!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

PM: Can we have it so the usernames are case-sensitive?

Me: uhh, sure I guess.. But thats like really pointless and adds no real usefulness.. In fact makes the whole logging in thing a tad more complicated for no reason..

PM: Well this one other product we have uses "Admin" for the login versus yours that used "admin" so it needs to be implemented.

(note that mine accepted "Admin" anyways...) *implemented it*

PM: So there's a problem with the username sort, it sorts by capitals then lowercase.. eg:
alpha
beta
Alpha

Me: Yeah, you asked for case-sensitive usernames..

PM: Well can you fix it?

Me: I could create a second field within the user data that is the username in all lowercase and sort by that. But that negates like all of the whole case-sensitive usernames thing.. OR I could drop all this actually important work I'm doing and do a whole bunch of work on a custom sort for this useless fucking feature you wanted me to put in..

*it's been 2 weeks and still no reply...*

One of the things I really hate on Windows (and Microsoft software in general) is that the keyboard shortcuts are localized therefore are different from 90% of the apps that I use on a daily basis.

Two examples of this (EN-US vs PT-PT):
- "Save" is "Gravar" while "Underline" is "Sublinhar". This means that whenever I press Ctrl + S to save a doc in MS Word I underline a word instead of saving the bloody document.
- "All" is "Tudo" so when I want to select all the itens on a folder in the File Explorer I have to press Ctrl + T, the same shortcut I press in pretty much every single tabbed app to open a new tab.

This is terrible for the user experience because different languages provide different keyboard shortcuts to the user which goes against the concept of the usefulness of a keyboard shortcut: perform an action from anywhere without having to know its menu or menu description.

I didn't really find the usefulness of Docker until I used Docker Compose. Deploying our architecture with a simple 'docker-compose up' FeelsGoodMan.jpg

At work we have a....err....pool of usefulness awareness situation.

You see. The school does not know all that me and the lead developer does. Our head of department does. Our manager used to do(fore she left) but as far as the rest of the 2 fucking campuses are concerned, all of our shit works through magical dwarves that live inside the servers in our server rooms.

Normally, we are fine with this. But whenever one of us misses, or decides to take the day off and some shit hits the fan...THEN and only then do our users know what we do.

So we have a "pool" of items that seem to be picked every time one of us is not there. The more it gets picked, the more people are aware of us, the more they figure out what we do...the more they start to ask for customization and shit like that.

Such a funny situation. Wonder if this will get in the way of friday morning coffee and magic the Gathering at the office.

Or me and the cms admin playing videogames together.

Oh well

"How useful was your CS degree and why?" - I studied CS at university, my education always was incredibly useful.

Firstly, the knowledge you gain in itself is useful. Furthermore, we explain and understand the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, the more you know, the easier you learn new things.

But secondly and more importantly, university teaches you *how* to think. In a structured way, like a scientist or engineer. To see the bigger picture.

I originally wanted to end here, but I've read a couple of entries doubting the usefulness of any CS degree.

Our profession isn't all that different from others. It is, however, relatively young. How's this for an analogy: We're still in the stage of building sand castles. That's fine, and can be self taught. But in years to come we'll want to build bridges and sky scrapers, which are not just "sand castles scaled up". Our sand castle knowledge won't help us here. Sky scrapers need entirely different materials and a good understanding of architectural statics.

Can you still teach that yourself? Maybe. Will a formal education with a degree be useful and generally more trusted? I bet.

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

!rant

I used to doubt the usefulness of regex, until now.
I'm new to web dev, and downloaded a sample website to make a project with, but all the sources of images came as src="images/image.jpg", and for some reason I couldn't make it work, the only way that I found that could work to me was creating a static folder inside my app folder, declaring in the start of the document a {% load static %} and referring the image source as {% static 'images/image.jpg' %} in the html file, I kinda get what this is doing, but why it's the only way that works, it's beyond me.

Great! Now I can start the development server and see the website in its full glory!!! Then I realized: I had to edit the sources of every image and every reference to css and js in 5 html files to it work properly, and come on, do all that by hand?

Then regex came to mind, never had used it, never knew how to use it properly, after some web research I found if I did a find/replace with ([a-z]\w+\/[a-z,-]+\.[a-z]+{1,2}) and {% static '$1' %}, all the work I had to do, was resumed to a single click of replace all.

Man, I love doing what I do, and I love you guys/gals, never tough I would ever find a place in which I could share this kind of thing!

I am actually kind of starting to see reacts usefulness and opportunities, but just can't let go the thought that many are blocking javascript, so those would be barred from the resulting site, doesn't that bother anybody else? or is that just generally ignored?

Biggest mistake I've made in my life is assuming other people knew more than me and asking for advice and integrating their advice. I suffered many years being tortured by terrible advice that had no actual relation or usefulness in reality but caused me stress to have to follow, and I was too inexperienced to know any of this.

The other problem with bad advice is; how do you know it's bad advice? If you got the advice when you were naive, and you followed it, never strayed from it, you will still be naive in that area, because of the dutifulness by which you stuck to that advice. You literally imprison yourself, forever, especially if you are very good at putting effort in and have high conscientiousness, reliability. You will never know you were wrong.

Interesting..

From the book Effective Java, third edition:

"1997, when Java was new, James Gosling (the father of Java), described it as a
“blue collar language” that was “pretty simple” [Gosling97]. At about the same time,
Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) described C++ as a “multi-paradigm language”
that “deliberately differs from languages designed to support a single way of writing
programs” [Stroustrup95]. Stroustrup warned:"

"Much of the relative simplicity of Java is—like for most new languages—
partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness. As time passes,
Java will grow significantly in size and complexity. It will double or triple in
size and grow implementation-dependent extensions or libraries."

Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++)

for all the apps who make one sign up before they prove their usefulness

🌵🌵🌵🖕🖕🖕 + mailinator 😏😈

Antergos is going out of the play. And i saw a very click baity article which poised the following statement at the end:

"Is the death of Antergos a major loss? No, not on its own. Despite the developers bragging about over 900,000 downloads (over the last five years) it’s hardly a popular operating system. Still, its demise is a part of an emerging trend where developers don’t have the resources to continue a project. And both the Linux and Open Source communities should be very worried about that. Developing for love or as a hobby simply isn’t sustainable."

Now, this is, at least to me, bullshitty in the sense that the open source community does not really have anything big to worry about. Large pools of companies would make yeary investments in open source codebases due to the ammount of usefulness they present to their companies. More and more great open sourced projects come out every year OUTSIDE the all eating scope of just web development(which to an extend is fine since it brings communities together)

Saying that a hobby isn't sustainable is funny in itself really.

If people don't have the time to support a hobby project because they are moving on to bigger and better things in shit that actually pays then I am glad for them. It tomorrow Arch, Debian, pop os, ubuntu and fucking freebsd goea out then I would have something to bitch about.

Till then, stating that the community haa something to worry about is just bullshit.

Its amazing how many people call themselves programmers yet cannot figure out the usefulness of print/log statements. 🤦‍♂️

lol @ doing stand-ups for the sake of stand-ups. I used to work for a company that vigorously applied them. Bro, I don't care about your development progress. You're wasting my time with your bla bla. Bunch of people just standing there rattling out their daily progress.. but no one really caring. Not useful.

lol..

Focus on projects, not tests.

If you want people to be able to code, judge them by their ability to code.

Plus that way your graduates have a portfolio as opposed to a grade list that says nothing about their usefulness in the market.

If you must do tests, at least mimic real world conditions:

- Digital, no paper
- Internet allowed (have rules on copying SO if you must)
- BYOD, let people work in their customised environment

I was talking to a friend about the current state of machine learning through tensorflow and commented about the use of Javascript as a language.

He discarded the idea as he views Javascript as something that should only be used as a frontend technology rather than something to build backends or deep learning models.

I am thorn. I have always liked Javascript but will admit that I have used it mostly in the area of front end with very few backend instances(i did create a full stack intranet app in Express once, major success for the application it was hosting, it was a very basic api which had its own nosql db with no need to interact with the company's relational data, it was perfect for the occasion and still help maintaining it from time to time)

My boi states that node's biggest issue has always been npm and the quality of packages. I always contradict those statements by saying that if one uses community standards and the best packages then one does not need to worry about the quality(i.e mongoose over some unmaintained mongo wrapper etc)

I sometimes catch myself finding that my way of thinking adapts better to JS than it even does Python (which is his preference for deep learning) and whilst there are some beastly packages for python in terms of quality and usefulness such as matplotlib etc that one can do great things with the equivalent JS.

I mean, tensorflow.js came from the same wizards that did tensorflow (obviously) and i find the functional approach of JS to be more on par with how we develop solutions.

I am no deep learning expert, and sadly I have no professional experience with machine learning. But I venture to say that we should not cast aside the great strides that the JS community has done to the language in terms of evolution and tooling. Today's Js is not your grandaddy's Js and thinking that the language is crippled because of early iterations of the language would be severely biased.

What do you guys(maybe someone with professional experience) think of Js as a language for machine learning?

Do you think the language poses something worth considering in terms of tooling and power for ml?

You can say you know a computer language to a decent level when you can in fact make useful programs with it.

For example, I can say I know JavaScript to a basic level. I know its basic core functionality by heart (which can't be said for some people I know), such as:

- it manipulates the DOM, the DOM has Element, Nodes, TextNodes (all to be found on W3C documents with its own specs)
- useful functions are:
getElementById()
getElementsByClassName()
Also knowing that these return either HTMLElementCollection or NodeCollection because you have to iterate over it differently then
- element.textContent
- == and ===
- dynamic typing
- closures
- avoid global variables
- nodes have parentNodes
- isNaN, undefined
- arr.push()
- arguments don't have explicit types defined
- etc.

Using this knowledge I built an antispam script for a particular server. It's good to know the model of a language, that it sits in your head and that you can use and understand the constructs when you want and how you want.

Welp. Time to ditch windows entirely! It's outlived it's usefulness, so my last windows computer is getting converted! So let's start a flamewar! To all the nonpurists out there, a question! Manjaro vs antergos? (I love arch but I'll be damned to have all my systems broken. I want at least one semi stable system)

I just started but I'm already tired.

For some years I have worked in the industry, not a lot, I know right but I really wonder how do you deal with all "not code-related" bullshit.

IT should be a dynamic field but somehow it is stuck inside the business logic which is all about the money and that does not take care of the real matter which is "code engineering".

- Most of the projects I have seen are an utter mess.
- No real structure
- Code is literally thrown somewhere to make stuff works and fix bugs
- Features which should require X amount of time are planned and shipped earlier ignoring best practices.
- The customer changes idea every week
- Nobody wants to pay for a reasonable architecture but prefer to keep financing un-maintainable projects that only God knows where they have been made (presumably in Hell)
- Juniors devs with no real senior following them committing unreasonable stuff
- Seniors devs thinking they are but they aren't.
- Company that keeps delivering projects even if they have not the required amount of people to make it in time.

Seems like nobody wants to stop and take time to think and make the right decisions. I see people running around me like crazy ants.

But, above all, what really kills me deep inside is HR. You are looking for "dynamic" "talented" "cool" devs but you are not willing to pay them enough.

Should I talk about LinkedIn?

Oh, God... Even the worsts companies sound like they are into Fortune 500. I feel so much hypocrisy here.

I have worked for big and small IT companies.
In the end, is all about "inside politics", everything which is getting financed is not because of usefulness but because of "relationship".

I started coding when I was really young.
After ten and more years, I finally take the job of my dreams but everything is shuttering under my feet.

If you have some words of wisdom, I'm here to hear you.

PS.
I'm not a native English speaker, I apologize for any mistake.

Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google search been SEO'd to death? At this point only Bing and even freaking Brave Search are providing results that are related to what I'm looking for. Even Gigablast does a better job than Google sometimes (props for open sourcing the backend, Gigablast maintainer guy)

Fucking fuck! How could I be so naive?
I just started my masters in Enterprise Software Development. It's basically the continuation of the CS BSc I finished this year. I don't consider myself a lazy and bad dev and I finished in the top 5-10% of the class - I say this not because I want to brag, I know I'm not the best, I know I have my defects, BUT I don't think that it's a good sign that all of us, my top graduate friends all full of hate and anger against this whole MSc after just a week. And... It's mostly one fucking egoistic teacher's fault.
Okay, all of us are working full time which is obviously tiring if you combine it with the university classes. But I still think I could manage this first week better, if I wouldn't fucking came to the same line of the faculty.
I deeply fucking hate that I've been naively thinking that the masters will be different after experiencing one of the worst teachers last year. It's fucking first week, and I can't change the specialization anymore, only give up. I wanted to fill up the void with some usefulness, but I just fucking messed it up.

This "beloved" teacher is from the industry, he has a lot of experience and started to teach recently. Which is not a problem, no! It should be a great thing by default. But the way he holds his courses is inaccaptable. I don't think I have the right to share everything, but the following stuff just grinds my gears... Like a fucking lot:

1) He brags about a lot of stuff. Like he made really good deals in the past. Why should we know, that he made a contract with a client for 20 million euros. Okay. Whatever. That doesn't help us, and I think that bragging makes him look like an egoistic scum.

2) I hate this one the most: he fucking says that we have a choice in the administrative stuff. He gives us some hope and offers the possibility to argument and come up with our own solutions for grading and etc. But oh boy, is this a false hope, a fake idea of free will. He already knows what the final solution will be and on what kind of decisions will we all "agree". He did this last year, he does it again. Fucking naiveness of mine...

3) Lastly, he decided, that we have to go to theatre with him, all of us. No exception. And I like the theatre. But only when it isn't forced. Why and how could you pair this up with the grade you give to your students? Because that's what he does.

FML. How can I already hate this? How can I already be fed up with all the stuff? Anyways, I'm signing the contract with the university tomorrow, so let the fun games begin... I know, I look like a whining little boy now, but I just fucking had to went it after this deep fried shit-day. I probably have to get some sleep, and everything's gonna be fine. Eventually, skipping classes might become necessary in order to bear all this shit.

Why is everyone into big data? I like mostly all kind of technology (programming, Linux, security...) But I can't get myself to like big data /ML /AI. I get that it's usefulness is abundant, but how is it fascinating?

To make something impactful. I don't want to be fully credited, though being able to point to it in interviews would be great.

While working, I constantly segment my product into tiny reusable abstract solutions, most of which I eventually publish. I want some of these to grow into popular solutions to the problem I had or some other similar issue. Or, I want one of my major projects to become either a tool or an inspiration in something significant, but frankly the point is that some people appreciate something I created.

What I want to read is how to train an ai model to recognize images.

What I don't want to read is your 6000 word ad filled dissertation on everything related to the concept of ai that links to the tensorflow documentation 3/4 of the way through.

The first 15 links on Google are like this. You have you look real hard for a link to the actual documentation.

SEO has absolutely ruined the usefulness of the internet.

So I have my little program which originally was written with intention to be useful for academics to deal with old fuck HPLC, but they got new one so I am not sure about it usefulness anymore. Basicly it reads HPLC report and take from it table and dilution number from name.

I spend like 2 hours trying to read all numbers from string which are between two given chars. Probably I could do it easier with regular expression or not being fucking moron or use sheet of paper to figure it out. Eventually I take traditional pen and paper and solve it in 10 minutes...

How to be unproductive 101

I'm trying to decide between a MacBook Pro 13" (2017) vs. MacBook Air (2018).

Specs are somewhat similar; but with a huge price tag difference. The MacBook Air costs a quarter more where I live. I can afford either; my dilemma is which model's usefulness will last longer.

I need it to build and test a React Native application with some custom native code 😟

Like pull-to-refresh, auto-selecting the file name in "save as" dialogues is a design trend we are perpetuating without questioning its usefulness.

The "rename" feature of file managers and the file name fields in "Save as" dialogues and screenshot tools automatically select file names without the ending, expecting the user to want to replace it.

It would more sense to place the cursor between the file name and the ending ".png".

I can't remember the last time I replaced a file name. I almost always rename files to add a comment or time stamp at the end.

Adding a comment after the time stamp, for example, "Screenshot at 2024-02-04 12-04-37 progress bar.png", makes more sense than replacing the file name. A file name with a time stamp is more easily searched.

You can make your software as good as you want, if its core functionality has one major flaw that cripples its usefulness, users will switch to an alternative.

For example, an imaginary file manager that is otherwise the best in the world becomes far less useful if it imposes an arbitrary fifty-character limit for naming files and folders.

If you developed a file manager better than ES File Explorer was in the golden age of smartphones (before Google excercised their so-called "iron grip" on Android OS by crippling storage access, presumably for some unknown economic incentive such as selling cloud storage, and before ES File Explorer became adware), and if your file manager had all the useful functionality like range selection and tabbed browsing and navigation history, but it limits file names to 50 characters even though the file system supports far longer names, the user will have to rely on a different application for the sole purpose of giving files longer names, since renaming, as a file action, is one of the few core features of a file management software.

Why do I mention a 50-character limit? The pre-installed "My Files" app by Samsung actually did once have a fifty-character limit for renaming files and folders. When entering a longer name, it would show the message "up to 50 characters available". My thought: "Yeah, thank you for being so damn useful (sarcasm). I already use you reluctantly because Google locked out superior third-party file managers likely for some stupid economic incentives, and now you make managing files even more of a headache than it already is, by imposing this pointless limitation on file names' length."

Some one at Samsung's developer department had a brain fart some day that it would be a smart idea to impose an arbitrary limit on file name lengths. It isn't.

The user needs to move files to a directory accessible to a superior third-party file manager just to give it a name longer than fifty characters. Even file management on desktop computers two decades ago was better than this crap!

All of this because Google apparently wants us to pay them instead of SanDisk or some other memory card vendor. This again shows that one only truly owns a device if one has root access. Then these crippling restrictions that were made "for security reasons" (which, in case it isn't clear, is an obvious pretext) can be defeated for selected apps.

Alright, everyone speaks of Github and it's usefulness and all. I have gone on there, I have done the tutorial a couple of times. And I still am not grasping it. Does the fact I'm a student make it this way? Is this useful for a student or is it beyond my skill level and coding needs?

I feel like the "DEL | PUT | PATCH" verb are overrated. I still cannot see it's usefulness to this day.

Spent a couple of hours setting up an old laptop with opensuse leap and trying to learn the basics of using it so I can simulate a small network (my desktop, a couple of old laptops for specific tasks, and my school laptop) with that laptop as the ‘hub’ Put syncthing on there as a pseudo-cloud system, teamviewer for remote access, and did all required updates for the OS. But literally no idea where to go from there What all should/can I do with this setup useful or otherwise. This is meant to be a learning experiment with a hope for some usefulness from it