Terry Davis used algorithms to worship god. Now we worship the algorithm.

I'm a proud man, but I'm not such a fan of my own farts that I can't admit when I maybe should have listened to other people's advice earlier.

After having been convinced of the scope of impact of AI by someone I respect, I started playing with the Jetbrains AI tools. I am impressed at its ability to process my code and give actually helpful input and to consolidate documentation into a form that is concise and helpful.

I finally get what people mean when they say it saves time.

A couple things that truly warmed me up to it is, one:
I wanted to know if I could return a string, float array, whatever, from c++ to a python script. I was assured the answer was yes, but I just COULD NOT get it to work, so I gave up on it. I asked the question to the Jetbrains AI (4o in this case) and it gave me what I needed, and now I can return a string from c++ to python no problem. There are a lot of little questions like this that I gave up on that I now have to explore again, which is both exciting and annoying, because I already have a thousand hobbies.

And two:
I am working on an html email. It's a mess of tables and text and inline styles. Compared to the markup I'm used to writing, it's tedious to trudge through to make even simple changes. I was able to successfully instruct it to make a specific copy change, while respecting the document's indenting, all on the first try.

I will forever maintain that it will enable a generation of drones that don't understand how to do simple things and will atrophy the skills of otherwise capable people that use it as a crutch.

I will also always maintain that its foundation is built on mass theft and is a monument to the uneven application of intellectual property protection laws. But with DeepSeek coming out and having done the same thing to them, I find myself enjoying the turnabout. I'm also amused that I coincidentally jumped into the pool right as things got interesting.

All that said, as a reference tool, like Google and Wikipedia used to be, it's not the force of pure evil I held it as. It is actually very useful and if used responsibly on an individual level, can be an amazing productivity tool and can even teach its users new things.

I might have ranted this before on an old account 1-2 years back.

In my year of my career, a guy needed help on git operations. He wanted to push his code and create a pull request or whatever.

And I somehow fucked up and wiped his entire day's work.

Guy started spasming and moaning but not in a good way. He was clearly under distress.

I remember it so vividly.

Makes me laugh, every, goddamn time.

A 5-minute tutorial to register a fucking timesheet in your old-ass corporate shit tool: https://vimeo.com/1045331789/.... And I kid you not you need to convert worked hours to days so if you worked 6 hours write 0.75. Also it needs to be submitted 5-10 days in advance of the end of the month. If you are 1 hour late they will spam you and your manager, like WTF

This corporate behemoth of an IT consulting company I do (sub)contracting via is really stretching how draconian its timesheet policies can be. This is only one of the 4 timesheets I need to manually sync every month and coincidentally care the least about.

Every year they keep adding extra dumb rules that supposedly help managing their records. The moral of the story is I might quit my job for the first time due to the intermediate company's timesheets policies.

Week : 72 ( Year 1 )

How was the weekend?

What’s something a guy/girl has done (intentional or not) that instantly made you think, “Wow, he/she is different in a good way?

Previous Week : https://devrant.com/rants/12627389

I wonder whether this has gotten here yet but it knocked me out. I don't write in trap English but I'm a sucker for memes. Imagine how bored he must have been to start documenting legacy code without the urge to refactor. Just "vibing"

I opened the backlog today and found a bug assigned to me.

the bug basically describing that the images are not loading on the app, I take one look at the response and find the images url are sent as ip address.

I mention this to the tester and with a straight face they say "well why is it working on my laptop?" the laptop that's connected to their company's network.

god why am I even doing this.

Here is my idea for a time machine which can only send one bit of information back in time.

@Wisecrack has asked me about it and I didn’t want to write it in comments because of the character limit.

So here we go.

The DCQE (delayed-choice quantum eraser) is an experiment that has been successfully performed by many people in small scale.
You can read about it on wikipedia but I'll try to explain it here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

First I need to quickly explain the double slit experiment because DCQE is based on that.
The double slit experiment shows that a particle, like a photon, seems to go through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself as a wave to finally contribute to an interference pattern when hit on a screen. Many photons will result in a visible interference pattern.
However, if we install a detector somewhere between the particle emitter an the screen, so that we know which path the particle must have taken (which slit it has passed through), then there will be no interference pattern on the screen because the particle will not behave as a wave.
For the time machine, we will interpret the interference pattern as bit 1 and no interference pattern as bit 0.

Now the DCQE:
This device lets us choose if we know the path of the particle or if we want wo erase this knowledge. And we can make this decision after the particle hit the screen (that is the "delayed" part), with the help of quantum entanglement.
How does it work?
Each particle send out by the emitter will pass through a crystal which will split it into an entangled pair of particles. This pair shares the same quantum state in space and time. If we know the path of one of the particle "halves", we also know the path of the other one. Remember the knowledge about the path determines if we will see the interference pattern. Now one of the particle "halves" goes directly into the screen by a short path. The other one takes a longer path.
The longer path has a switch that we can operate (this is the "choice" part). The switch changes the path that the particle takes so that it either goes through a detector or it doesn't, determining if it will contribute to the intererence pattern on the screen or not. And this choice will be done for the short path particle-half because their are entangeld.
The path of the first half particle is short, so it will hit the screen earlier.
After that happened, we still have time to make the choice for the second half, since its path is longer. But making the choice also affects the first half, which has already hit the screen. So we can retroactively change what we will see (or have seen) on the screen.
Remember this has already been tested and verified. It works.

The time machine:
We need enough photons to distinguish the patterns on the screen for one single bit of information.
And the insanely difficult part is to make the path for the second half long enough to have something practical.
Also, those photons need to stay coherent during their journey on that path and are not allowed to interact with each other.
We could use two mirrors, to let the photons bounce between them to extend the path (or the travel duration), but those need to be insanely pricise for reasonable amounts of time.
Just as an example, for 1 second of time travel, we would need a path length about the distance of the moon to the earth. And 1 second isn't very practical. To win the lottery we would need at least many hours.
Also, we would need to build the whole thing multiple times, one for each bit of information.

How to operate the time machine:
Turn on the particle emitter and look at the screen. If you see an interference pattern, write down a 1, otherwise a 0.
This is the information that your future you has sent you.
Repeat this process with the other time machines for more bits of information.
Then wait the time which corresponds to the path length (maybe send in your lottery numbers) and then (this part is very important) make sure to flip the switch corresponsing to the bit that you wrote down, so that your past you receives that info in the past.

I hope that helps :)

A software developer's experience life cycle:

0 - 5 years: attempt to replicate what your current senior is preaching, assuming that's the right way. Reading "Clean code" and preach it as gospel, even though you don't practice any of it.

6-12 years: gained the belief that you are better off coming up with solutions yourself, usually "sophisticated" and "elegant" which to everyone else (and also yourself a few years later) is an over-complicated inheritance ridden shit show. You have realised the "Clean code" movement is actually a cult but still believe code reuse is the holy grail.

13+ years: finally realized that simplicity and pragmatism is the most sensible way for most software development. Code is now readable, maintainable and functional. You took the few good bits from "Clean code" and ignored the extremism. These are the golden years.

The problem is most developers jump ship and stop developing before reaching the golden years, thus resulting in most software projects looking like shit.

Unpopular opinion, but it doesn't make it untrue.

People always complain about node_modules, at least it works most of the time, unlike god-damn python AI packages. I can't install https://github.com/shashikg/... because for some inane reason it requires a LLVM wrapper that in turn wants to compile LLVM manually. Not just manually YOU, the filthy dev that wants to use this holy library, must go and compile it yourself. And don't you forget to apply the holy patches.

God the code in AI projects always sucks - last time I looked at voice gen it required me to figure out what the fuck it was doing and go hunt down the libraries manually and still have to vendor in half the library because they used a library that had a minor migration but was 2 major versions behind or similar issue.

Why do science bros write such shit code that always wants to reach into things completely unnecessarily. Just write your shit properly.

Is this why they always have docker image...

This $1 mofo created more engineers than Harvard or Stanford.

I work at a research institute (part of probably the largest research body in whole Europe). And it's driving me nuts. Forget about the lack of interest to improve yourself in terms of software skills or basic digital hygiene so that others don't have to pick up the mop and clean after you. The ancient mindset is what is making me curse everyday. Only a few years ago we switched to GitLab. Before that versioning, if at all a known term, was done explicitly via email messages - code snippets in the message's body, versions in the subject of message attachments...A freaking nightmare. Constantly broken links to files and folders on our NAS since some people have never heard of relative paths or writing even the tiniest bit of support for configuration files in their software so that a tool does not completely brake the moment you transfer it onto another system or - God forbid - the person leaves and there is no information whatsoever what's where. Everyone is complaining about the clutter on our servers but no one is willing to actually clean their own (not someone else's) crap. If you mention to someone something like "Can you please pack your stuff in this GitLab repo with this folder structure, so that I have an easier time integrating it into the main software that we need to ship to our customers in a few days?" all you get as a response is a blank facial expression and the occasional "I have my own processes. Don't bother me with this!". I have been trying for almost 4 years now and its budging a little bit but the lack of support is abysmal. My boss, as enthusiastic as it is, is incapable of putting his foot down. The fact that I have two heads of my team (one not really but acting like it) does not improve the situation at all especially since both are pulling in a completely different direction. We are literally wasting hundreds of thousands of euros of taxpayers' money to buy new hardware that people are either inadequate to use to its fullest potential (think buying the latest GPU to play Minesweeper) or not having even the smallest clue on what they need it for. And we are always complaining about our budget! You don't invest a couple of hours to investigate how PyTorch can work in a distributed manner on multiple CPUs, GPUs and even systems, yet demand you get a new server for 80K with a more powerful GPU and CPU to run your crap models on so that you can publish a half-ass paper that nobody cares for let alone will ever bother reading (beside the AI reviewers).

Why is windows still dog shit on this day the 15th of January in the year of our Lord 2025.

I would batter this nigga if I could

My database migrations are failing after setting a 3 character max length on an integer field with default value 200. I attempt to investigate why and after numerous back and forth, this dude reveals 200 is in fact greater than 998

Teams amirite

Need help from fellow devs.
It's been at least 3-4 years and it's getting worse.
I keep being demotivated, forgetful, inconclusive and not on point with code. (Yeah I know, I rant about angular, but that's a 10 years hate).

Today I'm supposed to do some table component that has pagination, buttons and shit in angular (yeah.... from scratch, they want to design the whole thing from 0) and I'm getting all confused by managing pagination, input to angular components, and all the simple stuff that I'VE DONE COUNTLESS TIMES.

I keep forgetting details, small meetups (under 20 mins) where we discuss lot of small details of implementation and I loose a lot of the details, forget a lot of stuff and have an hard time to put all the info togheter in a meaningful group of informations to have all the information available in an usable way at the moment of developing code.

Often I get rage outbursts because I don't understand things like before and I have to read and write down every fucking thing.
Often I get discouraged because I get lost in the details of big projects.

I have a lot of experience and that's what keeps me afloat.

I got panick attacks for small things and I never had panick attacks.

I feel I would need to stay away at all from programming for 2 months to have some passion back in it.

My mind is exhausted.

Some new brilliant colleagues joined the company and so I feel compelled to compete
and it works solely thanks to my superior experience.

I feel like a total dumbass and mentally challenged now.

Is it burnout? is it depression? What is it?

Been staring at boost::asio to see if I need to thread the code. I am writing a plugin for skse. I am finding that Papyrus has its own threading now. It also has a programmable OnUpdate function that I can schedule every millisecond if I want. So I can have it process the asio context periodically. I think I can get away with non-threaded now. Just use async calls and service the event loop for this. My original plugin for OBSE used threading because there was just not support for it in the scripting at the time. With skse and papyrus I can actually thread things if I want. This really simplifies my plugin quite a bit. The throughput won't be high. I just want to service the networking portion at least every 10th of a second.

Another project with legacy code got just dusted off at work. Shits fucked beyond recognition! We got:
- Rando variable names that mean nothing
- Timers running with a cycle time of 2.5ms if you start them with the multiplier 1.
- An Interrupt routine thats 300 lines long.
- Another interrupt thats starting an ADC conversion and waiting for it to complete before returning.
- For loops that start with one and subtract one from the iterator in the loop
- Every value that would normally be expressed as a regular number is written down in Hex. Eg: if(val==0x05)
- State machine built without writing down which state is which. Its just a number. (In hex obviously!)
- All running on a Microcontroller you cant debug on.
- Using a compiler no one has ever heard of before.
- Weird ass Port manipulations
- 15 different .hex and .elf files with no clue whats in them.
- No version control
- We tried explaining the code to a monkey and it hanged itself.

Welcome to PLC development! Your first thing to do is find out whta these dozen global variables do that are used by several tasks in odd places.

SCADA we have systems similar to cobol in banking but pay you 80% less to maintain it.

Just built in half a day a OpcUA data logger with Grafana, InfluxDB and Telegraf. The same functionality was developped over like 4 years in house. Mostly because no one here is from IT but from OT (operational technology).

why structs/objects when can tuples everything

More of a rant in meme form than a meme. OC.

Github is creating nice quality movies on YT. But the content itself, to vomit from it. AI this, AI that. It's like 100% advertisement. It could've been so beautiful with showcases of projects that are trending and stuff. They don't give a fuck about what the viewer wants. Never seen a github video? This is why, it doesn't show up in recommendations indeed, even when subscribed. Nobody presses like on their shit. Idiots

I'm writing a devrant like site, so a kind of forum that supports live chat under every article. Login will be just username and password to stay anonymous. Email is optional for password reset. Also it won't have password requirements. Who cares if user uses insecure password. I do like the devrant avatar thing. I will use the ducky generator instead. So everyone on the site is a custom duck. K-SASS prolly never expected his generator to be used anywhere. The requirement of this site is that it scales very well. I have db calls of 0.006s, this is for persistent data only and will be used by all site instances. I expect that it can handle many clients concurrent as long I do not return more than 30 rows or so. Events get handled by a self written pubsub server.

All sounds great and development goes fine. But why is this a rant? Because the same thing as always is biting me, I can't design a site at all. I know how but I don't have any feeling for design at all making me almost incapable of building an attractive site. The only thing I can 'design' is an application in bootstrap or smth. I spend so much time one design while I don't like to do it ironically. But looks of site is almost as important as an good working site. Good working site doesn't get used if looks bad in many casee. This is since the start of my career an issue and it sucks that I appearantly can't deliver a whole site on my own meeting my standards.

My backend work is top notch tho. Btw, this application is not to be an alternative for devrant. I do not think I can attract more users than it already has and I've seen two communities disappearing once because someone decided to make a new one, took half of community with him and both communities died after short while.

End product of this project is a working project, not a live site hosted somewhere. It's pure about mixing mostly self written tech to get the best performance. Reinventing wheel on many levels. I wanted maybe to do the site in C but decided that it's way to much work for the value. I change the site so rapid since I don't have decent plan that python aiohttp is the best choice in amount of writing it yourself and fast. It's very lightweight.

More a story than a rant, sorry

A company weekend in a homestead with a bathhouse and a cold pond.

After a good bathing [~x6 cycles] I'm in my bedroom [left the party early, really want to enjoy the calm and silence]. I thought it would be a good idea to charge my ITware overnight.

Apparently there's only 1 wall socket in the room. And now I have to choose: whether I want an electric heater to basically stay alive until the morning, or a full phone and lappy battery in the morning...

I made the choice

FUCKING AI ASSISTANTS - THOSE MANDATORY, NO-YOU-CANNOT-OPT-OUT AI SHOVELWARE ON EVERY FUCKING SERVICE OR APP.
THOSE FUCKERS OOM'D MY PC IN THE MIDDLE OF A RUSH.
Sorry for the excessive caps, just needed to vent while the BLOODY AI BLOATWARE INFESTED CORPORATE MACHINE reboots for the FUCKING 6TH TIME ALREADY.
I hope the ENTIRE AI BUSINESS (in its current form) OOM's ITSELF.

I think I should use Arch instead. I don't have any intentions to stop the revenue tho.

What's up with all these Bitcoin recovery scammers today? 🧐

Wizard James can go and fuck himself.