"voluntary is a state you impose on someone until they give their consent"

> By designing nudges that align with students' goals and cognitive processes, educators can effectively support students in reaching their full potential and improving their academic performance

remember kids. your full potential is dictated by others, not by you

I am creeped out and I hate society

— hi, how’s it hanging?
— a little bit to the left bro, why?

Reminder for Europe meet up.

I suggest August 23rd, Amsterdam. Let's meet at centraal and go from there.

... I expect 5 of you to show up, btw, with one being late and one being very very late. 😐

I hate Outlook! It's a mail client from hell, its diabolity now powered by an intrusive Artificial Idiocy interferring with any mail I try to write, popping up undesired autocomplete suggestions and driving me mad! Microsoft, by forcing your CoPilot-shit on your users, you have degenerated the entire MS office package into a FUCKING USELESS UX!

In my company I now have 3 browsers.

Chrome for company stuff that only works in Chrome.

Safari for company stuff that only works in Edge or Safari.

And Firefox for actual work.

🤡

Everything development related I see recently are related to LLMs and I’m starting to get sick of it :(

My wife went to do some work for a charity. They "got her the best computer available". It was a poor mangled MacBook whose better days were somewhere in the dawn of the last decade.
She tries to type anything... and only gibberish appears on screen.

She comes to me, absolutely me puzzled. I try to type anything... gibberish. I boot up in safe mode, everything is OK.

I look around for system configs... there is a custom keyboard mapping enabled by default.
We check the weird stains on the keyboard... they are regular and in all keys. Like if there used to be adhesive stickers on the keys, and those stickers were later removed.

I boot up again... and type "q". It becomes "a". I type "w". It becomes "b". I dread typing "e". Sure as bug, it becomes "c".
By the love of byte, someone asked for a custom keyboard layout... IN FUCKING ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

It was easy enough to change the layout after that, but the weirdness continues: my wife asked around, and apparently the laptop used to belong to some old dude... who was convinced there were characters missing from his keyboard. Apparently he could never find them in a regular QWERTY layout.

I wish I could give some encouraging words for the kid who came up with the solution. Working around technophobes is a drying art, that needs to be rewarded.

What I’d give for a modern version of gladiator fights. And no, not to watch people die. The belief that they massacred themselves in the arenas is hollywood propaganda. Many fighters werent even slaves. And had pretty high status

Food for thought, if rust-analyzer can infer the type, why the FUCK can't rustc?

is it just me, or is reading LLM-generated text really annoying?

It feels like I'm reading the same thing over and over again, in different contexts about different things.

My anxiety runs on an event loop:
while(alive) { overthink(); }
What’s your callback function to escape the void?
(Mine’s () => { orderDumplings(); })

We "engineered a prompt" (in other words, crapped a very poorly written paragraph using only short sentences) that gathers many arguments pro and against the usage of AI to code our production data pipelines.
Most of the "pro" arguments are variations of "we'll get fired if we don't use this crap in something".

Prompted with the whole argument, even Gemini thinks we should not use AI to write our code. Nowadays, we use Gemini mostly to justify why we shouldn't use Gemini.

Seriously. We made the whole setup so that any PO who demands AI has to convince the AI it is a good idea. I'll admit, the AI is doing a good job to deter people who want to use it. It hasn't cracked even once. Not that it matters, anyway. POs just ignore what the AI says and organically write orders telling us to use it anyway.

My favourite passtime is asking awkward questions I already know the answer to and seeing how long it takes the person to work out that they fucked up, that I know they fucked up and how monumentally they fucked up.

Dear GPT, dear Gemini,
cher Claude, cher Copilot,
thanks for wasting my time
with your contradictory advice!
I could as well
roll a dice.

Incompetence. Incompetence everywhere.

Project Managers will ask six figures salaries to whip an entire team of developers because it's fundamental to add AI to a fucking toilet by the end of the week, then walk around like they understood everything about life. Given how that's what they do for a living and we're not currently gunning them down on sight, I can't say they're entirely wrong.

why... WHY do I always attract all sorts of weird problems...

I feel like it makes me look incompetent :/

Like this side-gig. I had a client who brought us essentially half a rack (20 blade servers, 7 units of network equipment) and asked us to spin it up. No passwords, no topology - nothing. It was my first such "project".

So I'm setting it all up, using chatgpt and notions of vlan theory from college years ago. I managed to make smth work. Went away for the rest of the day. Hours later I come back -- no longer can connect to ovpn running on a MikroTik router. wtf... connect to office router's vpn, winbox via mac to the router to see wtf. Everything seems alright, except when I try to `/ip route print` it just hangs there. Tried a few times. -- same result. As if routes just got borked while noone was touching it. Found someone who's working with networks wtf, he said he's NEVER seen this happening. A router reboot sorted this out. That's weird problem #1.

I finished reverse-engineering and re-setting up the networking, sketched a topology with patching scheme and asked colleagues to take it all to the DC. They did it, connected it all up. 5 nodes aren't accessible via network. So I connect remotely to the router's openvpn and try to see what's up. Indeed, some servers are reachable, others aren't; even though MT switch (router's downlink) sees those servers plugged in with link up, servers don't see the link. I noticed some ports aren't trunking some VLANs. I started adding those ports when the winbox connection dropped out of the blue. 5-4-3-2-1-reconnecting... it reconnected. Yayy!! But wait, where is everything...? All interfaces -- gone (physical ones too). All IPs -- gone. All routes -- gone. Everything's gone. Half a minute later I'm disconnected again. The switch IP is no longer pingable. Servers plugged into it aren't reachable either. That's weird problem #2.

Then I figured I might try to see whether I can see anything from the router level. Try to ssh to it -- attempt was dropped, as if 22/tcp was closed. wtf? It was working in the office. winbox into it -- yayy, that works. Try to open a terminal via winbox -- a dialog pops up "Terminal <1> - not permitted (9)". wtf..? I Google this error up, it says that user is a member of group that does not have telnet and ssh permission. Indeed, I loog into groups -- the group 'admin' does not have them. Try to add them -- also not permitted. And I'm the 'admin' user, a single user in the router after a factory reset. How the hell else do I change permissions if even admin is flipped a finger.
That's weird problem #3

And now I look like an incompetent prick with two left hands who is only breaking shit.
And it's been like that my whole career

Why... How... ffs, that's getting annoying. Maybe I should downgrade myself to a QA. Problems find me themselves, I don't even have to look for them

NAGARJUNA CEMENT

We had a teambuilding last Friday. We went indoor karting and it was a lot of fun. My project manager does not have a driving license and it did show.

The karts have a boost button (electric karts) and my project manager used it before a turn and then slammed into wall. Now he got a few bruised ribs haha

Also, it's still funny to me that I was part of the teambuilding during my resignation but i'm not gonna complain about that. :D

age++

We have jestdotty, but where are chaidotty and mochadotty?

"Attending" WWDC 2025 ("attending" is a stretch). I'm starting this thread as a multi-rant (comments count).

To start it off, WWDC 2025 is, like all these other virtual 2020's WW's, BORING... World Wide Dull Cinema.. It's like being in developer-solitary-confinement. After going to the in-person ones, I can safely say that it is hard to care about anything in WWDC beyond the keynote...

And when Tim gets on there /still/ trying to extoll the virtues of it being virtual, it is pretty clear that they are trying to compensate...

1. no collaboration
2. uninspiring without your peers
3. random because there is no real schedule
4. boring because you don't meet anyone new
5. career limiting, can't trade vCards & resumes
6. cringy trying too hard announcements

(just sayin', love you guys but come on here...)

WWDC 2019 and prior were awe-inspiring. WWDC pre 2020 collected enough IQ in one place to make the world wobble on its axis.

WWDC needs to go back to in-person /with/ streaming for those of us who can't make it. Change the venue to Las Vegas for crying out loud, they can handle the *worlds* *largest* *trade* *show* (aka CES) there... WWDC is small potatoes by comparison.

Dear Windows,

How hard is it to actually update and shut down? No, don't restart. If I wanted you to restart I would have chosen that option.

Sincerely,
The last decade

Opened devRant after exactly 4 years. Brings back so many memories!!
Hello again, devRant community! What's life like rn?

Stack Overflow has really gone to shit. I had a bad experience with a recent Qt6/Python question, or really two questions both of which were closed and deleted!

I was just going to ignore it, but some recent talk on the Fediverse made me write up a full post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

Dear employers, DO NOT FUCK WITH A PERSON'S DOCTORS. My doctors are paid to help me. If that means helping to sue your asses, they'll do it in a heart beat. Don't give them motivation.

My employer made dubious claims to my doctors in an occupational health referral. I've requested a copy of the referral. In the hopes I might not get a copy of the referral they've pushed this to my doctors as they don't want to give it to me. Because they've lied. Or they think I won't jump through the hoops to get access to MY OWN MEDICAL RECORDS.

Gotta say, Arduino IDE is a hobbyware at best, but in my not so humble opinion, is a completely pile of chocolate pudding.

OMG, it can only target one type of hardware at a time. It has to apparently be completely reconfigured when you use different hardware. Libraries and the like that are loaded for one board cannot be loaded and available if you are building for a different board. I mean seriously, what the ... is wrong with these developers.

Imagine if Xcode would allow only one library load for any given hardware target.

💩ware.

Don't get me going with the editor... the inept "debugger" which NEVER works.

They need to fix this hobbyware or shut it down.

Wtf is up with some education providers? Even the de facto industry leaders have half-assed courses. Not many are super high quality. They sound like they are speaking into a mic, forced to do it. Nothing like YouTube, more like middle-aged, depressed men with no life with no energy. I'd much rather learn elsewhere. This is akin to how some university professors give some lectures. Where are the passionate teachers of our world?

The ones that I enjoyed were: MIT, Harvard and Stanford. Perhaps it has to do with money. lol.

Tbh, ostream is a nice guy. Once you get over his

- Racism towards Germans
- Racism towards Jews
- Closeted racism towards anyone, really
- Psychotic episodes of rage
- Borderline criminal tendencies
- Bipolar disorder

It's actually fun to talk to him. You have to invest time and patience though.

Love you ostream bro.