Me: *Watching a movie*

Main Character: "Oh no, we have to hack the CIA to figure out how this machine works! Hacker girl, do the stuff"

Hacker Girl: "Consider it done!"

Hacker Girl: *Opens Linux bash*

Hacker Girl: *types 'mkdir Hack_CIA'

Hacker Girl: "They have two-factor authentication in place, this is going to be a hard one."

Hacker Girl: *Types 'cd Hack_CIA'*

Hacker Girl: "I'm in!"

Me: "..."

Friend: "Wow, so well done, so realistic!"

Me: *Dies*

Two factor authentication atrocities 😍😍

"Do you have 2 factor auth for the database?"
a customer asked. I stared on the wall in front of me and suddenly fel and urge to punch and piss on something.
I took a deep breath while thinking to myself
*Oh boy, here we go. Another retard*
I put on my nice voice and asked:
"What you mean?"
The customer seems confused, as if my question did not make sense and he said:
"TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION! Dont you know what it is? To make the database more secure."

I was fucking right, this person reads to much shit. The fact that the email signature of that person said "Wordpress Developer" made me more angry.
I, still with the nice voice asked
"How would that work?"
"Two factor authentication when I am connecting to the database."
"So, do you want it by SMS then? You'll get alot of messages if it is going to send you one every time a query is made."
The following 7 seconds was dead silent until I heard the person hang up.

Client asked for Two Factor Authentication as a part of the webapp we're building and then were confused as to why they needed a second password to login

"we don't want to add an extra step into the login process, can you remove it please"

fml

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

I can add two-factor authentication to GitHub, but my online banking password must have EXACTLY 5 characters...

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

Question regarding implementing two factor authentication.

I want to implement 2FA for at least one service I'm writing but I'm wondering, next to email, what services/implementations could I use?

I know that email isn't the best when it comes to security but I also don't want to force (a-technical) users to install an app specifically for 2FA so keeping email as an option as well.

But except for email, any ideas? Anything related to Google/facebook (prism integrated services) are a no go anyways (this has, as mentioned before, nothing to do with my ego or giving myself 'a pat on the back')

As for costs, I don't mind a little bit of money but the service will be free at first and I'm not rich :)

Looking forward to the comments!

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Holy fuck nvidia. Why the fuck you want me to login to your fucking app in order to download a fucking driver. You also want me to click a fucking link that you sent to my email for verification on every fucking login? Why on earth someone would stole my fucking nvidia account? To see which drivers I use? What the fuck nvidia? Oh wait. DO YOU DARE ASK ME TO SETUP TWO FACTOR AUTH TO SECURE MY ACCOUNT?!? What the fuck? Even if I put my credentials online no one would care to login my fucking nvidia account. Just let me download my fucking driver!

Fuck you Amazon.
Fuck your two factor authentication.
Fuck your PINs over SMS that take 1 hour to arrive.
Fuck you.

Fucking Apple... my MacBook Pro committed suicide upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, had to wipe the drive. After much trouble resetting my Apple ID (put the password AND the two-factor code in the password field.. who the fuck thought that up), it tells me Mojave isn't compatible with this computer.

... fine, it's a 2012 machine I can respect that, but you blew away my system to upgrade THIS WAS YOUR IDEA NOT MINE...

...and so I just try to update to El Capitan or something because I'm on FUCKING OSX LION now (swirling galaxy, so sparkle, such stars)

...and the App Store won't let me. Why?

"Software Update Required"

"To make changes to your payment information, you need to upgrade your Mac to the latest version of macOS."

just.

wow.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

Read a blog post at work yesterday from the company head of IT security. Line 1:
As part of our company policy we enforce the use of usernames and passwords, known as two factor authentication. However we also need to ensure.....

Stopped listening at this point as I hit Google to confirm the definition of two factor auth.

Nope I'm not loosing my mind, the blog post is insane....

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

"How do we share access to two-factor authentication."

What you mean is "how do we defeat the purpose of multi-factor authentication."

Slack is cool and all... But do we really have to have an "account per team" ? Damn I cringed so hard when I was setting up two-factor authentication and realized it was this way... Wtf...

Fuck Apple Two-Factor Authentication.

I am a developer with multiple accounts and this two-factor authentication is a fucking joke! I spoke to this idiot on the line who told me that I had to create an administrator on my computer to login to a developer account of mine. I hung up the phone and told her to "Fuck Off"

It's a fucking waste of time. Apple has not had an innovation since Steve Jobs died; each upgrade does nothing new compared with the last one. What's new things are there between 10.14 and 10.8??? Nothing. Except it's a lot fucking slower.

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

So for a while I have wanted to build a raspberry pi cluster. In the spirit of shia labeouf I got started last saturday.

I had two pies lying around so I figured I'd run some experiments before I invested in a lot of hardware. After about a day I had turned the two pies into a shared cluster when disaster struck....

I had completely ignored the fact that you cannot run 32 or 64bit software on an arm processor (I know... I'm a java developer). So when I booted my service and the load balancer, I found that nothing worked. So pretty bumbed out, I quit the project.

Later that day I found a crazy guy who had bought a batch of 400 small form factor PSUs (300W) and internally I laughed at him a little. I mean, who's gonna sell 300W irregular power supplies. Then, just as I was about to go to bed I found this guy, he was selling from a batch of CPU-onboard motherboard for 10 bucks each and everything clicked!

I did some quick calculations and decided I could probably gather enough cash to get: 10 motherboards, 10 2GB ram dimms, 10 Sata disks and 14 PSU (in case some fail) and some misc hardware for networking and such.

So... Long story short, I am going to build a cluster computer, the first version is going to have 10 nodes and I am waiting for delivery right now!

Enforcing two-factor authentication is bullshit!

They call it security questions.
I call it social engineering backdoor.

I'm supposed to enter those questions after logging into my account and I'm not able to skip it nor to set a proper two factor method.

Well, fuck you. Did you ever thought about dying by a two factor method? Ever watched a Saw movie? You got the idea.

When we subtract some number m from another number n, we are essentially creating a relationship between n and m such that whatever the difference is, can be treated as a 'local identity' (relative value of '1') for n, and the base then becomes '(base n/(n-m))%1' (the floating point component).

for example, take any number, say 512
697/(697-512)
3.7675675675675677

here, 697 is a partial multiple of our new value of '1' whose actual value is the difference (697-512) 185 in base 10. proper multiples on this example number line, based on natural numbers, would be
185*1,
185*2
185*3, etc

The translation factor between these number lines becomes

0.7675675675675677

multiplying any base 10 number by this, puts it on the 1:185 integer line.

Once on a number line other than 1:10, you must multiply by the multiplicative identity of the new number line (185 in the case of 1:185), to get integers on the 1:10 integer line back out.

185*0.7675675675675677 for example gives us

185*0.7675675675675677
142.000000000000

This value, pulled from our example, would be 'zero' on the line.

185 becomes the 'multiplicative' identity of the 1:185 line. And 142 becomes the additive identity.

Incidentally the proof of this is trivial to see just by example. if 185 is the multiplicative identity of 697-512, and and 142 is the additive identity of number line 1:185

then any number '1', or k=some integer, (185*(k+0.7675675675675677))%185
should equal 142.

because on the 1:10 number line, any number n%1 == 0

We can start to think of the difference of any two integers n, as the multiplicative identity of a new number line, and the floating point component of quotient of any number n to the difference of any number n-m, as the additive identity.

let n =697
let m = 185
n-m == '1' (for the 1:185 line)

(n-m) * ((n/(n-m))%1) == '0'

As we can see just like on the integer number line, n%1 == 0
or in the case of 1:185, it equals 142, our additive identity.

And now, the purpose of this long convoluted post: all so I could bait people into reading a rant on division by zero.

My biggest challenge has been moving away from an unmaintainable Java/Tomcat/Spring Security application server to a Node.js/Express application server. That handles single sign on and two factor authentication. In 2 weeks.

I'm a front end dev. I'm sure it's fine 😓

Three-factor authentication:
1. Setup an Amazon.com account.
2. Setup an Amazon Web Services account under the same e-mail address
3. Setup two-factor authentication for both systems.
4. Login to Amazon Web Services in a new browser session, and you'll be required to provide BOTH security tokens at login (Amazon.com first, then AWS second.)

Company sends email notifying us we'd need to register for two factor authentication because it would be mandatory for all access to email within a week. However, it had to get manager approval and had a side effect of giving us access to work from home (which my manager hates). So, we send the request to him, explain the situation, he denies it and says "that can't be right! Let's do this: if you do in fact lose access to email, then I'll approve it". Well, we did lose it, and just spent two days without any access to email and it was a huge pain to get the registration process done because one of its steps involved getting a validation code from the email.

Why the fuck is debit cards that don't need a PIN for transactions even a thing? What is so difficult to understand or implement in a two factor authentication? Like do these companies have meetings where some fucktard proposes removing a crucial security feature and the others just nod approval?

I recently went to an office to open up a demat account

Manager: so your login and password will be sent to you and then once you login you'll be prompted to change the password

Me: *that's a good idea except that you're sending me the password which could be intercepted* ok

Manager: you'll also be asked to set a security question...

Me: *good step*

Manager: ...which you'll need to answer every time you want to login

Me: *lol what? Maybe that's good but kinda seems unnecessary. Instead you guys could have added two factor authentication* cool

Manager: after every month you'll have to change your password

Me : *nice* that's good

Manager: so what you can do change the password to something and then change it back to what it was. Also to remember it keep it something on your number or some date

Me: what? But why? If you suggest users to change it back to what it was then what is the point of making them change the password in the first place?

Manager: it's so that you don't have to remember so many different passwords

Me: but you don't even need to remember passwords, you can just use softwares like Kaspersky key manager where you can generate a password and use it. Also it's a bad practice if you suggest people who come here to open an account with such methods.

Manager: nothing happens, I'm myself doing that since past several years.

Me: *what a fucking buffoon* no, sir. Trust me that way it gets much easier to get access to your system/account. Also you shouldn't keep your passwords written down like that (there were some password written down on their whiteboard)

Manager: ....ok...so yeah you need sign on these papers and you'll be done

Me:(looking at his face...) Umm..ok

So, there was that post about Valve that send your steam password through an email. I changed my password to see if it was true (I couldn't believe it). And I had to do phone verification....

I thought for a sec it wouldn't stop, but yeah atleast I got the message.

As of two days ago, I no longer use systemd on my Arch system, I switched to openRC.

Basically it all started right around 9 months ago, installed Arch on a new laptop, and whenever I would reboot (which was never very often, mainly kernel upgrades), about 7 out of 10 times it would crash when booting up. My solution for a while was "just don't reboot then".

I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what was causing the boots to fail. I tried disabling systemd units, just trying to narrow it down. I even got the logs from each failed boot, comparing it to a successful boot to find any differences just to have some idea of what the issue was.

One day I figured, it's possible that it could be an issue with systemd itself. So on my day off of work, I figured I'd try using a different init system, just to see if it would work 10 out of 10 times. Decided to try openRC, and sure enough, IT FUCKING WORKS!

Now, I don't hate systemd, I've always been on the fence about it. I feel like it just tries to do too much. I will say, it is fairly convenient to have a lot of things running off of one component, making them all compatible, BUT there's also the factor that one issue could potentially fuck shit up.

Hell, I'll say that it is easier to use systemd than openRC. Enabling unit files is easy as shit in systemd. But I personally like a challenge, and to learn new things, that's part of why I use Arch.

Anyways, I'm done with my rambling for today.

A couple of weeks ago my work email got hacked, I found out because he/she was sending phishing mails to yahoo emailaddresses, but they couldn't be delivered because they were marked as phishing.

I've immediately changed my password and turned on two-factor authentication, shared my story with my boss and now we use two-factor authentication for every service where it is possible.

So I was having problem logging in to slack. It seemed like their two-factor authentication was not working. So I kept on pondering and pondering. Then suddenly a light bulb was lit in my brain. I said to myself, "what would an ordinary muggle do? They surely will click on this contact us button and raise a ticket with them." So that's exactly what I did.

so after a while slack did sent me 16 text messages together as a sweet reward of my trials. I was happily working in Slack and then I realised they in fact did answer my ticket. The only thing is I just needed to log in to get the answer I need. I am happily reminded I wasnt the only fuckwit left into existence...

[!dev], [toasters]
Does everyone only ever toast perfectly uniform slices of bread?
My grandma has a toaster that has two doors which open to the side and are held closed by a spring. This way if a slice is too thick the door can't close properly, but the damn thing still works. It's from before ww2, like most dead simple devices that work surprisingly well. I can't find anything similar anymore. The only two types now are the top-loaded design that simply doesn't work with thick slices, and the version for Americans or families of twelve that is the form factor of a smaller oven. (Which I obviously don't have room for. I already have an oven.)

Btw, how should I tag this? It's a rant, but it has nothing to do with the platform except perhaps the undocumented dependency between toasters and bread slicing machines.

Two weeks sick and several meetings where canceled, bugs haven't been touched the slightest bit and requests from customers have been deferred until I'm back.

That's what I call a low bus factor.

I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.

Cool, I thought at first.

Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.

The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.

Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.

So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...

For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.

I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.

So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.

Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..

THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.

Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.

Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.

This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.

" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.

Deep breaths.

How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:

Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.

Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....

Drinking the first beer.

Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...

First beer poof.

Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...

Opening next beer...

Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...

Oh. Another half bottle gone...

Filling in the columns...

Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...

*burping*
*cracking finger joints*

Now let's get to the sad part...

Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...

Cost and description as columns.

Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.

Another beer...

Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.

Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...

SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.

Now we can add another sheet.

Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.

Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...

Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.

Why do I want to get even more drunk.

Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.

Let's add some colored highlighting ...

Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.

Too much red.

More beer.

Don't give a fuck.

Hm.

Time for some whiskey.

What else is there to do....

Oh yeah.

Diagrams.

The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.

Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*

Hm. More whiskey...

Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.

Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....

"Copy paste the last mail from last month"

Hm.

Ah.

*sipping whiskey*

Spell check extension - to the rescue.

Thesaurus *burps*.

Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.

Uh....

Trying to attach file...

*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*

Done.

Damn.

Need to press send button.

*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*

Done.

*Pressing computers power button*

Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.

*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*

Couch ... Where Couch...

After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.

(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey)

Am I incredibly paranoid with my idea of multiple(>2)-factor-auth like fingerprint+yubikey+password+OTP aso?

My concern only goes so far...

‘Wow! Two factor authentication is not main stream... Are you f*cking kidding me? And you own bitcoin!’

‘No, I have ripple.’

‘Oh, well, not bothered then.’

Its everyones favorite time again. Wisecrack's 8th grade hoborants about mathematics.

Lets start with the example

a=89
b=223
p=a*b=19847

If

(1/(5/p))/b = 17.8

and naturally

p/5 =3969.4

3969.4/b = 17.8

What I find interesting is that...

p/17.8 = 1115.0

..for any product and factors (given two factors), the result will always be an integer.

Why is this?

You can see that

t= 1115.0*b = 248645.0

And if

17.8*(p/a) = 3969.4

Then

17.8*(t/p) = 223.0 (our factor, b)

a*(t/p)
1115.0

p/1115
17.8

also a*(t/p) = 1115.0

I could be once again misunderstanding but
what it looks like is that theres some real number that always transforms p into an integer on the ring of integers (Z) representing multiples of the factors of p.

Now notice

b/17.8 = 12.52808988764045

We can also get that number like so..

t/p = 12.52808988764045
I think (though I could be mistaken) is that the reason is because t is b*1115 and 12.52808988764045 is the ratio between b and 17.8 as well as the ratio between
p and 1115.

And if we do

t/√p = 1764.9495488858483

1764.9495488858483^2 = 3115046.9101123596

also incidentally
3115046.9101123596/t =12.52808988764045
3115046.9101123596/12.52808988764045 =
t (this is obvious but I want to point it out anyway), or 248645.0

and

1115/b = 5.0

248645.0/5 = 49729.0

and

√49729.0 = b

Why is this last part true, that √(t/5) = b?