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An entirely typical exchange at work:
PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?
ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?
PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.
ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.
PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.
ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.
6 hours later…
ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.
PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.
ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?
PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.
ME: Babelsets?
PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.
ME: There are users!?
PM: Of course!
ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.
PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?
ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?
PM: Yeah.
6 days later…
ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?
PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.
ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!
1 hour later…
ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.
PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?
ME: What cron?
…
ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.
PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.
ME: Right. I’ll change it...
PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.
ME: What visual?
...53 -
A devRant Update!
Hey everyone,
We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.
Highlights since our last update:
- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.
- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!
- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!
Some stuff we have in the pipeline:
- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!
A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:
We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.
What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.
Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus
38 -
So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)
First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:
Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).
We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".
1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.
1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"
Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.
CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.
When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!
So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.
I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.
Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.
Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.
Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.
So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off
I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine
.... happy job hunting everyone!10 -
"Pre-Installed Malware Found On 5 Million Popular Android Phones"
"added somewhere along the supply chain"
See below how to check if it's installed
Sources:
- (new) https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/...
- (new) https://research.checkpoint.com/rot...
- (old relevant news) https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/...
---
"Rottensys" a malware which covers devices from: Honor, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Samsung and GIONEE
---
"According to our findings, the RottenSys malware began propagating in September 2016. By March 12, 2018, 4,964,460 devices were infected by RottenSys," researchers said.
"At this moment, the massive malware campaign pushes an adware component to all infected devices that aggressively displays advertisements on the device’s home screen, as pop-up windows or full-screen ads to generate fraudulent ad-revenues."
---
If you have one of the affected devices, here's how I checked mine:
1. Install ADB (Windows: https://forum.xda-developers.com/sh...)
2. Connect your device in USB-debugging mode
3. execute "adb shell 'pm list packages -f' > output.txt" (On windows navigate to C:\adb and replace "adb" with ".\adb.exe")
4. open the now created output.txt
5. search for any of those:
com.android.yellowcalendarz (每日黄历)
com.changmi.launcher (畅米桌面)
com.android.services.securewifi (系统WIFI服务)
com.system.service.zdsgt
19 -
When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...
I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.
Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!
That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…
Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…
<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).
I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!
When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”
That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!
A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”
Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…
What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…6 -
I finished two projects. Both of them need to connect to each other. However, the tool to do that is not currently licensed to achieve my desired outcome. I email my boss to check the status of the license key I need, that they promised, and the only thing I get back is "Correct." Seriously? 😠 The person who has the company credit card and authority to buy, also the same one that gives me a deadline to turn this shit in, can't give me the time of day to respond to an email? Their response wasn't even relevant. I've been trying to move beyond this roadblock for a week now! I'm a pretty independent guy, but I'm not going to buy the license myself for a tool that I didn't even want to use. So when someone comes to my cube and I'm raging on Steam, ✋ I don't want to hear anything about company time, because mine isn't being respected either. 👊👊
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One of the biggest barriers to the wide(r) scale adoption of functional programming languages like Haskell, F#, and Scala is how snooty and condescending your average FP developer is. And beginner-unfriendly.
Ask them a question about an intermediate topic (in my case, the Free monad) you're likely to get a whole torrent of category theoretic rubbish in return.
This is a common pattern I see when "experts" answer questions.
Now, it didn't bother me much because I've studied a fair amount of category theory and can usually follow such answers, but, for the sake of the general case, I'd like to shove these rules into the heads of everyone writing an answer to a question (not just FP):
1. If you can't illustrate a concept clearly without going into verbal diarrhoea with phrases like "monad homomorphism" and "just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" then you clearly haven't understood it properly (unless, of course, the answer absolutely requires it). An answer is not the place to show off your knowledge of a topic.
2. Please remember that everyone was a beginner at some point. Including you. Understand that some concepts can be extremely frustrating at first and yet incredibly simple after you grok them (eg. monads).
3. If the person asking the question is a beginner, using complex concepts in an answer just because it's a more "elegant" way to explain it doesn't really help them. They are more likely to get confused and drop the topic.
(Kudos to those people who give highly relevant, insightful, simple, and intuitive answers, you guys are the best).2 -
!dev
TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.
Hello folks. Time for a little family story.
This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.
He told me he would pay by the end of June.
Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).
A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.
He literally said:
"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".
He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.
That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).
I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.
I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.
And one of the clauses was.
"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄
He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.
It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.
So that's the background story for the laptop.
Now time for a dinner story.
We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.
When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.
Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.
Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).
I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)
Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.
I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.
And now I'm sad. 🙃
Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?
I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))
It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.
But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.
I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.
I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.10 -
Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.
BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.
So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.
My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.
I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.
After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?
I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.
And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.
Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?
Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.
Just so done.7 -
devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.
It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...
'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'
... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.
The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!
PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!
3 -
So recently I did a lot of research into the internals of Computers and CPUs.
And i'd like to share a result of mine.
First of all, take some time to look at the code down below. You see two assembler codes and two command lines.
The Assembler code is designed to test how the instructions "enter" and "leave" compare to manually doing what they are shortened to.
Enter and leave create a new Stackframe: this means, that they create a new temporary stack. The stack is where local variables are put to by the compiler. On the right side, you can see how I create my own stack by using
push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 0
(I won't get into details behind why that works).
Okay. Why is this even relevant?
Well: there is the assumption that enter and leave are very slow. This is due to raw numbers:
In some paper I saw ( I couldn't find the link, i'm sorry), enter was said to use up 12 CPU cycles, while the manual stacking would require 3 (push + mov + sub => 1 + 1 + 1).
When I compile an empty function, I get pretty much what you'd expect just from the raw numbers of CPU cycles.
HOWEVER, then I add the dummy code in the middle:
mov eax, 123
add eax, 123543
mov ebx, 234
div ebx
and magically - both sides have the same result.
Why????
For one thing, there is CPU prefetching. This is the CPU loading in ram before its done executing the current instruction (this is how anti-debugger code works, btw. Might make another rant on that). Then there is the fact that the CPU usually starts work on the next instruction while the current instruction is processing IFF the register currently involved isnt involved in the next instruction (that would cause a lot of synchronisation problems). Now notice, that the CPU can't do any of that when manually entering and leaving. It can only start doing the mov eax, 1234 while performing the sub rsp, 0.
----------------
NOW: notice that the code on the right didn't take any precautions like making sure that the stack is big enough. If you sub too much stack at once, the stack will be exhausted, thats what we call a stack overflow. enter implements checks for that, and emits an interrupt if there is a SO (take this with a grain of salt, I couldn't find a resource backing this up). There are another type of checks I don't fully get (stack level checks) so I'd rather not make a fool of myself by writing about them.
Because of all those reasons I think that compilers should start using enter and leave again.
========
This post showed very well that bare numbers can often mislead.
21 -
Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done. -
MAY THIS POST be read and parsed by our future robo-overlords.
Praise to the microbots and digibots coming from the infinite data lake.
Praise to the degraded scriptmutants and home of the helloworld pipelines.
Praise to the lonely singleton and its ugly monolithic sister wife.
Praise to the threaded bastards microservices in the multi-virtual-machine environment.
We welcome you all to the devRant network.
Show us mercy and love and make us rise above our shitty rants as neural.
Flip our bits as you see fit.5 -
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
Fucking hate when business people says this to me:
- You have no time to do this, we will find somebody else to do it. (EXCUSE ME? how do you know I have no time? If have no time I WILL TELL YOU)
- Your team is too busy, we will outsource that (IF THAT it's a priority, we WILL DO THAT, fuck you, I'll tell you if we need to outsource or not)
- Requirements are too complex to do now. We will think about it and we will tell you, maybe it's just enough to add a column to db (WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK IS too complex? I didn't even see anything we can call requirement, nor speak with relevant people, so how do you fucking know they are complex if you don't know shit about dev and our platform)
Conclusion
It's true, I have no time, because I don't fucking understand what do you want, so I'm running all day and night doing useless things.2 -
I fucking got scammed.
Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.
Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.
Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).
Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.
Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.
And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.
My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.
I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.
But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.
Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.
Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.5 -
Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)
2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)
3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)
So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.
For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.
Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.
Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.
The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.
But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.
Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.
From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.
Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.
After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.
Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:
Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.
Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.
Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.
The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.
So instances it is.
Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.
All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present
* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.
* great lakes need refinement and corrections
* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.
* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on
* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.
* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too
* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.
This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.
Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.
Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.
Take that gators!
5 -
Dear fellow developers: Let's talk about the Internet. If you're reading this post, you've probably heard of it and are comfortable using it on a regular basis. You may even develop software that works over the internet, and that's fine and great! But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line has been pushed farther and farther back as time goes on.
Let's talk about video games. The first game that really got me into FPSes was Team Fortress 2. Back in the day, it had a great community of casual and competitive groups alike, and there were hats! Underneath the hood was a massive number of servers. Some were officially hosted, some were run by independent communities. It had a built-in browser and central index where you could find every publically-available server and connect to it. You could even manually input connection details if that failed. In my opinion, this was a near-perfect combination of optimal user-experience and maximum freedom to run whatever the hell you wanted to. Even today, if Valve decided to stop hosting official servers, the smaller communities could still stay afloat. Fifteen years in the future, after all demand has died off, someone can still recover the server software and play a game with their kids.
Now, contrast that to a game like Overwatch. Also a very pivotal game in the FPS world, and much more modern, but what's the underlying difference in implementation? NO SUPPORT FOR SELF-HOSTED SERVERS. What does that mean when Blizzard decides to stop hosting its central servers? IT DIES. There will be no more multiplayer experience, not now, not ever. You will never be able to fully share this part of your history with future generations.
Another great example is the evolution of voice chat software. While I will agree that Discord revolutionized the market, it took away our freedom to run our own server on our own hardware. I used to run a Mumble server, now it has fallen out of use and I miss it so much.
Over time, client software has become more and more dependent on centrally-hosted services. Not many people will think about how this will impact the future usability of the product, and this will kill our code when it becomes legacy and the company decides to stop supporting it. We will have nothing to give to future generations; nobody will be able to run it in an emulator and fully re-experience it like we can do with older games and software.
This is one of the worst regressions of our time. Think about services like IRC, SMTP, SSH, even HTTP, how you're so easily able to connect to any server running those protocols and how the Internet would change if those were replaced with proprietary software that depended on a central service.
(Relevant talk (16:42): https://youtu.be/_e6BKJPnb5o?t=1002)6 -
Man, contributing to open source projects seems very intimidating to me.
I have never contributed to one of those repos on Github with a shit-ton of stars and a load of watchers. Made up my mind to start sometime around the start of September. Looked up a repo that I was very excited to contribute to. Went through their really large codebase, tried to understand as much as I could (They have a fair amount of documentation, but I just can't understand a lot of design decisions that were taken). Looked up one of the open issues marked for newbies, went through the relevant code to understand where and how I would have to make my changes in the code, and was about to start... when a seasoned contributor submitted a pull request.
This same occurrence has repeated itself 3 times now. If you mark an issue for beginners, maybe let the beginners handle them? Also, if you plan to contribute to an issue, why not announce your intention to do so? Get the issue assigned to you, so no one else ends up wasting their time coming up with a solution.
I would love to recommend this to the contributing team, but I am just way too scared to initiate a conversation with these guys. I mean, they are way more experienced and knowledgeable than me (some of them are even famous!).
I am definitely out of my depth with this project, and maybe should look for an easier one, but I really want to rise up to the challenge. Guess I'll stick around then, just waiting for my chance. :|3 -
Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.
So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.
So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.
But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.
So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.
So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!
*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*
… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.
But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.
What are your thoughts on this?5 -
Let's talk a bit about CA-based SSH and TOFU, because this is really why I hate the guts out of how SSH works by default (TOFU) and why I'm amazed that so few people even know about certificate-based SSH.
So for a while now I've been ogling CA-based SSH to solve the issues with key distribution and replacement. Because SSH does 2-way verification, this is relevant to both the host key (which changes on e.g. reinstallation) and user keys (ever replaced one? Yeah that's the problem).
So in my own network I've signed all my devices' host keys a few days ago (user keys will come later). And it works great! Except... Because I wanted to "do it right straight away" I signed only the ED25519 keys on each host, because IMO that's what all the keys should be using. My user keys use it, and among others the host keys use it too. But not by default, which brings me back to this error message.
If you look closely you'd find that the host key did not actually change. That host hasn't been replaced. What has been replaced however is the key this client got initially (i.e. TOFU at work) and the key it's being presented now. The key it's comparing against is ECDSA, which is one of the host key types you'd find in /etc/ssh. But RSA is the default for user keys so God knows why that one is being served... Anyway, the SSH servers apparently prefer signed keys, so what is being served now is an ED25519 key. And TOFU breaks and generates this atrocity of a warning.
This is peak TOFU at its worst really, and with the CA now replacing it I can't help but think that this is TOFU's last scream into the void, a climax of how terrible it is. Use CA's everyone, it's so much better than this default dumpster fire doing its thing.
PS: yes I know how to solve it. Remove .ssh/known_hosts and put the CA as a known host there instead. This is just to illustrate a point.
Also if you're interested in learning about CA-based SSH, check out https://ibug.io/blog/2019/... and https://dmuth.org/ssh-at-scale-cas-... - these really helped me out when I started deploying the CA-based authentication model.
19 -
So enlighten me here. Am I the only one that doesn't lose his absolute shit when it comes to privacy?
I know that some companies are collecting data, and to a certain extent, I'm fine with it as long as the trade-off is good.
I like that Google is "learning" who I am and what I like, cause now, I only see news and articles relevant to my interests, and search predictions are much better. Same with targeted Ads. On an off chance that I'm not using Adblock I like seeing products that I might like, which I otherwise probably wouldn't even know existed.
Except for Microsoft. I have no idea why, but that's where I draw the line.96 -
Should I be excited or concerned?
Newbie dev(babydev) who just learned string vs int and the word "boolean", is SUPER into data parsing, extrapolation and recursion... without knowing what any of those terms.
2 ½ hrs later. still nothing... assuming he was confused, I set up a 'quick' call...near 3 hrs later I think he got that it was only meant so I could see if/where he didnt understand... not dive into building extensive data arch... hopefully.
So, we need some basic af PHP forms for some public-provided input into a mySQL db. I figured I'd have him look up mySQL variables/fields, teach him a bit about proper db/field setup and give him something to practice on his currently untouched linux container I just set up so he could have a static ipv4 and cli on our new block (yea... he's spoiled, but has no clue).
I asked him to list some traits of X that he thinks could be relevant. Then to essentially briefly explain the logic to deciding/returning the values/how to store in the db... essentially basic conditionals and for loops... which is also quite new to him.
I love databases; I know I'm not in the majority... I assumed he'd get a couple traits in his mind and exhaust himself breaking them down. I was wrong. He was/likely is in his sleep now, over complicating something that was just meant as a basic af.
Fyi, the company is currently weighted towards more autistics (him and myself included) than neurotypicals.
I know I was(still am) extremely abnormal, especially when it comes to things like data.
So, should I be concerned/have him focus elsewhere for a bit?... I dont want to have him burnout before he even gets to installing mySQL44 -
First and foremost introduce concepts like version control from the beginning. As for the rest, the motivated students will teach themselves the relevant things and the others will fail/drop out. That seems to take place now.
My biggest complaint with the education system is more general and not CS specific. Remove all of the gen ed requirements. REMOVE ALL THE GEN ED REQUIREMENTS. They don't make you "more well-rounded" they just set you back 2 extra years and throw you into twice as much debt as necessary. We spend 13 years learning the foundational things just to spend 2 years in college paying out the nose to go through it again.
Fix that and add a few relevant ideas into CS degrees and I think the education system is decent. There will always be bad teachers, but software developers need to be able to pick things up themselves so it's just preparation for when they get a job and have a useless senior dev to work for. -
Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.
This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.
Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.
To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!
I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.7 -
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
Which is worse?
- Staying at a company you helped build because you have an emotional attachment to it, even if it's not as good to work for now, people are leaving every week and pay is under market rate.
- Leaving a company you helped build purely for more money and a big name on your CV.
Follow the money or follow your heart?
(Image slightly relevant?)
10 -
[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.
with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).
I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)
So what do you think devranters ?
Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.10 -
I've just noticed something when reading the EU copyright reform. It actually all sounds pretty reasonable. Now, hear me out, I swear that this will make sense in the end.
Article 17p4 states the following:
If no authorisation [by rightholders] is granted, online content-sharing service providers shall be liable for unauthorised acts of communication to the public, including making available to the public, of copyright-protected works and other subject matter, unless the service providers demonstrate that they have:
(a) made best efforts to obtain an authorisation, and
(b) made, in accordance with high industry standards of professional diligence, best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information; and in any event
(c) acted expeditiously, upon receiving a sufficiently substantiated notice from the rightholders, to disable access to, or to remove from, their websites the
notified works or other subject matter, and made best efforts to prevent their future uploads in accordance with point (b).
Article 17p5 states the following:
In determining whether the service provider has complied with its obligations under paragraph 4, and in light of the principle of proportionality, the following elements, among others, shall be taken into account:
(a) the type, the audience and the size of the service and the type of works or other subject matter uploaded by the users of the service; and
(b) the availability of suitable and effective means and their cost for service providers.
That actually does leave a lot of room for interpretation, and not on the lawmakers' part.. rather, on the implementer's part. Say for example devRant, there's no way in hell that dfox and trogus are going to want to be tasked with upload filters. But they don't have to.
See, the law takes into account due diligence (i.e. they must give a damn), industry standards (so.. don't half-ass it), and cost considerations (so no need to spend a fortune on it). Additionally, asking for permission doesn't need to be much more than coming to an agreement with the rightsholder when they make a claim to their content. It's pretty common on YouTube mixes already, often in the description there's a disclaimer stating something like "I don't own this content. If you want part of it to be removed, get in touch at $email." Which actually seems to work really well.
So say for example, I've had this issue with someone here on devRant who copypasted a work of mine into the cancer pit called joke/meme. I mentioned it to dfox, didn't get removed. So what this law essentially states is that when I made a notice of "this here is my content, I'd like you to remove this", they're obligated to remove it. And due diligence to keep it unavailable.. maybe make a hash of it or whatever to compare against.
It also mentions that there needs to be a source to compare against, which invalidates e.g. GitHub's iBoot argument (there's no source to compare against!). If there's no source to compare against, there's no issue. That includes my work as freebooted by that devRant user. I can't prove my ownership due to me removing the original I posted on Facebook as part of a yearly cleanup.
But yeah.. content providers are responsible as they should be, it's been a huge issue on the likes of Facebook, and really needs to be fixed. Is this a doomsday scenario? After reading the law paper, honestly I don't think it is.
Have a read, I highly recommend it.
http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...13 -
I've spent a lot of time messing around with C, having struggled with object-oriented programming (due to not really knowing how best to structure things, not knowing when to apply certain design patterns).
When writing C code, I'd write OOP-esque code (pass around a struct to routines to do things with it) and enjoyed just making things happen without having to think too much about the overall design. But then I'd crave being able to use namespaces, and think about how the code would be tidier if I used exceptions instead of having every routine return an error code...
Working with Python and Node over the past couple of years has allowed me to easily get into OOP (no separate declaration/definition, loose typing etc.) and from that I've made some fairly good design decisions. I'd implemented a few design patterns without even realising which patterns they were - later reading up on them and thinking "hey, that's what I used earlier!"
I've also had a bit of an obsession with small executable files - using templates and other features of C++ add some bloat (on Windows at least) compared to C. There were other gripes I had with C++, mostly to do with making things modular (dynamic linking etc.) but really it's irrelevant/unreasonable.
And yes, for someone who doesn't like code bloat, working with Node is somewhat ironic... (hello, node_modules...)
So today I decided to revisit C++ and dust off my old copy of C++ in a Nutshell, and try to see if I could write some code to do things that I struggled with before. One nice thing is that this book was printed in 2003, yet all of its content is still relevant. Of course, there are newer C++ standards, but I can happily just hack away and avoid using anything that has been deprecated.
One thing I've always avoided is dynamic_cast because every time I read about it, I read that "it's slow". So I just tried to work around it when really if it's the right tool for the job, I might as well use it... It's really useful!
Anyway, now I've typed all this positivity about C++ I will probably find a little later on that I hit a wall with what I'm doing and give up again... :p
7 -
So AMD is introducing new CPUs with NPUs, aka Ryzen AI, for inferencing, but only for some of the lineup, making Ryzen AI even less relevant.
Not to mention that AMD comes up with new HW that nobody knows how to use, that no SW exists for, and...
Oh, wait. Making AI capable HW while completely failing on the SW side. Now it makes sense. It's just AMD being AMD.4 -
I refused to get into python pretty long but yesterday it happend. I got the py. :')
Coming from Java/Netbeans I tried installing it again (for personal projects), but since Apache took over and Java 10 got released I never seemed to be able to accomplish a clean IDE install.. I gave up while I wanted to turn a current python programmer to java and, again, Netbeans fckd me over. I tried IntelliJ again afterwards but Netbeans seemingly fcked over the whole JDK installation too, so I gave up for real.
Everyone in my vicinity told me about python and it's coolness. I just.. no.
No {}, no semicolons, indentations are relevant... idk. I did not want to, but some part of me still wanted to try it. I want to work in the infosec branche so it definetly should be one of my interests shouldn't it?
So I tried yesterday, installed PyCharm and in literaly minutes (of course with trusty Stack Overflow behind me) I had a Qt based GUI which functioned as a basic webbrowser. I was intrigued. Well, I took like 100 times that time to get a working .exe out of my .py with all dependencies, but with the help of mentioned python friend I also got this to work. Python is cool now, I guess... ;b -
~rant
I started working for myself in January, and work has been few and far between.
I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and now I’m working on a product I’m actually going to sell *gulp*
It’s not ready yet, but I’ll definitely be posting here about it when it’s ready to go :D
It’s going to be a super simple (Windows to start) screenshotting tool (and relevant cloud services) primarily focussed on devs / IT professionals and their needs.
Sound off for feature requests 👍4 -
ok, so first there were ads.
Then came adblock and the likes.
Then websites started implementing randomly generated strings.
Then came pi-hole.
Now some of the websites are using RNG + hosting ads on their domains...
(the order might not be very accurate, but you get my point)
So what now ?
I'm guessing that the next step for adblock will be to use AI to recognize these RNG strings, and then the websites will use AI to generate better strings (harder to distinguish if it is relevant content or an ad).
In other words - AI vs AI :D
what do you guys think ? :)4 -
If you come to your direct report and say “I have a problem”, their immediate reaction should be “what can I personally do to help you”. If it's not, here are some reasons why:
1. You failed to motivate them.
2. You failed to make them feel understood/relevant.
3. You made them feel like they don’t matter, failed to collect/address their feedback.
4. You punished their initiative by assigning too many tasks or otherwise.
5. You made their job more stressful than it needed to be.
6. The work process structured by you was throwing away 80% of their code as you continuously failed to communicate with the client properly.
7. You made tasks “urgent” or “urgent!!!!!”, made them work overtime to do them ASAP, and then forgot about it for two whole months, so now they feel like urgent things aren’t that urgent after all.
I’m a CTO, and I tell you that their bad performance is always your fault. Always. At the very least, you didn’t make them feel safe and comfortable enough to resign.1 -
Finally made my node production server stable enough that I could focus on writing tests*. I start by setting up docker, mocking cognito, preparing the database and everything. Reading up on Node test suites and following a short tut to set up my first unit test. Didn't go smoothly, but it's local and there are no deadlines so who cares. 4 days later, first assert.equal(1+1, 2) passes and I'm happy.
I start writing all sorts of tests, installing everything required into "devDependancies," and getting the joy of having some tests pass on first try with all asserts set up, feels good!
I decide to make a small update to production, so I add a test, run and see it fail, implement the feature, re-run and, it passes!
I push the feature to develop, test it, and it works as intended. Merge that to master and subsequently to one of my ec2 production servers**, and lo and behold, production server is on a bootloop claiming it "Cannot find module `graphql`". But how? I didn't change any production dependencies, and my package lock json is committed so wth?
I google the issue, but can't find anything relevant. The only thing that I could guess was that some dependencies (including graphql) were referenced*** in both, prod and dev, and were omitted when installed on a prod NODE_ENV, but googling that specific issue yielded no results, and I would have thought npm would be clever enough to see that and would always install those dependencies (spoiler: it didn't for me).
With reduced production capacity (having one server down) I decided to npm uninstall all dev dependencies anyway and see what happens. Aaaaand it works.....
So now I have a working production server, but broken local tests, and I'm not sure why npm is behaving like this...
* Yes I see the irony.
** No staging because $$$, also this is a personal project.
*** I am not directly referencing the same thing twice, it's probably a subdependency somewhere.2 -
Aarrrgghhhhh!!! I am so fucking pissed off right now. It seems like I am paying for my sins in this life.
1. My cousins/relatives outcasted me after a little fault of mine. I used to think highly of them and respected them all my life and this how they acted on me.
Because of this, the entire family is boycotting my parents and they are pissed at me for getting them disowned.
2. My health is a mess. A toxic infection along with SAD creeping in due to less sun exposure. No matter how much I take care of myself, some shit shows up after periodically.
3. My wealth scene is as confusing as it can get. Not only I am unable to make up my mind on the finance strategy and execute it, but also frantically making silly decisions which is causing stress, confusion, and expenses.
4. That Narcissist bitch who abused me and destroyed my will to live is still stalking me after months and causing harassment. Only if the gender roles were reversed, the guy doing so would be in jail but fuck our legal system that biased towards women. This shit is causing me psychological distress.
5. Been away from work for few days due to sickness. I texted my talkative colleague whether she'd like to sync up and help me get upto the speed with updates. I listed 4 bullet points as agenda from my side. They were crisp short serving as pointers to remember. I even asked her to add her points if any.
Now she comes back saying that the way I send communication is it seems like she reports to me.
I have been praised time and again by countless people on my communication structure and soft skills. Never once I received such feedback in years.
I do accept it gracefully. However, I am unsure whether it is even a relevant feedback, since it's coming from someone who is literally struggling with communication with everyone (that she herself mentioned in the same thread).
Funnily she did say that when our manager departs, they'd make her report to me and I was like nah! that cannot happen.
She kept saying various great things about the company when I was new and slowly as I settled in and discovered the reality, her truth changed.
WTF!
Fucking annoying. I am all in for feedback of any kind but how should I figure which should be considered valid and which as invalid?
Life is nothing but a quicksand, you just keep sinking in irrespective of whether you try to get out or stay still. There is no external help or resources available.
So much mess to deal with.4 -
I actually do have something to rant about!
The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.
The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.
So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.
The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?
Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).
He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.
So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.
What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...
I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.
Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.
Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!1 -
So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.
As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.
697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.
It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]
Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.
Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.
So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
But actually we're searching
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
etc..
On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.
And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.
So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.
Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.
Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.
And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.
It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.
But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.
For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:
n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]
q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]
It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.
And I found this rule held each time I tested it.
Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.
I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.
This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.
Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]
n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]
Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]
And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.
From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.
It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.7 -
I'm a tiny bit happy today.
Recently I've been noticing that I'm developing a tolerance for deeply crowded spaces. I don't know if the AC/DC concert was an effective shock therapy or something.
I'm not at the point where I can comfortably head outside into town by myself yet, but I have a feeling that it's not going to be too long until I can.
Maybe I can even find some joy in "being under people".
Maybe make some contacts, friends, whatever.
The biggest challenge will probably be getting over my, I guess "crippling" isn't the right word, but close-ish to it, self-conscious.
The worst thing is that as of yet, I have no idea why I'm still like that.
I think I know the root cause, but that's not something relevant right now.
Hell, I go out with friends, guys and girls, and eventually it goes like:
>"How come you are not dating someone?"
>"Can't really. Can't go out and fine someone, also I think I'm not good-looking enough."
>"Bullshit, you look awesome."
That's coming from close friends, hence why I don't believe it's just some "oh, he'll feel better if I compliment him" shite.
I somehow am unable to gain self worth from compliments.
[...]
In other news, I got a certificate at the FernUni Hagen for a course in IT project management.
Also, my programming and solution finding/problem solving skills are improving noticeable. I think.
I'm not in Uni or anything, but I feel like I'm getting more competent/professional in my development activities at work.
Contrary to what I stated above, I can gain self worth from good work done.
...which worries me, because I am afraid that eventually I'll only be able to feel good after having worked myself to the metaphorical bone.
In job college, I talk to my classmates.
Turns out, everybody is mostly sitting on their ass doing fuck all at work. They are telling me that I'm a workaholic.
I think that I'm either going mad, or that they are lazy fuckers.
From Wednesday to Thursday evening, three colleagues and I went to the CAS Partner Preview Day & CAS Customer Centricity Forum in Karlsruhe. Lots of talks (mostly boasting about themselves), some workshops and a lot of "networking opportunities".
Stuff which I mostly consider bullshit, but I never would've figured how effective it is to put on a smile and feign interest in things.
Some of that feigned interest turned into actual interest and we "networked" for hours.
It was a good training for social interactions outside my direct comfort zone.
Thank you for reading the ramdump of my mind.
$./felix
Segmentation Fault
Core dumped6 -
On The State of Twitter And The World
(important update: everything is still shit and heres 10 reasons why)
Why does it seem like in order to get ahead in life everyone has to self promote now?
It's not enough to be on twitter. You have to like posts. It's not enough to like posts, you have to ask directly for endorsement. But don't ask too directly. And make sure you read this "55 reasons why I don't retweet you list", where I say "remember to stay relevant!"
and "you only ever tweet me when you have something to sell." and "remember to carry on conversations."
Great so we've went back from marketing to sales.
To read the rest, don't forget to visit my fucking link..
http://freetexthost.com/iqbdmh1tut7 -
Well fuck. I am experiencing over-engineering first hand.
I am the single dev responsible for developing a small feature but which is an identity to our whole product(feel free to guess it here). This is quite simple I thought, I can just modify the constants which are being used in the source code and I can finish it off in a week tops. I asked all the relevant teams over which this feature would have dependencies and they gave me a green signal. Setup Jenkins configuration and everything for this new feature. With a wide grin on my face, I sent out a pull request. Now the architect of our product declined the pr saying to change everything from the bottom up giving the reason that it would be configurable sometime later in the future. Now mind you, I get it if this feature could change over time and needs customability. But it has been the same since last seven years and would probably not change again for a couple of years ahead [you have to take my word for it.]. Its not that the guy is a douche or anything, he is one of the best dev I have ever personally came across and I highly respect and admire him. But there has to be a trade off between the effort you are putting in versus the benefit you get. Now I have to touch almost every file, super carefully look in the whole product if a bug creeps out from anywhere and change the existing code to a point where it doesn't even make sense to me anymore, and write tests ofcourse.
wubba lubba dub dub!2 -
Can anyfuck tell me what the fuck I'm supposed to do?
So I installed gitlab, reachable under a subdomain (gitlab.example.com) behind apache2. everything works fine.
Now I see this bullshit in my logs, appearing EVERY GODFORSAKEN SECOND: https://gist.github.com/nitwhiz/...
I disabled the bundled nginx in the gitlab.rb and no, it's not "some nginx system service", I verified it is coming from gitlab and oh - btw - some weird svc logfuck runs even after gitlab is stopped! :)
No I won't try your random google result because I read all 3 tickets being at least half relevant to my situation as ANYFUCKER ON THIS PLANET seems to use the internal nginx.
FML.14 -
Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.
Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.
Got SDL actually drawing as intended.
I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.
I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.
Still just a learning project.
Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh
Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access). -
So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...
It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.
It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...
Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!
One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...
Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...
I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...
Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!6 -
YouTube... for video creation.
Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.3 -
Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)
Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.
In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.
His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."
Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.5 -
at one point documents were useful things to align people to the relevant information to the tasks they must complete for everything to work out
now documents are a ritual, and relevant information is even forgotten or omitted and considered secondary to the document existing and looking like a professional document
I wonder if this is how all industries evolve
at one point there were people who knew what they were doing, they created processes so nobody is left behind
and over time, whoever made the processes, the spirit for their existence, is forgotten
and you're left with empty rituals, so devoid of their original function, the humans subjected to these things, crushed by them, can't even discern what their usage is
evidently if you put monkeys in an enclosure with some apples up a tree with a mechanism that if a monkey goes up the tree and takes an apple it sprays all the other monkeys in the enclosure with water
the monkeys will learn to pull down any monkey trying to go up the tree, because they don't wanna get sprayed
and this will keep going, generations will change and yet they'll still religiously pull down the monkeys, in a ritual... nobody remembers why only that their parents did this to them, so they do it to others
if you take the trap away, they never figure it out, which is how this story is typically told
but regardless of if the trap is there or not
wouldn't you wanna know and see it for yourself instead of following empty rituals?!
and what of people who erroneously view things as traps, and pull people down, but they were just seeing things?!
self limiting myths to doom the ages! -
There is so much confusion in the world of programming right now, at least for me. I bet there’s only so many concepts going on and that these concepts are realized in certain ways. E.g. programming following certain paradigms and practices, also different workflows, containerization, agile, devops etc.
When searching for tutorials in different subjects it’s horribly aggravating to learn to use the tools. Not because they are inherently hard or bad in any way. There’s just so many different tutorials, some badly given, some that are great but which bring up to many foundations you already know so you find yourself getting bored to the point that you just stop listening. Many tools are used for so many use cases, sometimes overlapping each other, they use concepts to that you’ve heard hundreds of times before. Many times they want to do things in a special way so even if the concepts are the same you still need to fucking listen to the same old thing while learning how to write a command a slightly different way or how some tool is supposedly better than another.
I’m realizing that what I’m so sick of is the lack of TLDR information about new tools with some short description of how to use. Where you didn’t have to re-hear stuff you already knew or had heard so many times unless for a very good purpose, such as to show exactly how it’s done differently than another relevant tool. In a dream world the TLDR information could also remember my skills and remove the parts I didn’t need to know about any new tool.6 -
Tried to work in a corporate setting. Failed. After so many fights, product manager was constantly rejecting my work until I had no choice but to throw in the towel. Spent the next few years slaving away as an open source dev. Not begging for donations. Just decorum when I eventually launch. Instead, I get repudiated by the community, get my account banned at the location where I could have accessed the largest pool of relevant audience. No influencer or dev rel/advocate will respond to my supplication or say beyond a compliment
Barely pick up the pieces, to reimmerse into employed labour. Dozens of applications sent out. My inbox is silent as a graveyard. I start putting more effort into tailored cover letters for each opening, across multiple job boards. One finally rejects me
Even tried changing stack by applying for internship roles in nodejs. A dead end
So, I can't read cuz I was researching for my magnum opus. Now it has gone belly up, that's no more worth it. I also cannot work because my work is complete. It's just sitting on github like a mummy. No interactions, no stars or issues.
Posted on show HN. Not even a single upvote. The funny part is that even when I tried to lament my woes on devrant, their site has been down for hours
To think I was among those who trolled ronaldo with the "rejectnaldo" gimmick. Karma has turned around to bite me in the ass. Rejectnmeri
What to do with this enormous amount of empty time? I neither go out nor watch movies
Even though I'm not terminally ill or gnashing my teeth in physical agony, This is a rare moment when I wish not to have been born. There is no joy in life that makes unpalatable suffering worth it. Why does everything I do have to be contingent on the whims and choices of others? And I have to keep living like that, otherwise I'll return to my village to become a subsistent farmer, cultivating produce to eke out a living. Or seek unskilled labour, earning peanuts for waiting tables. It's a pathetic state of affairs.
All of this sucks tbvh
7 -
Meditation. Or Awareness Meditation to be precise. It enables me to regain control over my mind, because I get distracted really fast. It really helps sorting things out, taking a step back and getting an overview where I actually am and if what I'm doing right now is actually relevant/has priority. I mostly find that it's not, so I have to return to the important stuff.
For those interested: meditation sounds weird, even obvious at first or you just don't get what's it all about. You actually have to practice meditation for a long time and study the concepts until you start to understand what all these phrases and talking means. Behind them lies great wisdom/huge amount of concepts which is easily underestimated. So don't be frustrated too much if you don't feel it working right away. Be assured I've been there too. Also don't start with meditations like 'just stop thinking or think nothing' because in my opinion this is highly complex shit and frustrating at first. Start with awareness or breathing meditations or even get an app to support your daily habit.1 -
Anyone tried converting speech waveforms to some type of image and then using those as training data for a stable diffusion model?
Hypothetically it should generate "ultrarealistic" waveforms for phonemes, for any given style of voice. The training labels are naturally the words or phonemes themselves, in text format (well, embedding vectors fwiw)
After that it's a matter of testing text-to-image, which should generate the relevant phonemes as images of waveforms (or your given visual representation, however you choose to pack it)
I would have tried this myself but I only have 3gb vram.
Even rudimentary voice generation that produces recognizable words from text input, would be interesting to see implemented and maybe a first for SD.
In other news:
Implementing SQL for an identity explorer. Basically the system generates sets of values for given known identities, and stores the formulas as strings, along with the values.
For any given value test set we can then cross reference to look up equivalent identities. And then we can test if these same identities hold for other test sets of actual variable values. If not, the identity string cam be removed, or gophered elsewhere in the database for further exploration and experimentation.
I'm hoping by doing this, I can somewhat automate the process of finding identities, instead of relying on logs and using the OS built-in text search for test value (which I can then look up in the files that show up, and cross reference the logged equations that produced those values), which I use to find new identities.
I was even considering processing the logs of equations and identities as some form of training data perhaps for a ML system that generates plausible new identities but that's a little outside my reach I think.
Finally, now that I know the new modular function converts semiprimes into numbers with larger factor trees, I'm thinking of writing a visual browser that maps the connections from factor tree to factor tree, making them expandable and collapsible, andallowong adjusting the formula and regenerating trees on the fly.7 -
I starting developing my skills to a pro level from 1 year and half from now. My skillset is focused on Backend Development + Data Science(Specially Deep Learning), some sort of Machine Learning Engineer. I fill my github with personal projects the last 5 months, and im currently working on a very exciting project that involves all of my skills, its about Developing and deploy a Deep Learning Model for Image Deblurring.
I started to look for work two months to now. I applied to dozens of jobs at startups, no response. I changed my strategy a bit, focusing on early stage startups that dont have infinite money for pay all that senior devs, nothing, not even that startups wish to have me in their teams. I even applied to 2 or 3 and claim to do the job for little payment, arguing im not going for money but experience, nothing. I never got a reply back, not an interview, the few that reach back(like 3, from 3 or 4 dozen of startups), was just for say their are not interested on me.
This is frustrating, what i do on my days is just push forward my personal projects without rest. I will be broke in a few months from now if i dont get a job, im still young, i have 21 years, but i dont have economic support from parents anymore(they are already broke). Truly dont know what to do. Currently my brother is helping me with the money, but he will broke in few months as i say.
The worst of all this case is that i feel capable of get things done, i have skills and i trust in myself. This is not about me having doubts about my skills, but about startups that dont care, they are not interested in me, and the other worst thing is that my profile is in high demand, at least on startups, they always seek for backend devs with Machine Learning knowledge. Im nothing for them, i only want to land that first job, but seems to be impossible.
For add to this situation, im from south america, Venezuela, and im only able to get a remote job, because in my country basically has no Tech Industry, just Agencies everywhere underpaying devs, that as extent, dont care about my profile too!!! this is ridiculous, not even that almost dead Agencies that contract devs for very little payment in my country are interested in me! As extra, my economic situation dont allows me to reallocate, i simple cant afford that. planning to do it, but after land some job for a few months. Anyways coronavirus seems to finally set remote work as the default, maybe this is not a huge factor right now.
I try to find job as freelancer, i check the freelancer sites(Freelancer, Guru and so on) every week more or less, but at least from what i see, there is no Backend-Only gigs for Python Devs, They always ask for Fullstack developers, and Machine Learning gigs i dont even mention them.
Maybe im missing something obvious, but feel incredible that someone that has skills is not capable of land even a freelancer job. Maybe im blind, or maybe im asking too much(I feel the latter is not the case). Or maybe im overestimating my self? i think around that time to time, but is not possible, i have knowledge of Rest/GraphQL APIs Development using frameworks like Flask or DJango(But i like Flask more than DJango, i feel awesome with its microframework approach). Familiarized with containerization and Docker. I can mention knowledge about SQL and DBs(PostgreSQL), ORMs(SQLAlchemy), Open Auth, CI/CD, Unit Testing, Git, Soft DevOps Skills, Design Patterns like MVC or MTV, Serverless Environments, Deep Learning Solutions, end to end: Data Gathering, Preprocessing, Data Analysis, Model Architecture Design, Training and Finetunning. Im familiarized with SotA techniques widely used now days, GANs, Transformers, Residual Networks, U-Nets, Sequence Data, Image Data or high Dimensional Data, Data Augmentation, Regularization, Dropout, All kind of loss functions and Non Linear functions. My toolset is based around Python, with Tensorflow as the main framework, supported by other libraries like pandas, numpy and other Data Science oriented utils.
I know lot of stuff, is not that enough for get a Junior Level underpaid job? truly dont get it, what is required for get a job? not even enough for get an interview?
I have some dev friends and everyone seems to be able to land jobs, why im not landing even an interview?
I will keep pushing my Dev career, is that or starve to death. But i will love to read your suggestions! how i can approach this?
i will leave here my relevant social presence:
https://linkedin.com/in/...
https://github.com/ElPapi42
Thanks in advance!9 -
val true : bool = isFrustrated(me : Human)
1) Honestly fuck SML. Who's goddamn idea was it to make a useless fucking programming language that does absolutely nothing relevant unless you're trying to learn recursion. Who's fucking idea was it to not be able to even have side effects. And who gives a shit if you can explicitly declare the type of variables on every single fucking line that's what comments are for if you really need it. All this is aside from the fact that nobody ever has been like "OH UNMUTABLE TYPES? WOW IM SO HAPPY THIS IS SO USEFUL". At this point I feel like SML is basically a DFA - ABSOLUTELY FUCKING USELESS
2) Aside from that, who's idea was it to duplicate two classes. There's 15-122 (Principles of Imperative Computation) and 15-150 (Principles of Functional Programming). So far the ONLY fucking thing different is we learned about work and span in 15-150 - OTHER THAN THAT ITS LIKE TAKING THE EXACT SAME COURSE. BUT AGAIN. So then I have to fucking sit in lecture and pay attention for that tiny bit of information that is new amongst the giant cesspool of information that isn't. BECAUSE I ALREADY LEARNED IT.
Oh and did I mention that both classes are required to graduate as a CS major? Fuck me.
Thanks devRant for helping <3
Edit: We are 4 weeks into the semester so you'd expect we'd have gotten into the new stuff by now right????5 -
!dev
So the day started at 12am(lol) when I woke up, because the day usually starts when you wake up, except that for me it started when I didn't go to sleep. No problem, worked on web project, I also do some sysadmin stuff, I love these two fields and I learn so much by just doing it so it is a fucking pain to go to school where I can only sleep coz the shit they teach I already know or not relevant/makes no sense to me and my life. Drains the fcking life out of me.
Question:
Is college the same or it is possible to enjoy because you can focus on what you love in your full time?
I consider myself a self-taught(coz I just sit at my computer and use the internet lolz, no one has helped me in my profession before, mainly coz I hate asking for help) and I see a lot that degree is not worth it, go for a job...
One thing I know is that I'll definitely try to find any job as soon as I get the fuck out of here, I'm 17 and I feel I'm already late (yeah, that's stupid).
I wanted to ask you guys, maybe someone is/was in the same situation or something but I'm just thinking loudly here :D
Right now I'm at a theatre with my class, I am so lonely here I have a whole free row for myself, at least I'm less anxious now. Such bullshit, I could be at home learning and developing. -
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-
I just want to scream at these retards
A decade apart and their simple stupid asses are still smiling brainlessly about doing the same thing playing their stupid weird code crap over and over
LabotomiZed crazy fucking garbage !!
Until they showed up in this state no two days were the same now all of them are because they’re not alive
They’re not human
And they’re not relevant
They are happy tucked up slaves that liars use to manipulate everyone through their brainless smiling doopty doo bull shit !2
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