I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

Friend: I wiped this drive, and then I open it in my Hex viewer app, and it's all zeros!

Me: yeah?

Friend: Why isn't it empty?

Me: uh well a drive must have its bits set to some value and can't just nothingness so zeros is just a default meaningless value that resolves to nothing..

Friend: No, but why is it full of zeros? why it isn't empty?

...

I attempted several times and then exploded. rip self

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

My team handles infrastructure deployment and automation in the cloud for our company, so we don't exactly develop applications ourselves, but we're responsible for building deployment pipelines, provisioning cloud resources, automating their deployments, etc.

I've ranted about this before, but it fits the weekly rant so I'll do it again.

Someone deployed an autoscaling application into our production AWS account, but they set the maximum instance count to 300. The account limit was less than that. So, of course, their application gets stuck and starts scaling out infinitely. Two hundred new servers spun up in an hour before hitting the limit and then throwing errors all over the place. They send me a ticket and I login to AWS to investigate. Not only have they broken their own application, but they've also made it impossible to deploy anything else into prod. Every other autoscaling group is now unable to scale out at all. We had to submit an emergency limit increase request to AWS, spent thousands of dollars on those stupidly-large instances, and yelled at the dev team responsible. Two weeks later, THEY INCREASED THE MAX COUNT TO 500 AND IT HAPPENED AGAIN!

And the whole thing happened because a database filled up the hard drive, so it would spin up a new server, whose hard drive would be full already and thus spin up a new server, and so on into infinity.

Thats probably the only WTF moment that resulted in me actually saying "WTF?!" out loud to the person responsible, but I've had others. One dev team had their code logging to a location they couldn't access, so we got daily requests for two weeks to download and email log files to them. Another dev team refused to believe their server was crashing due to their bad code even after we showed them the logs that demonstrated their application had a massive memory leak. Another team arbitrarily decided that they were going to deploy their code at 4 AM on a Saturday and they wanted a member of my team to be available in case something went wrong. We aren't 24/7 support. We aren't even weekend support. Or any support, technically. Another team told us we had one day to do three weeks' worth of work to deploy their application because they had set a hard deadline and then didn't tell us about it until the day before. We gave them a flat "No" for that request.

I could probably keep going, but you get the gist of it.

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Minimum wage employers and restaurants asking "and why should we hire you?".

You have 40 vacancies in your area for just your company alone.
You're paying $13.25 an hour when only a year ago you were paying $9.75.

Why should we hire you?

F*ck you, pay me, that's why.

You're not f*cking NASA
You're a God damn chain restaurant with a 40% turnover rate, who's employees probably shoot up in the bathroom on the rare occasion they even get a break.

I looked at the guy with all the annoyance I could muster, stared him down for a good five seconds and said. "You pay a few dollars over minimum. You're job is not important enough to even ask that question. Have a nice day." And got up and left.

Dude followed me and stuttered " hold up. I was just..."

But I was already out the door.

You were just what mark? Asking a dumbfuck question as if you had any leverage at all?

Your competitor *across the street* is offering 50 cents *more* per hour, and has guaranteed breaks.

What, did you forget 2008 and how you treated millions of people as disposable? The little part where you and most american industries demanded passion, without pay raises? Promotions without benefits? The jobs that if you worked hard, rather than a promotion or a pay raise, your reward was more work and less hours to finish?

You assholes thought we forgot about that? How you shipped millions of jobs overseas, blamed it on "automation" (chinese and indian slave labor), and then pointed the finger at millions of impoverished people as "lazy" in places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and told them "you just got to work harder and smarter!" Or "just get a small loan and create the next google!" from the comfort of your yachts? I'm looking at you bane corp.

No, now the shoes on the other foot motherf*ckers. Hows it feel needing all *us* commoners? "Why should we hire you?"

No, why should *I* WORK FOR YOU?
Cuz I saw THREE dirty tables coming in. A line of people that could be being served. A line that could have been optimized with the proper table count and some simple changes. A menu that doesnt even incentivize your biggest sellers and a dozen other things your store is doing wrong.

Think mark, think!

This is one of those braindead questions employers paying sub $18 an hour ask, because they suffered so much brain drain from years of payola profits from too-big-to-fail wallstreet bailouts, that they forgot they are not king midas, unless they are the king midas of shit, because increasingly everything corporate America touches turns into shit.

And while were on the subject, stopping bringing in outside management to stores. It destroys team cohesion, staff morale, pisses off people *on site* who *actually know* the team, the stores daily activities and processes, and who are better fit for that role. You bring in disinterested outside management, and it's one of the biggest red flags I've ever seen: these smarmy selfcongratulating f*cks who know nothing about the particular store, have no connection to the staff, go on firing sprees or alienation-sprees to hire in friends, fuck up the schedules because again they know nothing about the employees, and then move on after a few years to greener pastures, leaving a barren radioactive wasteland of chain smokers and burnt out staff in their wake.

Dear corporate America, your free ride on the public's good will is over. It's over.

Now you're in the bitch seat. Come sit at my desk and explain to me, EXPLAIN TO ME, why I should sweat and labor to save your shitty company hemorrhaging money like a bleeding crack-addicted hobo dying with a sucking chest wound from a chicago skidrow friday-night drive-by?

You dont deserve it. Your management and company culture is worse than incompetent. It's full of smiley guys expounding about their passion for customer service while giving each other sloppy BJs in broom closets, a veritable cornucopia of cult-like corporate dick suckers *and* dickheads, proclaiming, no...PROFESSING (hence "professional") their undying allegiance and dedication to their corporate family with the intensity of cujo, foaming at the mouth, or Mitt Romney preparing for a photoshoot, plastic smiles and feigned laughs.

Dont forget to wipe your chin, asshole. It's not Ronald McDonald your blowing, but it's definitely not Gordon f*cking Ramsey either.

Would you like fries with that?

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the "brand manager" if he knew how to reset printers to their defaults before reconfiguring them, knowing full well that he did not. He assured me that he did. I smiled and let him leave.

He called me yesterday, frantic, because he didn't know how to reconfigure a printer that already had a password. After reminding him of the above, I told him how to put the printer in diagnostic mode and how to navigate the menus. Literally: "Turn the printer off, then hold down the feed paper button while turning the printer on. It will print out a bunch of diagnostics, and a menu at the bottom. Just follow the instructions at the bottom to use the menu"

Apparently following simple instructions is well outside of his abilities. After he spent five minutes fighting with it and complaining, I called him and walked him through powering the printer on while holding down the feed paper button. Terribly difficult.

The next step amounts to "hold down the feed paper button for more than 1 second." He spent ten minutes (ten!) on this unimaginably challenging step, and, frustrated at his inability to outsmart a simple button, he gave up completely.

He literally couldn't follow the instructions on the printout. I've attached a picture to show how ridiculous this is, and it saddens me terribly to report that I'm quite serious. he was literally unable to figure this out.

HE SPENT TEN MINUTES TRYING TO PUSH A BUTTON FOR >1 SECOND! TEN MINUTES!
That's what was too difficult for him! A button! With written instructions!

I can't even.

But the kicker?
Now he and the bossman want me to drive half an hour so I can push a button for ~1.2 seconds because they're utterly incapable.

I'm soo done.
So. done.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

A few days ago I went to my local bank again to check my balance and see whether some transfers that I've been waiting for have been completed.. as I was walking there - headphones on, music full blast - I was zoning out a bit. Of course I was, not like I have to mind cars in the middle of bumfuck here. There's hardly any in this town. So meh.

Now that day there was one.. I was just about to cross the road and suddenly looked left, and there it was. A mindless meatbag behind the wheel of a killing machine - an average driver. Visibly startled I suddenly stopped and waited for her to drive away. At this point she was about 20-ish meters away and already stopped. Come on bitch.. I already stopped and I am not going to cross this road as long as you're here. Hit the fucking pedal.

So she accelerated again.. and drove to the parking spot at the other side of the road, then stopped there. Oh, cool. Maybe she needs to be somewhere in this town. … Not at all. Bitch accelerates again, and stops yet again 2 parking spots further. What the fuck (ಠ_ಠ).. and I thought that I was an idiot...

Then she accelerates yet again and drives away. Looked after her, astonished by the amount of brain damage she just caused to me. Must've been a Facebook user.. holy fucking shit. Through what kind of black magic do these people get a driver's license?!

Finally, I'm full of joy. I just came home after long Recruitment drive and first thing I saw on table is this.
I was totally screaming "YES!!! YES!!!! THEY'RE FINALLY HERE" (sorry for caps). Thank you very much @dfox and @trogus and no doubt devRant is the best app I ever had.

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

So some student complained that the busses are to full in the morning (they are filled with students).
Student: "why don't they drive more busses?"
Me: "because that would raise prices of busses since more drivers and fuel is needed. It's simple economics"
Student: "Public transit already is way to expensive, they can easily drive more busses and trains for that"
Me: "public transit is already way to expensive.... Oh look! An iPhone, MacBook, AirPods, Apple Watch, Dr Martins and other overpriced shit you have with you now!"

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.

Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..

Golang installed and up and working fine.

Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!

Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.

hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.

> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.

No problem I just don't own this object!

> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.

At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.

Or install linux.

Google/Microsoft: We are committed to Linux and the open source community!

Us: Awesome, so can we expect a one drive and google drive client for Linux or at least well documented API's?

Google/Microsoft: *Unveils random arse applications and services without answering our pleas*

Google is by far the worst for this, Chromebooks built on Linux, getting full Linux application support and android that's built on Linux all have Google drive support baked in... Can we just get a single fucking desktop client... Please!

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

-Hi, my PlayStation’s storage is almost full? Can you change it?
Me: yes, but why not just buy an external one....
-We can’t add games on it.
Me: ... See here. Read. It’s possible. How much storage does the PS have now?
-93GB
Me: ... Total? 500 GB?
-Yes, I think.
Me: buy a 4 TB one will last long enough.
-Ok. Can you come to install it if it’s arrived?
Me: Ok...

Can’t people just read on fucking internet how to connect an external drive to a PlayStation??
I don’t understand... I’m a software guy not fucking hardware...

Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.

Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.

Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.

Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.

As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.

All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.

I've got a HDD, gotta look for any data left on it. I don't need a 1:1 copy of the drive to determine if any data is even there still, and i'm also strapped for space, so I threw together a little 20-line or so Python script to skip over large amounts of empty space so I only have to sift through what little it finds to see if anything's left at all. I wrote it, ran it... and it took a while. Too long. My SSD was floored and RAM was full for no reason. I double-checked my code...

device.seek(0)
device_size = len(device.read())

If you don't get it, this would've tried to load the ENTIRE DRIVE'S CONTENTS into RAM before giving the length. The drive's 128GB or so. That's not happening.

I'm a fucking idiot.

EDIT:
This is what this was for. This ain't ext4. What in the fuck...?

Any other devs forget to eat... Then when you do eat, a guy has to drive a lorry to you because you just realised you're sooooo hungry (lorry full of food)

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

Ooh yeeaah. It was 2020 and I was in a final exam. Algebra and Analytical Geometry; 1st year of Engineering class, if you care.

I had a camera pointing at me, my desk and my computer.
The submission was through Google Drive.
So I use my phone to scan my test into a PDF, upload it, and when I tried to submit it...

My recent documents were full of nudes of Belle Delphine.
I had forgotten a friend sent that while we were on Discord having some laughs earlier and I clicked it to check.

I selected my exam, submitted it, and went on with it.
I don't know if anyone noticed, but I think it was kind of obvious, even if it was a screen in a camera... the previews were kinda big on my big screen.

Do arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berserk) count? I got my allowance in quarters.

Atari 2600? Ti/99 with a tape drive to play a game at my friend's house?

Having to buy a 5.25" floppy in the HS bookstore for typing class on the TRaSh-80s and finding a way to put a break in the program and save it to disk so I got top score on assignments?

Tron. That's what really did it for me. To this day, I like to imagine there is a vast world inside the computer.

After a BASIC programming class in HS, I got an Apple IIGS and started writing my own load menus for these little games I'd find around FIDO and newsgroups. Instead of "PR#6, brun gumball" a nice styled menu would show where you could press the number of the game you wanted to play.

I bought a book on Apple assembler and promptly got disillusioned with full blown programming (in 1988), instead sticking to BASIC and, later, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python.

Who remembers sharing hacked PCP accounts to dial out of state BBSes?

Applied Engineering customers and 300 baud chatroom lurkers represent.

User #243, God's Country chat

"Hello, the drive of your XYZ server is getting full, would it be possible to prune some of the unused and/or old docker images and layers there please? Alternatively, we can offer to replace the drives with a higher capacity models for FOO extra per month"

"Hello, the disk use keeps growing and has reached the 95% mark, please prune some of your images to make space for new. If you wanted to choose the alternate option of disk capacity increase, we would have to do that as soon as possible, otherwise you may run out of space before the RAID array rebuilds"

"Hello, your server XYZ has completely ran out of disk space. Any changes that would require data being saved on disk may and probably will fail. Please free some space as soon as possible"

Ugh, I hate clients that just don't cooperate until shit hits the fan...

And no, we could not prune the space ourselves, its not our data to delete whenever we think it necessary.

We merely manage the machine's operation, keeping it online and its services running.

Made a backup script today that backs up our site files and database (total size 34gb, we have 70gb storage)

the script takes 1:10 hours to far the website files and backups up the database and somehow when running in a detached terminal because my boss wanted me to run it at 4:20pm when I'm leave at 5:05pm( what could go wrong) it went in a infinite loop and filed our storage.

Our provider just called our boss that his drive is full ( why can you even see that)

Well it will not be a fun morning tomorrow

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

I really felt like a badass one time when I managed to recover all projects on our dev server after a full meltdown of the HDD.

We had no recent backups, because our backup server was down for a few months, and our (at the time small) company was in a tight spot on finances, and couldn't get a replacement.

The problem was that the HDD on the backup server failed, but we were storing all projects also on the dev server, along with our local git repos (no GitHub at the time for us), but then the dev server HDD also broke, and I used every piece of data recovery software I found trying to recover the data, until one actually managed to read the raw data from the HDD and store it as a virtual drive, that I then used to try and build another partition index and it actually worked!

Lost about 10% of the data, but that was enough, as i managed to recover all the git repos and databases...

I don't even remember the tools that got the job done in the end, but that was one hell of a week, and at the end I felt like a true IT God!

True story!

PS: 2 weeks later we had a new backup server, another offsite backup solution and a GitHub account for the company. Was delayed on salary in order to manage it (me and the CEO both agreed to give our pay for one month to get them), but worth it!

tl;dr - install ‘Pop!_os’ and try it out if you haven’t yet, it’s pretty damn good!

Heavy Micro$haft user here, have tried using ubuntu a bunch of times in the past and fucking regretted it every time. Ran into issues with stupid shit like the apt cache growing exponentially until the drive was full, or something like the the system python getting borked.

To be fair, I’m 120% certain my dumb-assery is what caused the problems. I’m definitely not trying to blame the OS. But my experience was shitty, even if it was at my own hands lol.

Started playing around with Pop!_os from the system76 team. And I’m seriously in freakin’ love with this OS. It’s clean, is performant, feels way less buggy or just feels more stable somehow. I know it’s based on ubuntu, but I’ve had a great time thus far using it. I’ve got ansible, docker, aws toolkit, aws cli, sam-cli, vscode, dynamodb-local, serverless, npm, brew, and working on steam now.

Everything has been a breeze and again the system feels really fast and snappy. It feels a lot like mac on the smoothness scale, but snappy like a windows box with beefy hardware specs.

I’m still just in the testing phase on a VM, but I’m seriously thinking about blowing away my windows install for Pop!_os.

(I’ll try arch someday when I’m up for some hardcore masochism)

I kept piling on hard drives at home and you know... One day I'll setup some redundancy.
Then a 5 months old full 4TB drive gave up and I lost that data.
After that I've upgraded to having a ceph cluster storing everything.
At the beginning of this year one hard drive in the cluster gave up. I didn't notice until I wondered why available storage was low. Cluster had already rebalance itself and were running flawless.

Upgraded from a gen 6 motherboard and cpu to a gen 11. And the difference is asounding.

My old setup did everything I needed it to pretty well. Hell it got me through college as well as multiple part time and full time jobs. As well as the system that I learned about 80% of what I know specifically for my career

But alas the old cpu's age started showing and I'd consistently throttle multiple threads when compiling or even just using 7z on large folders. Hell deleting anything above a couple hundred mb would pause for a few seconds

The new cpu is immensely faster on such tasks (probably cause of the extra 2 cores and cpu improvements since gen 6)

I haven't been this excited since I got my first SSD a few years ago and saw the immense boot time improvements. Maybe soon I'll get an nvme drive and really be zooming with this setup 🤣🤣🤣

Me: "time to install some stuff for visual studio.. But VS, my system drive is getting full, so install these additions on this other drive with tons of space."
VS: Sure thing! I just need to put 95% of it on your system drive. Cool?"
Me: "REEEEEEEEE!'

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

Updated Win10. After the installation I realized that my C drive was full.
Why? Windows.old folder was 43gb big
Thx Microsoft

My laptop died on Monday. 5 days after it's first full backup in 2 years. I'm almost disappointed it was a power connection issue and not a drive failure

Got a new job a couple days ago, cleaning cars at a dealership. One of my friends works there doing the same and he told me I should apply.

The hourly rate isn't much more than I was making at McDonald's, but I have very consistent hours now. I'm only scheduled for 35 hours a week, but normally we don't get out on time. On Friday we didn't get out until an hour after I was scheduled to leave, so chances are I'll get overtime here.

Basically all I wanted in a job was to have consistent hours. Come in at 2, leave at 8, rinse and repeat. McDonald's was basically, come in at 4, leave at 10, maybe stay until 11. Next day you're coming in at 7 and closing, next day you normally work but now you don't. Just very inconsistent, and basically no chance at full time unless you're a manager's favorite.

I like the new job, I get to drive nice cars and clean them, and that's basically it. I got to drive a car that's the same model as my mom's car, but 7 years newer (she has a 2011, the one I drove was a 2018). Even got to drive the exact model of the car that hit me a few months ago (same year too).

I've never been a huge car guy, but I really like it there. There's just something very satisfying about driving a brand new car. Also, at McDonald's I wasn't allowed to have a beard. At the new job they don't give a shit, as long as I work.

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

What happened? I visited this site probably less than 12 hours ago, now I have 99+ notifications! And on top of that, my hard drive is almost full!

I'm in a small company so they don't have a big budget.

The previous I.T guy went full retard and decided that it would be a great idea to buy a shitty 200$ laptop with a soldered eMMc hard drive for accounting.
Since they NEVER use the cloud and just pass around excel files, the files aren't really saved anywhere but on the USBs and the computer.

Guess what ? The motherboard fucking fried and almost 6 MONTHS of accounting work was lost. Out of warranty of course, not that it would help since the eMMc chip is also fucked.

That's what you get for trying to cheap out on hardware and not choosing the right stuff.

Needed my Windows 10 vm for parallax propeller development again. Should be pretty straightforward:

Start VM. Very unresponsive and Interface glitches with 2GB RAM so I give it 4GB to get on the desktop. Bruh, off to a good start.

Turns out that there are a few updates. So I try to install them. After two fucking hours Virtualbox screams at me for being out of storage. FFS Window$ updates managed to take up like 20GB extra.

Had to install it from scratch since my drive is full. Now my key won't activate because it is already activated. 15min support hotline, because 6*8 characters are necessary for a f*cking Phone activation.

Damage assessment:
1h of my life I will never get back, a barely viable operating system and I'm not even sure if USB passthrough works.

PSA:Gnome-Boxen has a superb unattended installer.

Tried installing Antergos on an external 1TB SSD to give it a try after having checkout Mint, now my laptop won't boot from it anymore after having removed and reinserted the disk and it skips to Ubuntu's grub on my HDD or windows.

Ubuntu's grub does show antegros whenever the ssd is plugged in though, and then I get this error while trying to boot it. Also changing the boot order doesn't do much and it skips to the next thing on the list.

I'm probably going to overwrite antergos and try to use portable antergos on it, perhaps it wasn't made to hoot from a removable drive. Ubuntu and windows still work fine but ubuntu is on my hdd because the internal ssd is full of windows, and super slow.

So now I have a partitioned ssd that doesn't work and a grub entry that gives an error ugh :/ (and a slow ubuntu but that's not as bad)

Anyone else have any idea of what happened? I have definitely seen antergos work before packing up and removing the drive, so the installation was succesful.

I have a gaming laptop with a 125gb ssd and 1 TB secondary drive. Ssd has just 20 GB free.

I wanna dual boot windows 10 and arch. Most of the secondary drive is full of steam games. Win 10 for gaming and arch is for projects.

What's a good way to partition the drives for arch? I can't guess how much space either will need in the future. And what do I do with the other drive?

!rant

So I installed a Linux distro as my primary operating system for my laptop, I needed to use my windows installation... But idiot me did a full hard drive erase installation and not a dual boot didn't I...

*Sigh* now to download a windows 10 ISO!

33 hours

My shift (9h, afternoon-evening) + a shift I had promised to cover for someone (9h, evening-morning) + a day full of lectures (seminars) (morning-afternoon)+my shift (9h, afternoon-evening).

I know that the lectures do not account for "working", but it definitely wasn't "resting" either. Hadn't time to sleep or eat at any point. I think I didn't even drive back home after the last shift - took the bus, because at that point I couldn't even remember where I left my car... And I don't remember getting out of the bus at my stop. No clue how I got to my home/bed. I must've ridden the bus standing to stay awake

Can't git push
because of an "access denied" error message
because I didn't set up my key file properly (with right paths, right format and so on)
because I'm working from my home laptop device
because I'm in home office
because Corona
..but..
I can connect to my work computer where git is set up properly but also I
can't git push
because I can't "cd" into the project path
because the samba mount point is messed up
because I don't reboot my machine to fix it
because I can't enter my password
because it does have a full hard drive encryption and the password screen shows up before the network services are started.

I gave in...

Chimera N850HK1 15.6'' Full HD IPS Display 1920x1080 Laptop
Processor
Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ Mobile Processor (4x 2.8GHz/6MB L3 Cache) [N850HK1]
Memory
8GB DDR4-2400
Video Card
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI GDDR5 4GB - [N850HK1]
Primary Hard Drive
1 TB 7200rpm Super Slim Laptop Hard Drive - Single Drive

Why the fuck is the elastic search docker image 900Mb. Why the fuck does it include a complete logging system and why the fuck doesn't it have an up-to-date alpine image?

The arrogance of some systems these days. You're part of someone's software, not the software itself. You don't have the right to claim x resources. It's not about you.
Same for Sentry, a logging application that literally requires 8Gb of ram? I removed the limits and did try it anyway and stuff just crashed. Congrats, a logging system that REALLY requires 8Gb ram. The best my VPS does is 4Gb and therefrom you're only allowed to use 512Mb max imho.

I care about image sizes since my laptop only has 114Gb drive and my internet is a 4g hotspot with 50Gb/day limit (trust me, you can't find better for 40 euro's). 114Gb is maybe a bit outdated but be realistic, I only use vim, vscode, some sdks and source files. Why would my harddisk ever be full? Because of bloated docker setups. That's why. The other option is screwing over your system with everyone's configuration.

Alpine all the things!

This thing. My C:\ drive is full, and I bought it almost a month ago. It's the solution to all my problems and my biggest nightmare (I need to do a clean install).

So long story short, I bought a license for a very popular web app theme a few years ago in the hopes that I'd someday use it to make a full fledged app that i can use as a showcase for my skills. Day in and day out, they keep sending me updates for the said theme, only for me to download it and then leave it to rot somewhere deep in the trenches of my hard drive, never to be heard of again until i run out of space and have to clear some stuff out. And then i proceed to delete it, thinking its ok coz i can download a new version when they send the next update. The last one that I downloaded was 9GB. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My setup, seeing that people are posting theirs.
+ BenQ 22" monitor
+ Custom-built PC
+ Fried i7 motherboard :(
+ Working i3 motherboard
+ 2 Green fans (top, back)
+ 2 Red fans (front)
+ (not-working-well) CD/DVD disk
+ 2G WD hard drive (not SSD :( )
+ 4-port USB 3.0 hub
+ SD card reader (with 3 more storage devices it can read)
+ Webcam
+ HP DeskJet Ink Advantage
+ Horrible mechanical keyboard
+ Special keys (music player, play/pause, next/prev, etc.)
+ Mouse that doesn't stop glowing
+ Awesome speakers
+ 4 lights
+ Water jumps through the lights whenever audio rises
+ Xbox 360 S (2G internal storage: Ugh)
+ Speakers connected to Xbox 360
+ Desk Lamp

Software:
+ rEFInd
+ Arch Linux
+ Plymouth
+ Systemd
+ i3-gaps (Me)
+ GNOME (full) (for rest of family)
+ NeoVim
+ XTerm
+ Cmus

life becomes sulking when you have no support.

1. bought a new car. finally everything went good and i was able to get out of the infinite loop of anxiety : "where would i park?" "fights with neighbour" , "how to become confident after learning to drive in driving schools?" , efc

2. on delivery day, a friend helped park the new car near home. the plan was that from next day , we will start taking classes on self car with a car trainer

3. this morning, i took a class with car trainer alongside my mom as she wanna learn too. she used to drive somewhat shakily 10 years ago.
She got scared seeing me to drive. i was driving fine as the trainer hmmself didn't scolded me anything. i was driving at 30kmph on empty roads, while she is trained to drive at 10-15kmph. whe she drove, her driving was full of jerks and sudden break/clutch release, but i remained mum

4. later on, one of my friend also rejected going with me for driving. and the car trainer is also citing some time issues for next few days. i am now stuck with:

- a brand new car wrapped under sheets with no future for getting out

- a driving license in my wallet that will keep on taking dust as i would rarely be allowed to ever take my car out for a 60km drive to office.

-some overly anxious parents trying to take out my morale

- a sad me. when will the life give me a chance to fuckin grow up?

i have cracked the IT for fuck's sake. i started from peanuts salary, and worked my way to a great package, i am a person who understands how to live. why the fuck can't i learn this skill

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Why is it fast to search using Google than to search a file on my computer using Cortana or File explorer and my hard drive is just about 200GB full yet the Internet is far much bigger?

For the past 5 hours I’ve been backing up my pc, reinstalling windows(full wipe of every drive) and, reinstalling programs to my fucking pc. I can now say I’ve been to hell and back, because fuck everything, now I need to rebuild it because 2 years ago “oh cable management is optional I don’t need to do that.” So fml. And especially fuck apple and windows. Fucking windows with having to reinstall once a year and Apple with overpriced bullshit lightning to 3.5 adapters, $10 for one because they removed 3.5 jacks. @linuxxx I understand why Linux is a good alternative although it sucks for gaming due to no support( I know about wine but I don’t want to use it due to it having problems half the time)

So, today I was very happy with my new chromecast. I can hold a button on remote and tell him what to search on youtube. But it's impossible to let it search forward tsoding. It just doesn't understand. So, very confident I spelled tsoding and expected it to understand correctly. No! From all freaking miles we made to AI, it can't fucking understand spelling? How hard could that be. So now, I still often have to use my phone. Big downer.

Also: you never know if it will answer a question you made or if it'll search for videos. Seems very random.

I should be able to add things to Callender by just speaking to it but it says that it doesn't have permissions and can't find them nowhere.

Besides that, this new one is usable as network drive of 4Gb. Good source file backup network drive. I already try to contribute to the webdav server on it. The implementation is a bit sad and I already wrote a whole full featured webdav server myself. Also offered Dutch translation.

We had serverside profiles at school. And at one day someone forgot to sign off. So me, the bored dev apprentice, wrote a cmd Programm which spammed every folder with a txt file with contents like "Sign off next time!" Then wrote that sentence to a desktop file until the drive was full.

They had to restore a server backup since that appearantly fucked the system

A jr dev was having an issue registering code with our data pipeline (prefect self hosted).

Turns out he's running vscode to launch a anaconda shell (didn't even know that was a thing) to launch jupyter notebook and running commands in the notebook (didn't know that was possible) all from Windows.

No it doesn't work. His environment configuration isn't right. I told him to just run Linux and get rid of all that nonsense.

Nothing is on git yet and were three weeks in! His code is full of hard coded absolute paths of files on his hard drive... He even had an example app to go buy, with a project layout to copy.

There's no helping some people

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

Cross-platform open-source & free password manager.

Description:

Cross-platform mobile/desktop password manager application. No backend needed, private data will be encrypted and stored in Google Drive/One Drive/Dropbox etc...

I've used multiple applications over the years but they pricey (especially if you switch platforms) and most of them don't have full cross-platform support.

Also, I've made a POC app with Ionic a while ago, but I didn't like the hybrid app feel.

Tech stack:
Js/React Native

Hey all

Much rather ask here than on a subreddit full of jerks

I have a PC running Ubuntu 20.04LTS that I use as a media server.

8GB RAM
i3 6100
1TB Samsung HDD (Boot)
3TB Seagate Barracuda
2TB WD Blue

The 2TB and 3TB are NTFS drives. I formatted them that way because they are network shared to Windows machines. Often when watching videos off those drives, they kinda just stick for a second here and there. You know, like how a scratched DVD would.

This happens regardless of if I watching directly on the server or over the network on another PC or my TV

I tried copying a video over onto the boot drive and then it worked fine.

The 3TB has one bad sector and the 2TB is reportedly perfectly healthy. So any ideas?

Could it be as simple as bad sata or power connectors?

Speeds seem fine when copying to and from though

Github Actions.
A nice feature that can drive you nuts.

"GITHUB_EVENT_PATH: The path of the file with the complete webhook event payload. For example, /github/workflow/event.json."

"github.event_path: The path to the full event webhook payload on the runner."

Well guess what? These fucking variables are completely useless since the path in them is non-existent.
Fortunately /github/workflow/event.json works...but for how long?

Also using header Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json to download a zip file is masochism.

Thought it had been a while since my last Arch redo. Now the fsck output is hundreds of pages long and I'm grateful for my backups, and all suspiciously occuring just seconds after a full upgrade. I guess hardware failure is a possibility, but the smart status on the drive says it's perfect and dozens of retrospective self tests didn't reveal any issues. RAM passed multiple tests as well. Oh well, not like I haven't reinstalled before.

This is what happened. I had Linux on my machine. I wanted to show off. So I asked my friend to give me a flash drive with full of viruses which will kill HIS machine if plugged in. Wanted to show that Linux is superior. So he handed me a flash drive. And while he was watching, I plugged it into my machine, proudly. Alas, my machine was dead in half a second. I was like, WTF man. I asked him, "what runs on your machine?". He replied, "freaking Linux"

(this is not a true story) :p

Just now I was talking to this young girl on her employment in the corporates. I asked her if she learned anything that allows her to deliver value to her organization. She said 'not much'. And she was actually learning the wrong things, and didn't get exposed to the proper tools to get the job done, and the fact that she wanted to take the offer to work overseas.

I was telling her that if she has the adequate skills and the drive to deliver, she can be anywhere she want, but not now, and then I offered her a part time or full time freelance position that she can really learn up a lot under my supervision and deliver with satisfaction. She's not budging.

It also made me thought of myself on why I'm always hesitant to get out of Malaysia and just start a new career along with my peers overseas. I honestly want to get out of here. Seriously. I could have just gone out there. Do you know how much that I envied people who went out and had a good life being employed elsewhere?

But I still haven't been satisfied with myself, of not being able to deliver the best that I can, the best of my work throughout the 7 years of my career, and I intend to stay and prove that I can produce something great and potentially have really good gains before I make my ultimate move. I still have work to do. Unfinished business.

There are several more things that I need to cover such as server deployment on AWS, doing DevOps for web backend apps, and more architecting work. It takes time to learn. That's why I want to delegate some Android work to that young fella, so that I can move on to the more hardcore stuff.

A dev decided to overwrite the master branch with his code saying its better. That it fixes the major bugs that all of us couldn't solve.

Against my better judgement of firing him, I decided to test it.

Firing up the testing site, we made test databases to use and we went to house.

In the middle of testing, I noticed the test DBs weren't being changed. While everyone was still testing, I looked at the code. It wasn't made to test on any databases, it was specifically designed for the actual production server.

However the damage was done. In a secret dashboard in the code, someone sent instructions to drop the tables, effectively ruining the production server.

We had the dev go to an offline backup site that only went online every 10 minutes a day to make new backups. So we shut down the production server, setup a maintenance page. I get my ass chewed out again, and we were sitting ducks.

I don't think the dev had enough punishment, so I grabbed his laptop and made a full backup of his data, and locked the SSD in a safe.

I downloaded a Windows 98 and put it on a flash drive. And installed it all on his SSD. The dev is now a proud (pirate) owner of Windows 98.

He came back and started balling on his desk. We all looked at him with a pity, but he deserved it.

I'll give him the drive on Monday.
Do you think he learned his lesson?

Anyone knows how to start a hard drive without power supply?
I'm hacking a few old disks and don't want to use a full power supply

Spent all afternoon and night, trying to get Windows reinstalled on my old college laptop because my dad needed another pc since I'll be using his personal laptop to wfh.

1. DVD Drive is faulty, slow/faulty reads
2. I don't have product keys (they're all stores on a USB disk, I should make a backup... that I didn't bring back to their place) except for Vista and Win 8 but Win 8 key already used by another PC. I have a burned Win 7 disc
3. Apparently it had a virus which was never removed, fresh reinstall never done. It hides the DVD drives and kills the internet and makes the installers think there's only 400MB.
4. I followed some wiki that said to Mark the C drive as Active... Which fixed the issue but then I decided to do the full install from boot... Except on reboot, apparently this fcked up the MBR
5. Tried googling how to fix the MBR, eventually found some USB app that supposedly fixes it. Create a USB boot disk, not recognized
6. Finally try the DVDs and release it recognize them somewhat when booting... Win 7 one kept hanging on the load screen
7. Somehow Vista got thru and actually installed...

Now IE and Chrome both complain about HTTPS issues and how they don't support Vista...

But at least my dad now had a laptop he can use to do non-work stuff while he uses his company laptop to do work.

I seem to have a really bad case of evening depression. If that's even a thing

I'm super happy and full of energy but as soon as it's dark outside I become a depressed sack of shit with no drive to work on anything 😔

So one of my aunt who is a school teacher had her Windows 10 + Ubuntu 16 dual boot laptop updated with Ubuntu 18 by the school principal. The school principal having no clue what she was doing, ended up messing up the boot manager. I hear she simply deleted the Ubuntu 16 system files to make space and proceeded to install Ubuntu 18. The school principal took no responsibility of the catastrophe because it worked fine with other laptop.

The school has no IT department or anything of that sort either.

Guess who had to help there? Me. However, I have no clue about that area, anyhow, I managed to show a way to bootup Ubuntu 18 which is what they use at school. Windows won't boot anymore.

About a month later, now I hear the drive where Ubuntu 18 is installed is full and it is causing some issues. There is no delete option on right to make space.

May God help them. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Fuck this Apple Macbook Pro 16" which takes 20W to drive two simple full HD displays in idle mode off the dedicated GPU with fans running at 3000 RPM.

I would love to get back my 2013 MBP which worked flawlessly without hearing the fans even in the hardest conditions while compiling stuff.

Even the most basic and cheap windows notebooks are able to drive two displays with 1W and no fans whatsoever in idle mode.

Damn Apple. Fuck this notebook.

I don’t know if I just want to harm myself or what… like it’s as if I really enjoyed being burned out so I’m trying to recreate that feeling.

So, the thing is I’m employed as a de facto principal security engineer, basically doing the work of 5-6 people and more, since I haven’t been able to completely shed all my responsibilities from my previous roles as cloud engineer and software developer. On top of that I’m studying my CS Master’s as if I was a full-time student. That’s a lot on my plate. No free time to speak of, and even that’s filled with side projects and, if I can spare the time once in a while, other hobbies.

Now I saw that the security research group in my university is recruiting research assistants to a quantum-resistant cryptography research project - and I am soooo tempted to apply. The topic and what the research project practically aims for, and the potential learning outcomes that I can see from the job description, excite me beyond comprehension!

Am I going to drive myself to burn-out and my marriage to an irreparable state if I take that side job on top of this all? Will I be reasonable and think about that ahead of time, before applying, or will I dive in and just find out?

Fucken great.

Managed to "finish reparing" my second Razer blade 14, swamped around some ssds and now both don't boot from my ssd.

So, I just disabled my mobile workstation.

Great.

3 days twiddling with it later and I still haven't managed to boot it.

Linux from a usb boots fine, Linux from the ssd, nope, no chance.

Csm looks good,
Bios sees the drive, should be good.

But I can only boot it legacy, which goes nowhere.
No uefi mode for the SSD.

But it worked before, so what the heck.

So when I boot grub of a usb stick, the live image runs fine.
I can also boot the ssd with the usb grub.

Most craziest thing for me right now is, I now have an nvme in the blade, but the blade doesn't fully support nvme as boot device.

And the external grub can boot it, and it seems to work properly once grub and the kernel take over, has full "support".

Just a side note, the other drive is a sata m.2 that worked fully before so i still have no reason why it isn't working.

So I thought I could now use a usb stick with grub to boot the nvme.

But nope, can't boot the usb stick anymore.

What the fuck is going on?!

And for all those realising that the nvme will not be running at pcie 3.0 by 4, yes, but it's not a high-end drive, Samsung pm951 so that doesn't matter.

Ok that's ALSO two more brand new phones totalling over 1000 in value they owe John boy here
And many months of lodging and other fun things and some hard drive cases and several hard drives full of earlier photos and videos of him

And let's just add on some extra money for making people act crazy.

Not trying to be patterned into you peoples shit by reinforcing my own self destructive behavior like some kind of goddamn drug addict

Obviously the end result sucks
Look at all these miserable fucks !

yup! your usual monday morning full of stress, where you drive to work early and know your timeline is messed up