How nice it is to work when almost no notifs and everybody is off. No slack distractions.

When you heard so much about A.I. that you think 'code assist' in Eclipse means A.I., when it really just means local docs contextual pop-up. lol

The hoops you have to go through to summarize a document even using LLMs with 100s of billions of parameters is insane. Even when you get something that "works" with RAG, all you are really getting is a summary of the distilled version of the document, not a pure summary.

I've got a script that breaks down documents into manageable chunks with an overlap so the meaning isn't lost between paragraphs, and it works decently enough, especially when you add terms and definitions to the system prompt for things it has trouble with. But the context window is still a problem so you have to discard older entries, which means you can't correct previous items based on new entries.

Using vision models to OCR the image instead of reading in a text document seems to be working a bit better, but it relies on the image being the right size and you can't load in too many at a time.

The Orwellian irony is that A.I. agents can probably help me better at finding a job than most recruiters can. lol

This November shall be... Noirvember, i.e. watching Film Noir. Nyah, see? H'what are you saying, see?

So November is epilepsy awareness month.

People literally shaking with excitement about this.

Ain't nothing like compiler development to make you want to jump of a bridge

I went in with my childish naivety. How wrong I was... lmao

(Double rant day)

So I had a little problem and I thought, why not test a new AI tool on it.
The problem: git-rebase, but copy tags. Example: if you apply a commit with the tag G2, create a tag called G2' in the new commit.
The tool: Perplexity. I had heard good things about it.

TL;DR: Had to do it myself.

1st it told me to do it by hand.
"What about --exec?"
Oh yeah, call a bash script to do it.
"What would the script look like...?"
Ooh, like this, look.
"Ok, I see. Can we just put it all in the command? The script can be simplified, only one tag per commit that has any, and forget the echo statements."
Yeah definitely, here you are.
"It's still complex, the script can be simplified."
Yes, I can remove some parts. Now.

Great, so now I had a single command, that would do what I wanted, right?
Nope.
- It referenced files that didn't exist.
- It had badly escaped characters in the bash string.
- And after fixing that*, for some reason Git didn't accept it, even if it was well formatted, and the AI never told me that could happen.
* Mind you, fixing that took some time of reading documentation of git commands and options I never used, snooping around what was accessible in Git's internals during a rebase, rewriting the bash lines... like, I didn't even use any part of the AI solution.

Evidently Git's very hard even for AI lol
It's neither artificial nor intelligent, it's trash. 0 stars.
(I know Perplexity is not "an AI", it was most probably using ChatGPT. Can't bother to see how to check.)
Maybe I was using it wrong??

This world can fuck right off.

March of 2025. I dove into a depression as a complication of my bipolar 2. Has less mania and more I want to die episodes. I noticed this as losing all interest in everything in my life. I DIDN'T HEED THE WARNING!!!

This results in me being distracted at work and struggling to learn a new platform. It also doesn't help that my supervisor keeps pulling me off the project to work on other shit. ALL OF WHICH I COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY. They even gave me a 4% raise in March. Apparently it didn't help my depression.

We get to May and my supervisor takes away the programming tool used to program the platform I am working on (embedded processor). I complain and they say I am not getting it back. In my head I should have seen this as a fucking RED FLAG and pushed back.

Then in July the CTO says I need to have my code finished for the new platform in one month. I tell my supervisor I don't think I can (should have spoke up about the programming tool because I CAN'T TEST ANY FUCKING CODE!) He says: "I think you can do it!"

So I am trying to code blindly on a platform I can't test the code. I get to August and report I am testing code on Linux because I have no way to test on the platform. Apparently the CTO doesn't like this. So he starts sending people to walk by my office to "spy" on me because he suspects a character flaw. I don't realize this is happening until after the fact. Apparently I am on my phone too much (which is not typical, but I suspect my depression fucked me here).

I get called to a meeting with HR and my supervisor. They are firing me for performance and violating policy of using my phone outside of break times. This is August 14th. I am compliant and don't make a scene (it won't help). My supervisor is crying and the CTO made him fire me and sign everything.

The CTO also made a statement about how I was never deserving of the job title because I was never creative enough or good enough or some shit. This is the same guy that praised my past solutions for creativity and unique ways of solving the problems. The dude flat out lied and rewrote history. I even found a review from 2022 saying I was good at the role. Also, the dude gave me the damn job title. Up until this point I respected the guy. Now, I have lost all respect for him. It is one thing to fire for cause. It is another to lie about it sell the point.

On the way out the door my supervisor offered to be a reference for me. Several other people I worked with offered the same and couldn't fathom why I got fired. People I worked with for 7 years.

So I get thrown into the shittiest job market in the last 20 years. I can't find anything online or local. My fucking degree is a shit tech degree. So even though I can write decent software nobody wants to consider me because there hundreds of thousands of out of work SWEs on the market. I was already trying to recover from working at a shitty startup after losing a decent job due to a layoff. This was also affected by my un-diagnosed bipolar at the time. I made poor financial decisions because of some of my rare manic phases.

Unemployment from DOL finds that I was not at fault for being fired. They determined the company applied inconsistent policy on cell phone usage. Which is true to an extent. I have seen people take a lunch for 2 hours watching movies. Saw another dude sleep for 2 hours. Snoring and everything. But unemployment has no power other than giving me unemployment. Which isn't enough.

So now I am 3 months into job search and I find out that as much as 60% of the job postings on LinkedIn are fake. So there is a good chance that all of the jobs I applied for are fake.

My wife has a business, but it won't be enough when savings run out in 6 months. Because of the shit market I can't get a fucking job doing anything it seems.

I am tired, and the bullshit keeps piling up. I realize the only way I can survive is to create some kind of business.

I know, my perception of what happened is my perception. But if I was ever a valued employee they would have asked "What is wrong, and how can we help?" Instead I find out the CTO had harbored ill will toward me and NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME! I had asked for feedback in the past about my work and was told it was good work. I asked: "Am I too slow." The CTO said: "Your a little slow, but I don't have to worry about your code." Yet when they fired me they said I was getting complaints from other departments. But guess what? They NEVER FUCKING TOLD ME. This is the most sadistic way I have ever heard of managing people. Hold them to a standard that you never tell them about. I should have been clued into this when they fired the last guy. They never told anyone he was gone. I asked the CTO why they never told anyone. He said something about that is how that works. This is some serious mind fuck shit.

Around half a year ago I had a client... Client that told me I would be responsible for quite big system that needs to be written, that he vibecoded a lot of, and that I am supposed to use as much AI as possible and buy myself claude max plan.

Fine, at that point I needed something, anything, as I didnt had any project.

Long story short, there was 3 huge, huge repos, with tens of tousends of dead code lines. An API that half of endpoints didnt work. I started vibecoding (as requested by client, "becouse this claude AI produces shockingly good quality code" - direct client quote) and getting frustrated by what tf the AI was doing.

I was requested to take as many hours as needed to get the features delivered asap.

I managed to bend the reality to get compiling code that passes some smoke tests of some of the features. Features, that were poorly defined and I had some questions practially all the time (as the file with features was vibed also lmao), and usually anwser was something like "whatever works, mate".

It lasted 1.5 weeks. Every single day I was out of claude limit.

After 1.5 weeks client disappeared for few days, not responding, and after almost a full week I got lengthy message from him that roughly said "you are great developer, but you dont use AI enough so your velocity isnt exactly what I expected. Good luck with next projects".

Ooof. While I know it's probably worst productivity measure out there, but LoC wise, that was solid +30k in that 2 weeks, that I did indeed read through and knew it at least roughly does what it should.

Oh, and he finished the project himself with pure vibecoding, launched it, it failed immidietely as it wasnt technically sound. At least made me smile for half a second.

I will never forget trying to get Opus to follow architecture or do anything reasonably.

I rant about it for simple reason:
for some people the AI thing makes them impossibly delusional what the tool actually can do and what it is good for. Impossibly delusional. Don't be me. Don't deal with delusional clients.

Has anyone noticed ChatGPT glazing getting really bad lately? Every single one of my stupid, bone-headed fucking questions are "insightful" and "important".

FUCK you, you psychopath. Stop manipulating me.

Manager scheduled an 8:30am meeting .. then send us a message saying he was delayed dropping off his kids at school and would be 15 minutes, then showed up at 9am. 😡

Tired of vertical scroll websites.

An HR manager was knocked down (tragically) by a bus and was killed. Her soul arrived at the Pearly Gates, where St.Peter welcomed her. “Before you get settled in” he said, “We have a little problem…you see, we’ve never had a HR manager make it this far before and we’re not really sure what to do with you.”

“Oh, I see,” said the woman, “can’t you just let me in?”

“Well, I’d like to,” said St Peter, “But I have higher orders. We’re instructed to let you have a day in hell and a day in heaven, and then you are to choose where you’d like to go for all eternity.”

“Actually, I think I’d prefer heaven”, said the woman. “Sorry, we have rules…” at which St. Peter put the HR manager into the downward bound elevator.

As the doors opened in Hell she stepped out onto a beautiful golf course. In the distance was a country club; around her were many friends, past fellow executives, all smartly dressed, happy, and cheering for her. They ran up and kissed her on both cheeks, and they talked about old times.

They played a perfect round of golf and afterwards went to the country club where she enjoyed a superb steak and lobster dinner. She met the Devil (who was actually rather nice) and she had a wonderful night telling jokes and dancing.

Before she knew it, it was time to leave. Everyone shook her hand and waved goodbye as she stepped into the elevator. The elevator went back up to heaven where St. Peter was waiting for her. “Now it’s time to spend a day in heaven,” he said.

So she spent the next 24 hours lounging around on clouds, playing the harp and singing; which was almost as enjoyable as her day in Hell. At the day’s end St. Peter returned. “So,” he said, “You’ve spent a day in hell and you’ve spent a day in heaven”. “You must choose between the two.”

The woman thought for a second and replied: “Well, heaven is certainly lovely, but I actually had a better time in hell. I choose Hell.”

Accordingly, St. Peter took her to the elevator again and she went back down to hell. When the doors of the elevator opened she found herself standing in a desolate wasteland covered in garbage and filth. She saw her friends dressed in rags, picking up rubbish and putting it in old sacks. The Devil approached and put his arm around her.

“I don’t understand,” stuttered the HR manager, “The other day I was here, and there was a golf course, and a country club. We ate lobster, and we danced and had a wonderful happy time. Now all there is, is just dirty wasteland of garbage and all my friends look miserable.”

The Devil simply looked at her and smiled, “Yesterday we were recruiting you, today you’re staff.”

this isn't really a DEVrant because i don't vibe code (or even use AI tools that much), it's more of a "please don't make your app like this"

chatgpt is so fricking pathetic. the company behind it is so fricking paralyzed with fear of liability that they have made the chatbot unable to respond to any question with the slightest undertone of potential unsafety. i asked it a homework problem involving the acceleration of a 20x102mm AA cartridge. i asked it whether a wooden or Steel handle would be better for a splitting axe. i asked it if my homemade lye was safe to dump down a clogged drain. on all three occasions it said that it couldn't "help with anything that would meaningfully facilitate harm", and proceeded to just suggest consumerism or some other nonsense as a "safe alternative". like what the actual heck? life on Earth inherently has risk, that's part of human existence. nobody would enjoy being put in a bubble-wrapped room designed for maximum safety (i know from experience), a bit of risk is what keeps us happy and motivated. i'm not even mad at whatever megacorp made chatgpt, i'm just disappointed. it's like watching a freshly-lobotomized fish flop around on the ground. if anyone makes an AI or something else. please don't do this. just slap on a limitation of liability and indemnity clause into your TOS, please don't lobotomize your chatbot in the name of "safety".

Omg I hate github. Fuck microsoft I swear those leeches are ruining everything they touch. They're like reverse midas.

What the fuck is happening in 2025 where half the websites can't keep the session open?

How is it "good security practice" to require me to login every few hours?

Shit like this makes me think software has plateaued. If devs can't make a fucking session work in the big 2025, then there's no hope.

Ths is a rant:

My client codebase is a mess:
- Node version is not set, but it is "told to set it up at X version". They don't want to set it fixed because, and I quote, "it is too much of a nuisance.

- Backend has not a single fucking log, beside the mandatory error in the catch of each controller, and it states "error": error.

- Backend again: why the fuck you want typescript if all the fucking codebase uses 'any'. But the orm is sequelized and it is typed... by zod classes that are only there to check the body on the endpoints.

- Frontend is a gargantuan piece of shit with one.big state with all fucking stucl there cause someone started to do that and they just keep the snowball... touching one of the utterly big and bloated compoments its in itself an act of faith. The thing is so clusterfuck that we have some api calls duplicated like 3 or 5 times...

I feel like my dev brain is being rotten each day a bit more...

I just bought some new device that has AA bateries included, already inserted, and obviously, already leaking.
Clowns.

New Job new me.

Looks like it's pure chaos. Randomly turning on aws features until things work. Lots of money down the drain.

Oh well. It's a job.

Did any of you other nerds sort of just glide through math in school and felt inadequate once you got to the real world, like: "I can't be a real engineer, I barely understood trig!"

That was me, then I started studying the fourier transform about a week and a half ago (because I bought an Arduino and want to make real-time sound visualizations)

I found that I actually really enjoy math on my own time. Learning about complex numbers, Euler's formula, polar form, whatever whatever - it was exciting and I was doing practice problems on paper and enjoying it!

Hopefully this momentum continues. Maybe one day I can be a genuine tough-guy engineer with math skills.

Paying for youtube premium and then almost every author these days has his own freaking ads in their videos. What the fuck is this for shit. Fuck off. Greedy fuckers. Degenerates.

It's also always for products that they don't use for sure while many times claiming they do. Talking about sophisticated shit and then "Here's incogni". Wraaaahh. You know it won't help fucker. You know it you know it you know it.

Return to work with java and boy, what a daft language lol. in php, i install wamp and i'm good to go. here, i have to shill $$ to lord oracle just to play around a project i cloned that requires glassfish support. otherwise, i resort to hacks and workarounds even for local deployment. thankfully, there's payara to the rescue

after surviving this, i start mvnw clean and install and the test suite is taking 32:45mins (still not passing). I snooped around for whether the tests are hitting some remote server since i was neither prompted for local db credentials or sqlite. for some context, the stats for my recently completed php app is (00:39.592 SECONDS, Memory: 76.00 MB, 180 tests, 421 assertions). the contrast was so astronomic so i asked chatgpt, who claims mine doesn't do the heavy lifting their test does. hilarious. the php app has 3 unit tests tops. the rest spin up connections to the local mysql server using eloquent. the app is full stack so all the underlying views are being executed and tested. of course, it relies on the container for everything and mocks some services. it's not a small app either (over 20 models). it performs computation and interacts with excel sheets at some point

so what's the excuse and what's special about this language?

php always gets mocked for crawling at snail-like pace, having weak app structures, etc. they are ridiculed for discarding app instance after each request yet, chatgpt claims that's exactly what the java test is doing. ironically, the php testsuite handles this more efficiently. it's been over 3 hours now gone down the drain. i haven't opened a single page from the app let alone begun to develop

Rest assured, this might take the entire day cuz i'm worn out already

it's ALWAYS one rough distraction or the other. never in my time working with this language am i allowed to focus on the main business logic i set out to implement. ALWAYS some fire to put out in config/project setup/dependencies/linking things/some external thing missing or incompatible

why is it so difficult? it MIGHT be understandable for mobile/desktop apps but the result on web is indistinguishable from what is tenable in php. how does this brittle junkware still have such high standards and is practically held as most ideal in the programming world?

Yesterday I installed lineageOS on my old android phone, patched the kernel and rooted it so I can get docker working. Took me hours, didn't know how hard it was for docker to run on a phone.

Ended up setting up a fileserver that will be running 24/7 on my home network, should probably check if there's a kdbx compatible password manager that I can host also cuz I am tired of having to constantly manage the latest version of my db between different devices

Playing Necesse again after a lot of time (a LOT).
I love how the settlers automation works in this game. It's super easy and useful.
I always admired how this game seems to have taken all the good lessons of the games it's inspired by. I wish I felt the same about more pieces of software.

My god, I look at Suno as a whole product, besides some serious perfect AI performance, that UI. I never worked on something that smooth / advanced. But times changed a bit / also worked on different kind of software. When I worked on such stuff it must always show the totals at the bottom and everything was in columns and should be all sortable. Now, nothing sortable and there are not totals anywhere. What is way easier on performance and stuff. Actually, in options the new software downgraded in many ways, but it looks so slick and is just more intuitive. What is the point of showing the totals and stuff in the bottom and having every column sortable (what was a big issue on some columns). Everything had to be live, now it's quite common to generate a report and wait a bit or so.

But i'm really surprised by the GUI. I know how to do it while I never did, but i was just never asked. Different times I guess. Beautiful was never a requirement to stuff I made in fintech..

It seems that AI is not the only thing advancing, I see a lot of stuff.

Imagine how smooth it would be if everyone just used web components instead of React. Urghx. I swear, native web components are less complexity. And yeah, doing that for over a decade. Some people call it modern. Haha.

For a long time, I vouch for non-2FA because I expect it to be against me earlier than being a benefit. Now, I have the mail server down. I need to login to repair it. I login and out of nowhere: 2FA. It sent the code to my e-mail. Ok, I'm fucked. So I call their phone number and that said "Sorry, we can't respond in person because of the high load (smth like that)". Well, this is an issue that an automated bot won't fix for sure.

This server isn't fixed anytime soon. But the 2FA, I knew it! Please make it optional and don't force it on users. Through e-mail is a bad idea by design, do a SMS or something, something that is not depended on the hosting services.

eye of sauron micromanagement coming down as i have hardly a clue what im doing and my plans are only stable until i am metaphorically punched in the face as per mike tyson's quote

if it works to improve me, then good enough

Replit went from a GREAT collaborative coding (/ developing; it had VCS, integration with deployment services...) to a burden of an AI-centric platform???

Horrible! What do you mean I can't set up an environment by myself? And I had to fiddle to find how to see the files, once it stopped "thinking", "trying", "failing" and "reading documentation" to create a simple Python playground I could've got with a couple clicks some years ago. 💀

I don't even want to see what happened to my old projects...

This was the first time the invasiveness of an AI implementation actually got in my way and made me lose more than the seconds it takes to press one or two close buttons.

Having cooled off a little, maybe it still is the great service I remember, but man... heaving to "ask" for a guessing tool to do what I already know how to do exactly... not a good thing.

Called the doctor this morning.
Hi. I'm running low on my sleeping pills and would like more.
Ok. I see that you haven't visited us for a while and would like a meeting before we can prescribe new ones. The next available slot is in three weeks.

Guess I stay awake until then.