the microsoft surface that has been lying in a shelf and was used three times in the last year now only boots to bluescreen. you still get the full experience even though you barely use it.

Those who are thinking, surface studio is over priced. Go and try comparing the cost of 4k touch screen cost, you will get to know.

Holy fuck...I didn't expect this.
simple terminal from suckless.org
(aka. st) After appiled path "alpha" -> It did transperent in the way that if you have 2 terminal overlaps -> It'll draw a transperent surface with the underline terminal. so, It's not an idea for open vim with i3 tab or stack mode. I kinda gave up on using it until I realize -> what if underline terminal is "mpv" which is video player. This is a result (Holy fuck is awesome). by set "hi Normal ctermbg=NONE" in vimrc to make transperent background with vim.
Now, I have "mps-youtube" which allow me to watch youtube with mpv, basicly (vim + youtube) as the same time.
ps. If gif is not play -> tell me, I'll upload video. (seriously, is awesome)

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

These fucking imbecile devs left me a bunch of bugs in a 150k LOC legacy hell...
Too bad it took some 8 months for them to finally surface in prod. God damned...
Technically, this whole codebase is one giant abyss filled to the brim with bugs.

Aw hell yeah!

Now I just need to figure out how to read...

New surface, nice try Microsoft.

since everyone was posting their workstations...

A people person is only a people person to another people person. I fucking hate them. Most sales people I see don’t really have any skills per say. They think they do by claiming to be a people person. The entire sales community is like this. Fake as shit. They pay thousands to learn something that has been written in Medium or you could just Youtube. I think I can pretty much get the fact if you wanna make a video do well, you need a good title. They speak everything on the surface. And they claim to a be a layperson. Well, no. Fuck you. I not giving you an average. You are stupid as shit. They can’t write a proper fucking email. I have to go through kubernates and monads and they still make more money than devs via commission. They are too sober and fucking pretentious too. Fuck em fuck em fuck em.

Am I the only one who found Satya Nadella picture really out of context and funny.. its like the numbers represent real estate value of his heads surface....

Changed my surface for a normal PC, added on More Monitor.

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

So you want to write some notes on your surface pro 3...

Windows 10: UPDATE TIME!

Me after two minutes:

I am working on an open source game project, and the most common way to draw things is using a class named ManagedSurface. The class is otherwise awesome, but it has a method called getBasePtr(x, y), which gives you a pointer to the requested coordinates. Fair enough (this is C++ without STL by the way).

But WHY THE HELL CAN I REQUEST ANY POINTER THAT I WANT, EVEN IF IT'S OUTSIDE THE SURFACE? Other cointainers have sanity checks, asserts and such, and the surface KEEPS TRACK OF IT'S WIDTH AND HEIGHT.

WAS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO ADD assert(x <= w); assert(y <= h);???

I spent 3 days on valgrind trying to find a heap corruption that manifested at random points in the code.

FUUUUCK!

On the bright side, I learned how to use valgrind (which is awesomely awesome).

Our IT-Class project: Mathematics trainer in Java
Day 1 (was monday)

TL;DR we didn't save.

So we formed groups and I landed in the UI team with, let's call him Mage and let's call her Goth.

We had an eclipse project folder on our desktop (they said it only works when put on desktop) Btw they didn't even want to use a cloud or something (I wish we'd use git and I'd finally learn it). We should take the changes by USB from computer to computer.

So me, Mage an Goth are making a basic GUI for this Mathematic-Training App. We use this thing from Eclipse but I forgot the name. It has not enough functionality on surface and I hate things that break complex things up to ease things but leave away so much.

So after a productive hour of building a GUI and centering shit by calculating the top and bottom distance and use margins (hurts me really but Mage was designing, Goth intensively calculating on paper), the bell rings.

Mage wants to save the project on my USB-Stick and bamm💥
A black screen.
I don't know how it happened but it sure had something to do with the USB-port looking like you fucked it with a way to huge🍆. It looked damn broken.

So because we have a nice App called HD-Guard, which fucking wipes the desktop on startup and resets all but the documents/images/videos/music folder —

It's all's gone. Today is day 2 of this project so let's see how today turns out.

Found this in "Origin" book by Dan Brown. I love it when tech jokes surface in novels.

Big-time Microsoft fan who claims they've been using licensed versions of Windows since Windows 3.0. Still has all old versions of Windows on different machines / hard-disks. They use only Microsoft Surface devices. They still use Nokia Lumia (with Windows Phone 10). They were working with an organization that used Office365 for enterprise email and collaboration. They used Microsoft Teams for team collaboration when the rest of the organization was comfortable with Atlassian tools like jira, confluence and bitbucket.

One fine day, news spreads that the organization is moving into GSuite for enterprise email and collaboration. They are devastated. They quit citing personal and family reasons, but we knew the real reason.

Hello fellow coders can you help me here plz.

I'm really confused whether to buy MACBOOK PRO 13 INCH or SURFACE PRO 4. Both of i5/8gbRam/256ssd specs. Price almost same in India.

My main use is programming ( web apps/ open source) + portability.

Factors I like in macbook pro:
1) unix based
2) best service here in India ( heard from answers on Quora )
3) DURABILITY ( heard from answers on Quora ) ( will last for many years without any glitch).

Factors I like in Surface pro 4:
1) its ultraportability
2) pen & touch
3) better typing experience ( since I code/blog for long hours)
4) native bash support
5) sexier than MBP :P

I really like SP4 over MBP but I'm worried about its durability and service(in India).

What are your thoughts on this guyz?

Does anyone have a Microsoft Surface Pro? Do you like them? They look amazing, but are also pretty fucking expensive lol

Switched to Linux yesterday on my Surface. I'm half way there boys!

Next step: Work PC

Anyone else hate their Macbook Pro 2018? RIGHT after the return policy the speakers start acting like it has fucking tourette's, plus my machine randomly SHUTS DOWN.

Apple Store "Genius": "Yup, we gotta send it in for repair, 10 business days."

10 business days without my work laptop, gee thanks asshole, at least be a little more empathetic about it.

My 2015 Macbook Pro gave me ZERO problems. The only reason why I upgraded was that compiling took forever (React Native).

If I didn't have to work with Xcode I would just sell this thing and buy a PC laptop. (The Surface book looks nice =))

The whole company [cult]ure bullshit has really gotten out of hand. When management sets new deadlines that only put stress on the devs then decide to have some cringe AF company bonding soirée in the middle of the work day who benefits from this? The rebranded HR platoon thinks all employees want to participate in basically mandatory chum-it-up gatherings. Don’t get me wrong I love to party and enjoy myself, but I go to work to do just that. Work. And when other departments whose main responsibility is setting up events for the technical staff, they never seem to consider these work loads or what other people actually want. It might seem all fun and dandy on the surface but when you hear tales of people talking in the closed offices about so-and-so because they aren’t reflecting the cultural values, it starts to seem very fucking problematic. Like why would anyone ever say anything when you would probably just get the boot for just being too different, even though all this sits on top of some guise of, “a diverse work environment”. All in all I hope this [cult]ure shit summers down sooner than later. And I’m in a right to work state, so transparency be damned.

Not sure how to handle this one. My new company gave me a surface laptop to do dev ops work.

16 gigs of Ram but only a 256 SSD?

Nothing is installed so far except for MS office and acrobat and I am already running into memory issues.

My last work machine had 1TB HDD and 128 gigs of RAM (i know overkill but I could have several VM’s up and running at once).

What the fuck? Apparently the CTO ordered this piece of shit.

Also no mirco SD card like other models so I have no idea how this is going to fucking work.

Anywhere I can sell my mother for enough RAM to run slack, google chrome, hyperterm and sublime?

A year ago I ranted, that I understood JavaScript callbacks.

That was a lie. I knew nothing.

But I think I scratched the surface by getting into functional programming this time.

Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

Microsoft Surface Studio

They are really taking everything seriously now

I can’t express how much I fucking hate repairing iPads. Words simply don’t skim the FUCKING surface.

Carry on.

I started to work in the CreditCard / Bank business a year ago.
Now they stopped the hole server migration project, so I leave again. They could have had it all. Server 2016, SQL 2016, Citrix, Surface Books and so on.
But no, the new shitty projects are more important than security or on what technology the system is build on.

Seems like the FTP Server will run on Windows 2003 forever...

All of a sudden every engineer at my work is a biochemist and talking about how the world is ending due to the Coronavirus.

Shut up. Wash your hands. Wipe down your laptop keyboard. Don't lick your hands after touching a surface. Don't touch your face. Just be cautious.

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

My God is map development insane. I had no idea.

For starters did you know there are a hundred different satellite map providers?

Just kidding, it's more than that.

Second there appears to be tens of thousands of people whos *entire* job is either analyzing map data, or making maps.
Hell this must be some people's whole *existence*. I am humbled.

I just got done grabbing basic land cover data for a neoscav style game spanning the u.s., when I came across the MRLC land cover data set.

One file was 17GB in size.

Worked out to 1px = 30 meters in their data set. I just need it at a one mile resolution, so I need it in 54px chunks, which I'll have to average, or find medians on, or do some sort of reduction.

Ecoregions.appspot.com actually has a pretty good data set but that's still manual. I ran it through gale and theres actually imperceptible thin line borders that share a separate *shade* of their region colors with the region itself, so I ran it through a mosaic effect, to remove the vast bulk of extraneous border colors, but I'll still have to hand remove the oceans if I go with image sources.

It's not that I havent done things involved like that before, naturally I'm insane. It's just involved.

The reason for editing out the oceans is because the oceans contain a metric boatload of shades of blue.
If I'm converting pixels to tiles, I have to break it down to one color per tile.
With the oceans, the boundary between the ocean and shore (not to mention depth information on the continental shelf) ends up sharing colors when I do a palette reduction, so that's a no-go. Of course I could build the palette bu hand, from sampling the map, and then just measure the distance of each sampled rgb color to that of every color in the palette, to see what color it primarily belongs to, but as it stands ecoregions coloring of the regions has some of them *really close* in rgb value as it is.

Now what I also could do is write a script to parse the shape files, construct polygons in sdl or love2d, and save it to a surface with simplified colors, and output that to bmp.

It's perfectly doable, but technically I'm on savings and supposed to be calling companies right now to see if I can get hired instead of being a bum :P

"Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem — the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible — his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth." - Charles Eames

alright, just acquired a Surface Pro 2. Never touched one before. I guess Linux with Enlightement enviroment would work great?

Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake, but that’s bullshit. Debugging’s actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with, about knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you’ve secretly known all along.

-Mr Robot

defuq!!
I was on the airport and wanted to buy a millefeuilles to eat, those bustards buy the single piece fir almost $2.5 (few meters outside the airport it's just less that $0.5).
Let's do the math: the dimensions of one piece is almost 10x5 cm, which means a surface of 50 cm² (0.005 m²).
So a m² of millefeuilles costs $500, what the shit, a m² awful millefeuilles is more expensive than m² of land in a respectable area.

I have a Mac at work right now, and if/when it putters out, I would be fine with another, but not if it's the touch bar variety. In that case, I'll ask for a surface or a latitude(the options the company offers to the MacBook) and just hijack Linux onto it. I won't even ask if I can, because I'm sure the answer will be no.

Who’s better at releasing unfinished/half baked projects that are eventually killed in the span of 5 years or less?

In this corner, weighing in at 264 killed projects, undefeated in search engine industry - Google!
And, in this corner, weighing in at 73 killed projects, the murdered of Nokia, Windows RT and soon to (probably) be Surface Duo and Windows 11 on ARM - Microsoft!

I personally think it’s Microsoft - when they do, they kill it in a spectacular way.

Powershell. Using classes. Can't create class libraries using regular .ps1 files (this way this **sort** of work). Using modules then. Can't easily refresh modules cache after any change to a class. Need restarting powrshell each time. Looking for more information. The issue is open since 2016 (just after the release of PS 5 that introduced classes). Once again, a Microsoft product turns out to be shiny at the beginning, but rusty when you go beyond the surface. Classes seem to be second class citizens in powershell. I feel frustrated and I would like to put pressure on microsoft but nobody seems to care. I'm stuck.

What aren't there any 2k 32 inch 144 Hz monitors out there that are: flat. I want to upgrade my home setup from a 24" setup, which is, you know, flat. Even back in the days of the CRT monstrosities I've spent a premium on getting a flat panel, as the outside curvature was a technical obstacle to overcome.

I don't understand the need to curve the display. It distorts the lines, hinders other people looking at your screen as you have to be in the right spot, and every camera records on a flat surface. Why should it be a good thing to go curved?

I am reminded of the 3D craze.

Fucking christ this year is a fucking shitfest:

- wpa2 krack
- "DUHK Attack Lets Hackers Recover Encryption Key Used in VPNs & Web Sessions"
- "Hacker Hijacks CoinHive's DNS to Mine Cryptocurrency Using Thousands of Websites"
- "Bad Rabbit: New Ransomware Attack Rapidly Spreading Across Europe"

My fucking router didn't yet get patched, my fucking phone is outdated and I can't change to my patched one because devrant just shits the bed in extended desktop mode. Windows 8.1 loses support in 3 months, rendering my last chance of using it on my surface pro done, making me use windows 10 with its fucking shit ass not optimized tablet interface. I have just fucking constant paranoia what else could be hacked tomorrow, nothing is fucking safe anymore for fucks sake. I even went as far as implement 3 step auth and intrusion detection on my shitty ass VPS nodes, fucking give me a break you fucking assholes.

When Microsoft shuttered Windows XP, my mom's old laptop became a virus-prone, sluggish machine. She let me have it, soon after which I decided to install Ubuntu on it. One thing I should note about this laptop is that the battery could not hold a charge. The power cord was the laptop's life support, and I made sure to place the power brick on a flat surface.
One day, a new version of Ubuntu was released. I decided to perform a dist-upgrade. Because this laptop was on the older side, the ventilation left a lot to be desired by today's standards. Rather than roast my crotch, I placed my computer on the table and the power brick on a swivel chair next to me.
I was working on an assignment for a class when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. I turned and watched in horror as my power brick fell off the chair, pulling the charging cord out of the laptop and turning off the laptop... MID-UPGRADE!
Moral of the story, learn to navigate a computer via a text interface if you haven't already. It may save your ass someday. It saved mine.

The more I use LinkedIn the more I hate it. I know I shouldn't be a nosy fuck but sometimes I've got nothing better to do for a couple of minutes on my work OS and the tab's right there. Every time I open it up it reminds me of why I'm not on Facebook. My coworkers are probably the most benign people to follow, all they do is repost company videos and blogposts. Basically advertizing, whatever.

It's the other people who get to me, the ones who are advertizing themselves. The soapboxing, the 'look at all the cool shit im doing', the reposting shit from people who I have no clue about. It's literally a window into just the good parts of peoples lives, like any other shitty social media site, but put through the filter of corporate PR bullshit. At least you can be yourself somewhat anywhere else, everything on LinkedIn needs to conform to what's acceptable to the sterile corporate environment, which amounts to showing off your certs or marketable products and the most surface-level 'progressive' social politics.

Fuck LinkedIn and fuck my curious ass for opening it like a dumbass kid who doesn't understand why you shouldn't touch a hot stove.

Daily driving alpine linux on my laptop. Excellent distro:
- Probably the most secure linux in the world, with very low attack surface and a lot of money being spent to keep it secure — alpine is the most popular linux for docker containers, and everyone uses docker nowadays
- no systemd (but openrc, way lighter)
- no apt (but apk, the fastest deps manager for linux bar none)
- no glibc (but musl, way lighter)
- no sudo (but doas, lighter)
- wayland and gnome work out of the box
- flatpak for heavy ubuntu-centric apps like some browsers. Librewolf, Firefox and Chromium don't require flatpak, they're in the main index
- I couldn't figure out secure boot in ubuntu. I read all the manuals, to no avail. GPT-4.5 couldn't figure it out either. It was a deal-breaker for me — I need secure boot. In alpine, I spent one morning (today) and got up and running relatively easily. It just works
- everything is stupid fast
- usually, in minimal distros, you expect the desktop part to work, but dev & serious parts to be a PITA. In alpine, both work flawlessly bc it's a server-oriented distro

Alpine ftw!

so here’s the tea.

i’m a Chinese dev working in a Japanese company. they’ve got this decently sized project a full web app and backend stack and yeah, I’m handling both ends. full-stack life. not a problem. I’ve seen worse.

but the maturity level in this place? the passive-aggressiveness? is different level. have you ever worked somewhere where your coworkers act all sweet on the surface, but lowkey make it feel like everything is your fault in the most obvious way possible?

so here comes the fun part.

the Stripe exchange rate endpoint we were using? deprecated. not globally — just regionally in Japan.

i did my homework. contacted Stripe support. got the chats, screenshots, docs, confirmations, evidence, not .........vibes.

solution? easy. i integrated a third-party API that returns the same exchange rate data. built a cron job to pull and cache the values daily. stored it locally. f