3 years, part time, $0.

I used to volunteer my time to an old text based rpg, handling code changes, sysadmin maintenance and the likes - back when those were a thing in the mid 2000's and money wasn't my issue in life - free for them, experience for me - win win!

Was something to get my hands dirty back in the day and contribute to an active community, but since then that place has shut down and been disbanded.

Time complexity doubt

How can you say T(n) ≤ 3T(floor(n/4)) + cn²

Given that T(n) =3T(floor(n/4)) +Θ(n²)

Won't it imply Θ(n²) ≤ cn², which seems incorrect (or am i wrong to think its incorrect?)

Less a rant, more just a sad story.

Our company recently acquired its sister company, and everyone has been focused on improving and migrating their projects over to our stack.

There's a ton of material there, but this one little story summarizes the whole very accurately, I think. (Edit: two stories. I couldn't resist.)

There's a 3-reel novelty slot machine game with cards instead of the usual symbols, and winnings based on poker-like rules (straights and/or flushes, 2-3 of a kind, etc.) The machine is over a hundred times slower than the other slot machines because on every spin it runs each payline against a winnings table that exhastively lists every winning possibility, and I really do mean exhaustively. It lists every type of win, for every card, every segment for straights, in every order, of every suit. Absolutely everything.

And this logic has been totally acceptable for just. so. long. When I saw someone complaining in dev chat about how much slower it is, i made the bloody obvious suggestion of parsing the cards and applying some minimal logic to see if it's a winning combination. Nobody cared.

Ten minutes later, someone from the original project was like "Hey, I have an idea, why don't we do it algorithmically to not have a 4k line rewards table?"

He seriously tried stealing a really bloody obvious idea -- that he hadn't had for years prior -- and passing it off as his own. In the same chat. Eight messages below mine. What a derpballoon.

I called him out on it, and he was like "Oh, is that what you meant by parsing?" 🙄

Someone else leaped in to defend the ~128x slower approach, saying: "That's the tech we had." You really didn't have a for loop and a handful of if statements? Oh wait, you did, because that's how you're checking your exhaustive list. gfj. Abysmal decisions like this is exactly why most of you got fired. (Seriously: these same people were making devops decisions. They were hemorrhaging money.)

But regardless, the quality of bloody everything from that sister company is like this. One of the other fiascos involved pulling data from Facebook -- which they didn't ever even use -- and instead of failing on error/unexpected data, it just instantly repeated. So when Facebook changed permissions on friends context... you can see where this is going. Instead of their baseline of like 1400 errors per day, which is amazingly high, it spiked to EIGHTEEN BLOODY MILLION PER DAY. And they didn't even care until they noticed (like four days later) that it was killing their other online features because quite literally no other request could make it out. More reasons they got fired. I'm not even kidding: no single api request ever left the users' devices apart from the facebook checks.

So.
That's absolutely amazing.

One of my websites is under a brute attack.

If I were to redirect failed logins to an illegal website (drugs, child pornography, terrorism support, etc...), will the feds come after me? Or will they go after the attacker?

"Almond, I thought you said the cause of the outage the other week was that our server crashed?"

"The Tomcat server crashed, yeah. Not the physical server." (And you won't give me the time or budget to spin up any kind of redundant one, but that's besides the point...)

"Ok, but I've spoken to ops and they say none of the servers have gone offline in the last month?"

"Yup, the physical server was fine, it was the Tomcat server running on it that crashed."

"...so the server didn't crash?"

"We're mixing terms here. There's two things that can be referred to as the server. One is the physical machine, and one is an application running on it. The physical machine was fine, but
the application running on it crashed."

"What?! It's a very simple question. Did the server crash, or didn't it?!"

🤦‍♂️

why programmers like cooking: you peel the carrot, you chop the carrot, you put the carrot in the stew. You don't suddenly find out that your peeler is several versions behind and they dropped support for carrots in 4.3

Got myself a new mug :)

Where's my caviar