Finally got paid (apparently they sent my money to the wrong account lmao).

So I bought:

- A Guitar Rig Kontrol 3. It's an old hardware designed for some specific soft, but it contains a soundcard, 8 foot switches, one expression pedals (continuus), 2 other expression pedals input, 2 audio input, 2 audio output. So I'll be able to plug my guitar and control FX from there. All of this for 50 euros at the pawn shop

Being a programmer helped me tremendously for electronic music because I can write actual drivers for old hardware.

- I also found an old bike on the street. Brakes and transmission, seat and tyres are fucked, but the frame and wheels seems healthy enough. I can get a decent bike for the price of parts and labour.

A day in my life. This morning Dell was doing it's update on my laptop before I left for work, so later when I knew my wife was up I asked her via text to shut my laptop off.

W: "You left your laptop on this morning."
Me: "I know, it was still doing an update this morning. I sent you a text."
W: "Leaving your computer on all day is going to burn it up."
Me: "Its 8:30, been maybe a half hour isn't a day."
W: "Still wasting electricity. How do I turn this thing off?"
Me: "It's just like yours."
W: "No, your computer is way different than mine. Just tell me how to turn it off"
Me: "My computer is running Windows 11, yours is Windows 10, shutting down is exactly the same"
W: "I don't understand, yours looks completely different. Stop being an ass and just tell me"
Me: "Select Start, then shut down"
W: "Select what? There isn't anything that says Start"
Me: "Sorry, click the little icon in the bottom left. Looks like four little blue squares. That's the Windows Start menu button, just like yours."
W: "OK, now what?"
Me: "Shut down"
W: "Shut down what? I don't see anything"
Me: "The icon that looks like power button next to my name"
W: "There is nothing next to your name except your picture"
Me: "It'll be on the right hand side"
W: "Where the clock is?"
Me: "No, on the Start menu, where you see my picture, there should be a button to turn it off."
W: "No, it went away"
Me: "What do you mean went away?"
W: "All that disappeared when you told me to click over by the clock."
Me: "I didn't say to click on the clock, anyway, doesn't matter. Start over, select the icon in the bottom left"
W: "You're not listening. There is nothing there when I click that. You're such as ass. You cannot even tell me how to turn off this stupid computer. I'm busy, you can turn this thing off when you get home."
<a few minutes later I text my daughter>
Me: "Baby girl, can you turn off my computer?"
<10 seconds later>
H: "Done. Anything else?"
Me: "Nope. Thank you."

Am I in a toxic work environment or not?

1. I suggested implementing some code guidelines for our team so we can all work the same way. Lead architect sends me a DM telling me to stop talking about it until after projectX is done because it might stress out other devs. Friday he talks about how important it is to use standardised tools and ways of doing things.
2. Spent a week working on a bug fix and they said solution is good, but then invalidated all of my work by DM-ing me saying it's unusable because i worked on wrong branch and he quickly fixed it over the weekend and I should just copy his (inefficient) code.
3. I ask him a basic question of what version the backend software is using and he doesn't even respond. I ask another team member who quickly helps me check. it would have taken 1 fucking integer to answer that question. i wanted to learn the backend stack, but not so much anymore.
4. Lead doesn't respond to project management software ticket mentions.
5. Lead randomly makes hotfixes to the QA server without prior notice so the backend randomly goes down at times during work hours and then my local copy of the front end stops working for no reason at all when I am trying to focus on bug fixes
6. UX/UI designer's screen designs look completely different than the actual app, so I spent weeks implementing a feature looking like his nice designs, then having to change it again, taking another week.
7. Generally poor comms
8. Leadership mentioned jobs are safe, then 2 months later retrenched a bunch of people.
9. People getting sick all of the time.
10. Nobody gives a shit about technical debt

There is nothing easier than running an insurance company in the US of A. When a big request comes in from a client in distress that got into a terrible accident that is definitely covered by their (very expensive) plan, you just go to the data bank like Equifax and see if they're still rich enough to win a lawsuit against you should you refuse to pay.

For those of you who don't know what a data bank is: data banks are companies that buy/scrape/suck in every last bit of data they can about every person in the country, and then resell it through their fancy UI with all the convenient features and metrics.

So, Umbrella Insurance Co. goes to Equifax and asks whether Joe Schmoe's accident is severe and life-ruining enough that they won't be able to sue us. Exuifax says: let's see... Joe's Revolut©™ account has the grand total of $80.12, with $7,382.25 recently spent on medical bills. Joe's WhatsApp©™ (a Meta©™ company) classifies their recent messages as "desperate". Joe's iPhone©™ Screen Time©™ is increased, and Joe is doomscrolling a lot, especially on The Washington Post©™ (a Jeff Bezos company). All signs show that if you don't pay them, they won't be able to out-sue you. That would be $0.12, thanks!

As a person who is no one in particular that may or may not have been a US of A's supreme court judge once said, "sometimes it's not about justice, but about making the sucker spend all their money".

I have almost 8 years of experience, am currently a tech lead in the company im at (a big known music and video streaming platform), i live and breathe tech...

and someone i interviewed for (in a 4 year old fintech startup) wants to put me in a mid level position because he "felt i lacked depth". apart from his feelings he failed to make me understand how I'm not senior enough for him.

so how do i become deep? what is this depth he speaks of?

So there is this discussion about killing children in code. Someone pops in with this:
"I do remember a post from a guy who actually got pulled into an HR talk, to ask why he'd littered the code with references to killing children and removing children from their parents. Imagine trying to explain to a person who's never programmed, that Kill(parent.child)is a perfectly standard phrasing and not a latent psychosis that should be reported to the police."

First I think who is the idiot that reported this? Then I think who is the HR idiot that didn't do a google search or talk to the software manager? So many people had to fail at basic thinking for this to get this far.

Then I think also. Two things can be true at the same time. The person writing this code could also harbor latent desires to kill children. But can hide their sickness in plain sight. CS could just be a place for psychopaths to talk about the true serial killer thoughts.

I was wondering what this would look like. Maybe the psycho programmer will allocate extra hidden children that will get created and destroyed without anyone knowing the better. Maybe they only need 10 children for the code, but they allocate 100. That is 90 children they can create and destroy that only they know about.

Is balancing a tree really about cycles to read the data? Or is this some sort of karma balancing with latent desires to add or remove children with different karma leanings? Linked lists? Obviously only a psychopath would make a singly linked list.

Then I read posts on devrant and think there is probably at least one psychopath here that looks up to Anakin. We know you are here! You can't hide forever.

How is MSSQL so popular? "Oh yeah, sometimes you have to use dynamic SQL because the compiler doesn't correctly detect the impact of DDL commands and rejects working code" god fucking what? Why does the compiler infer the future structure of tables after a DDL command if it can't do so reliably? In my world, if it becomes public knowledge that a compiler incorrectly infers something, the maintainer scrambles to remove the inference instead.

I also find it surreal that I have to disengage versioning on a table in order to be able to modify the version history. Like surely, there should be a mechanism to temporarily skip the hooks other than ALTERing the table into a regular unversioned database table and then ALTERing it back, rebuilding the versioning infrastructure from scratch. SQL is awful and MSSQL is doubly awful.

Dark Humor

Lets try some seriously dark dark humor. Lets find what lurks in the hearts of men.

My Kid: I was adopted.
Me: We wouldn't have picked you.

Oedipus: <whilst banging his wife> You remind me of my mom.

What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair?
Rollaids

What did Christa McAuliffe say to her husband before the launch?
You feed the dog, I will feed the fish.

Some I found from searching web:

What's worse than a baby in a dumpster?
A baby in 2 dumpsters.

If we had mosquito nets in Africa we could save millions of mosquitos from getting AIDS.

Down syndrome in military is called special forces.

Mom told me to eat my vegetables, now where do I put the wheelchairs.

Whoever thought white men can't jump obviously never watched the 9/11 footage.

Yes, I had the opportunity to buy any mouse in the world, but I picked a weird apple one with one physical button acting as two separate buttons, a trackball for scroll wheel (it's neat to scroll horizontally though, not gonna lie), virtual middle button, virtual squeeze sensor and a tiny internal speaker. Yes, I'm an idiot.

But hear me out. When I was a child, I accidentally wandered into an apple store. I was blown away by what their UIs looked like (it was a Leopard era, maybe Tiger, I'm not sure). I still remember how I approached a desk where an iMac stood, and this was the mouse it came with. This. This very mouse was my first experience with apple. and oh boy, how memorable it was, and how much I wanted a macbook of my own.

Apple still means a lot to me. It's so unfortunate that their privacy approach went real bad real fast. Somehow when people say that nintendo, which is a shitty anti-consumer company, means a lot to them, it's suddenly okay, because that shitty anti-consumer company is based in japan. mark my words, if apple was a japanese company, it would've been much worse, but it wouldn't have been hated as much.

I now possess my childhood dream, or at least its fragment: the best mouse that apple ever made. it feels comfy and substantial. modern flat magic mouse is a disgrace. if you're still an apple user (my condolences), buy a mighty mouse on ebay. wireless ones do exist, they take regular batteries.

Oh, and this mouse works perfectly with Debian out of the box. If you pair it with a Mac, you can see probably the oldest bit of UI that's still in modern os --- the mighty mouse settings panel. It's there, unchanged since the 2000s.

We're so back guys! Someone starred my truthchain repo - at this point I'm sure we'll kick X (twitter) out of business! There's only like 90% of the features unsafe and broken and every release has a major flaw and is broken and requires extra bs to work, but it's fine at 0.1.6, imagine someone actually contributed or makes a comment - I would immediately quit my job and dedicate full time (not). 😅

I made a bad design decision on the DB level, I made 1 NON-NULL column so i can avoid 2 NULLABLE columns
Small thing, but over a couple of years it's now bed-rock code and Projects, Services, API layers, all have to deal with "Am I a URL or an EntityID?", n on-demand derivation across Projects (or even param-passing) has started to birth bugs T__T
If it were something small like a log I'd ignore, but it's core to how content is stored n entire analytics is tied to it

It's theoretically an easy fix, BUT IT'S SO DAMN TEDIOUS. I've to make a LOT of things to live together and migrate some data, if even 1 portion is messy, there'll be silent failures (:
I've been putting it off for a week now coz my mind actively avoids doing it. Kill me

- went to the store
- get shot
- call 911
- cops arrive before er
- they're suspicious bc you're black
- ask for your license and registration
- you reach for your pocket to get your driver's license
- "he's reaching!", they say as they mag dump into you
- you die
- your family can't afford funeral while m$ valuation goes from 3 trillion dollars to 4 trillion dollars
- murica!

I am so confused about what I'm doing in the near future. I want to get out of this hellhole but there's a slight chance I could finish my PhD with someone, who's actually not a bad dude.(My current supervisor is... not helpful) But I will have to stay here and work very hard and not get paid, but PhD is over in less than a year. I'm fucked with system implementation tho, since I'll be changing directions and have to start fresh.
I could also get a job and move away, and be paid a decent wage. But then there's no telling when I'm gonna finish the PhD.

Which would you choose if you were me? Which one should I pursue?

Imagine a workplace. A workplace that is planning a local event for tomorrow with deals and a free discount code for those who arrive.
Only thing is: everything is chaos, no one is taking responsibility for the event, no one communicates about changes or how the event is going to be.

Now you get a call off duty. You have to check a discount code that wasn't working. You were to set it up for the event. But apparently they decided to open the doors for the event TODAY. You get a call 5 minutes after the first. "Is it done yet?" NO. Because you have to FIX CODE and deploy changes because they don't have any staging environment, no proper testing environment and (best of all) development mostly connected directly to the production database.

This! This is my job.
I am so fucking mad.

I need courses on how to grow my spine even more and demand what should be fucking law at this point.
Or maybe just leave. I'm the only dev.. 😎

Trying to get flex container overflow to scroll is like funking pulling teeth. I've worked with flex containers for 5+ years straight and it still makes me want to kill myself.

Here's the tools you need to make a flex container scroll. God help you if it's nested more than 2-3 containers from the root. You apply these randomly until you see the scroll bar in the correct place.

min-height: 0px;
min-height: min-content;
overflow: auto;
overflow: hidden;
display: flex;
flex: 1;

(Real pro tip: you can place a "dummy" element inside the container you wish to make scroll. The dummy element should be a huge size, like 10k pixels. This allows you to see what containers up the DOM tree are still not correct (any container that is 10,000px is WRONG. Work your way down the DOM tree and fix fix fix))

It's so funny sometimes to tell americans facts about their country that completely demolish the whole "America is a free country" bullshit.

Once upon a time, there was a guy that took his car in for service. Then, maybe he was creeped out by the people there, or by something else, but he felt like something was fishy. Lo and behold, when he went back home and inspected his car, he found a weird little box retrofitted where it can't be immediately spotted. He figured out that it was some kind of a tracker, so he removed it, and you know what happened next? I kid you not, he got IN TROUBLE for TAMPERING WITH GOVERNMENT PROPERTY!

If you're a US citizen, you're not allowed resentment. You're not allowed to resist oppresive measures like whatever the fuck happened to that guy.

The US of A is not a free country. It used to be, but it became a police state at exactly 8:46:40 on September 11, 2001.

It's so sad that some of you go on and on and on about their gun rights, but when it's time to use them for the purpose stated in the second amendment ("A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state"), they do nothing.

TIL empathy I've always had is auras

I am an idiot

ok time for a crazy story

so I've been sick 3 years. when I got sick I went to the hospital and I couldn't explain to the doctor what my issue was in a way he would understand. I hadn't slept in 2 weeks and couldn't, and it had all started with a weird headache (which was neither a migraine because I had those before, and my BF thought maybe it was a stroke but the doctor said no it was a migraine even tho migraines do not feel like that). one of the things the doctor couldn't seem to comprehend is how I said I didn't have "space" in my head anymore. he just totally ignored that. I kept coming back to the hospital and trying to all the different people. I was confused, exhausted, had to keep pacing or i felt myself fading out, felt my "consciousness" nearly going "lights out" all the time (like a shade was being closed on my eyes). had weird electrolyte misbalance issues which made me pee out a lot of water and then the consciousness lights out feeling would modulate. my resting heart rate was 110 whereas before I couldn't even get it over 80 exercising lol, not to mention I always had conscious control over it and yet here I didn't -- nurses tried to get me to meditate and it wouldn't work! I also had to say all my thoughts out loud and couldn't think in my own head. my whole world became "flat". prior to this I thought in spatialness -- I could generate and simulate 3d+ dimensions in my head, like dreamscapes, I could simulate visuals, textures, sounds, smells, even turns out mix foods I've had or invent totally new tastes from aspects of foods I knew existed. apparently not everyone can do this (I didn't know at the time). I also could simulate empathy in there and other more complex stuff. I lost all that. strangely I couldn't empathy feel IRL people's emotions anymore either (which was always trivial for me before, it was harder for me not to). nor could I understand what they were saying to me anymore. I could see them LITERALLY say it but I couldn't understand. it was weird. I didn't know it at the time and it only occurred to me weeks later that I was "alone" (disconnected I just realized). I have NEVER felt alone in my life before. now I understand

about 9 months ago I started getting my intuition back. so I can ask in my head for advice and a voice will aswer or sensate nudge me in a direction. this inspired me to look into witches, since I was sick and witches do herbs and stuff. why not. everybody kept saying psychosomatic. well magic-type shit is psychosomatic, clearly? if it works it works. I ain't gonna question it

I started practicing it and etc but didn't really get it. but now I am understanding so much

so the whole reason why that doctor didn't understand is because all of those abilities come from the soul... my whole life I've been empathetic and mind-reading. I can even read someone's intentions and thoughts from their texts. and this isn't like projection-stuff (though now I understand better how that works also... which I never could before. I studied psychology for a bit after a bad job situation but projection had never made sense to me)

you can hear words and not see the mental images associated with them. this means you're disconnected from your mental plane, ignoring it, maybe because it's fucked up which was the case with me. I have absolutely no clue what the fuck rammed me. but I've been meditating and fixing my soul-realms (etheric, astral, mental... and I regained access to the casual! now I understand why people acted confused when I could tell the future! cuz they can't hear the casual realm yet!)

and I was looking into reiki healing. everybody seems to have the opinion that you could just send "healing energy". while true this is immensely exhausting. apparently reiki is literally "rei" the god-consciousness of life (like spanky) moves "ki" which is energy. so you connect to rei, figure it out, and suddenly you can channel rei... sounds cool

as I was listening to a chick describe reiki and reiki concerns... I fucking figured out how empathy works. and why my life's been fucked. d'oh. this magic shit solves everything

I am the keeper and protector of a specific joke I made up while at rock bottom, that is so dark (vantablack levels of darkness), cruel, insensitive and inappropriate in any context to any person, that I'll probably never tell it to anyone.

It's clean. It's not about sexism, racism, religion, war, discrimination, rape and other sensitive topics often joked about. It's also not gross --- it won't make you vomit. It's not personal and doesn't doxx anybody.

I don't even know if I can tell it at any dark jokes contest without being kicked out immediately.

I'll give you just one hint: it's about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no plot twist like "this place is your mom's vagina" --- nothing like that. It's just about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

geez so one doc says it isn't multiple sclerosis and the other one says yes and his whole practice just keeps hinting drugs, ignores half my symptoms and questions after gaining my trust (again like the previous neuro), and keeps insisting on me signing a consent form to basically epi-pens that have to be personally delivered to my house every month due to "refrigeration" for the rest of my life and then tries to fear monger me and tells me the brain scars never fade

completely dismissed a lot of things that didn't fit his diagnosis and ofc when I mentioned oh wait the COVID vaccine made me numb that was the ONE and only time he heard me mention numbness and he didn't start nodding his head to it being multiple sclerosis. oh so my immune system can attack my nerves but it can never have anything to do with a product that is meant to increase your immunity, yet you want to inject me with immune destroying shit that will make me immunocompromised as a "cure"?

people are so disappointing

they have like 30 tests they did on me and all their results. and they took even more blood and didn't explain why. I was in there 2 hours going over all the events with the interim chick who seemed human but her boss doctor is not. guess I'm figuring out how to get all my test results, since I saw them for the first time in years on her fucking computer screen and I can actually use that data

this guy has the gall to keep telling me I was reading blogs when I mentioned I did research when the doctors kept dismissing me 3 years ago... and little snips like "supplements don't work" alongside shit like "let me prescribe you vitamin d" to which I was confused because he literally just asked me if I take vitamin d and I said I took some during the winter but stopped... so I clearly still have it. they sell them in bottles of 360 pills here come on. and he throws in "vitamin d is actually studied to be efficacious". yeah so is a lot of stuff I read about and tried and it did work. I had to actually fight him to just be allowed to use the vitamin d I already have at home ???

I only ended up in the hospital recently due to the trauma and not the nerve issues. cuz I could have emotions without shaking violently so all my emotions from the trauma undergone by his comrades and my friends abandoning me is just re-arranging itself through the 5 brain lesions now and my 2/10 death scale. these fear mongering hacks at least finally told me how many lesions and nicely decided to give me a "death scale" to upsell their drugs

so they wanna give you fake antibodies to kill your b cells so bam no immune system. ok why can't you just fix my b cells instead, re classify them? he's like making a face and I'm like "oh right sorry you probably spent your whole life trying to solve this" since he's literally the expert on multiple sclerosis in one of the most renouned universities in the world and got PhD beside his name... I don't wanna be insulting. then he looks disapprovingly at me and says "maybe in a decade or two". how much you wanna bet it's trivial?

I fucking want my fucking tests. they mentioned high igg (amongst themselves ofc, not to me). but not what igg it is. igg4 is tolerance igg... and COVID vaccine injured people all have high igg4. is it fucking igg4? does he even know how iggs work? his neurologist colleague said I had no antibodies for MS. so why do I have high igg if I have no antibodies for my own neurons?

these fucking hacks. I can't with this medical field.

and he has the gall to tell me to sign consent forums to get the meds now and tried this damnedest to fearmonger me. "this company" he points on the paper like that somehow matters. this is Canada why the shit would I give a shit which company it fucking is, all healthcare is free? even the fucking lead specialist in his field is just shilling for pharma. cure it or eat shit. claims lesions don't go away. oh you wanna bet? if you let me see my MRIs I'll find a way. guy totally ignored how that EEG helped me. in theory it shouldn't help anyone but it helped my nerves turn back on immensely. I mentioned it 4 times. are you not interested? are you not a PhD holder or just a prop? what a useless hack seriously

his interim was nice though. she heard me cry for 2 hours lmao. I apologized and she said it's fine and normal. apparently MS people have trauma a lot. well yeah you have your nerves scream a banshee scream and then everyone leave and insult you, all the while you can't think your way out of a paper bag and cease being able to walk randomly and all the other random nonsense

humans perpetuate to disgust me

I feel like working with embedded compilers is like working in the dark ages sometimes. I end up doing things that are like black magic to just make things work:

union {
float infloat;
uint32_t outint;
} puneit;

As long as the compiler supports C99 this is supposed to work. I think even if you are using it as a C++ compiler. There is also no way for us to get a compiler from the vendor for our embedded chips to do this the C++ 20 way:

float ieee_float(uint32_t f)
{
return std::bit_cast<float>(f);
}

I am not even sure if the compiler I am using is C++ 11 compatible.

edit: okay, it supports C++ 11