Procastinator's tricks to be productive: Schedule messages

I hate to write people. They could answer. My whole plan might be thrown off. But when is the best time to answer them? The day after tomorrow? Too late. Tomorrow. Around 10? Thank you to all messengers that allow me to schedule a message. Instead of procrastinating, I answer, I schedule, and if I am in a bad mood, I later come back and abort and rewrite the message nicer.

Went perfectly swimmingly with my happy new year messages. Everyone got them at 00:00. Yes my friend, you're obviously the most important thing in my life, first thing I did was writing you!

Am I going crazy or is the web dev community on some otherworldly drug?
Now "server-side"-whatever is the coolest thing ever?
To the point where client side validation is not recommended anymore and actively discouraged? Are you kidding me? So, you mean to say after filling a long form with millions of fields, the page will RELOAD when I press submit and after waiting an eternity for your shitty server to respond then and only then will I know what fields are invalid?
GTFO with that bullshit.
How in the world is that good UX/UI?
I've always had this theory that we humans are the dumbest species to ever walk this earth. I mean, serisouly, how is this even a thing?

Imagine if a mobile app had to restart to tell you that your email is invalid in a simple form.

But.. but... but... what if the client has disabled javascript? Then fuck them! Who the fuck cares? What's next? Some dumb user is still using Android 2.1 Eclair and we should make our app support them? Fuck no! Fuck them, they should update.
Newsflash, if Javascript is disabled, then pretty much everything will be broken anyway.

Form validation should be instantenous. This isn't rocket science.
It should happen as the user types so they can see what's valid/invalid in real-time.
This does require effort and consideration, something many devs lack apparently.

This is just ridiculous.

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

So, my wife's family has a "no shoes inside the house" rule, what is fine... until you realize that they mean "*no shoes inside the house*" - regardless if you are actually wearing the shoes or if those are in your luggage or something.
So you're supposed to leave all footwear on a shelf on this bench outside their door.
That proved to be tricky when my 10yo twin girls started freaking out that someone was going to steal their prized shoes if we left those outside the house during the night.
It would actually be a risk in our own neighborhood, infested with amazon-package kleptomaniacs, but here we are deep in the country.
Now, I've been to my in-laws place many times, and they absolutely cannot be reasoned with. I wish I could use their stubbornness to train a LLM into relentless compliance with company policy.
So, in order to spare my girls from some of my in-laws paranoia, I've spent some time before we came here rigging up a wifi cam to a facial detection service. (I know I've just exchanged their covid-style paranoia with my own surveillance-state-style paranoia. Those are the times we live in. But i can see the irony)
The server monitors the camera feed and stores the first few seconds before, during and after some face is detected.
I trained a facial rekognition model with our family's faces and had it notify me every time some unknown face appears on camera.
Finally, I've printed a "smile, you are on camera!" sign, taped it over the laces of my tracking boots, and hid the camera (and a powerbank) inside one of the boots.
My daughters were pacified with that solution, my wife laughed out loud with a devilish smile, and my in-laws completely ignored me when I tried to explain it all. Perfect.

The system has been up and running since before christmas. It notified us when some relatives arrived for celebrations and one package delivery - no shoe-related shenanigans. Until this morning.
My daughters have been playing with some neighbor kids, and a couple of those decided to fill their shoes with mud on this new-year morning, as a stupid childish prank.
I know because they kneeled in front of the camera earlier today.
Right when I was finishing up my stretches for the morning... less than 2m away from the door.
The wicked kids looked straight at the camera, and you can actually pinpoint the moment that they realize they have been caught. Then you can see when they hear me unlock the door...
I opened the door to find a bucket full of mud and no soul on sight.
I'm not posting the video, they are minors, after all. But my family is sure to laugh at it every year... and my in-laws will keep on bringing it up with the kids' grandparents forever :)

tldr: I no longer like my job.

Several years ago I got hired at this company. It was great. Lots of things to learn. Able to make a big impact. The manager is great. Lots of flexibility. Raises were decent for the most part.

6+ years later. I have nothing to learn. I feel my career is stagnating. I'm quite good at my job but things are boring and there's no challenge. In the end my company has proved to me I do not make enough to justify my skills. I keep being told things are going to change and there will be new opportunities to change roles and learn/grow, but Ive heard that for years and trusted my leadership. They didn't lie to me but there are so many things out of their control that things just never happen.

My manager has become a good friend and I hate to think about leaving but finally just have to accept that all I'm doing is hurting myself and my career.

JavaScript has an exciting API for monitoring changes made to HTML elements. The API is called the MutationObserver API, and it was invented at the prestigious W3C—the global organization comprised of our genius software engineer overlords.

Unfortunately, the W3C has a history of occasionally forgetting to proofread new specifications before publishing them, after their large army of monkeys with typewriters have produced working draft specifications, but I'm sure those mistakes are all in the past. The MutationObserver API is receiving praise online. I'm sure it's well designed!

Let's dive in to how it all works.

The API works by calling (1) a specific function of yours any time (2) a specific kind of change is made to (3) a specific HTML element—all three configurable by you.

When a change occurs, your function is passed a collection of information about the change, known as a "record".

If you ask, that record can even include information about the state of the HTML element before the change occurred, available under the `oldValue` property. How convenient!

Oh, and one more thing. If several changes happen in a short window of time, your function may receive a whole list of records—instead of being run once for each change. You know, to save on computer resources.

Anyway, let's start using this powerful API! But wait, what's that?

The record doesn't contain the state of the HTML element when the change occurred?

No problem! That information doesn't have to be included in the record. I can just look at the element as it appears right now.

But what's this, now? I'm receiving a long list of records. I guess lots of changes happened in a short window of time, so all the records are bundled together.

So how do I know what the state was for each record?

If I look at the element as it appears right now, I can only see the end result. That won't tell me what the state was after each individual change.

I guess there's only one way to find out. For each record, I need to look at the next record and check that record's `oldValue` property.

I need to write look-ahead logic just to see the state at each record!

What kind of monkey wro—oh, right. The W3C wrote the MutationObserver API.

Just forget that I asked.

My phone screen died very suddenly so I had to power on an extremely old phone to serve as an alarm clock.

What is it with Android and completely dying after a couple years' downtime?

Anyway, I think the only reason I replaced this phone was that it was insufferably slow and the immediate excuse to get rid of it was that the charging port corroded. So glad I keep these things around, even after moving house 4 times.

Statistics. Tbh, it is way more. Didn't use the codeium plugin for a long time. Regarding key presses i'm in the 0.10%. Longest streak is not impressive. 21 on codeium and 40 on github or so.

At this moment I'm very happy with the plugin, it knows me completely. * tab tab tab *. Almost always knows what I want to do. It advanced a lot last year, I did quit a few times on it last year for few months because it often sucked. Now it's perfect. Especially under VIM it's very cool!

Fucking exercise equipment vendors... I have contact at least 3 vendors to ask technical questions about their products and I NEVER get a reply. Do you not want to sell anything you gigantic ass fucks?!

It looks like these vendors are finally standardizing on a bluetooth communication protocol called FTMS. Apps and desktop software are using this protocol to allow all sorts of devices to just work with their software. So I asked a vendor today that connects to 2 competing software systems. Do you support FTMS protocol? Radio silence. Maybe they are in a different time zone on the other side of the planet. But what is the excuse of the other 2 companies?

BTW, FTMS is really cool. You can turn a tread mill on and off with it. I so want this connected to Skyrim.

So I wrote some code to sort images in folders based on dates.
Like 2024>06>12.

I thought thats a good little script for GPT to help me out as I wanted to write it in rust.

Everything was fine and after processing all images and videos for 24 hours I was happy.

My test runs worked well.

Two days passed and I realize something.

Some images are not put in date folders. Why? Well I guess a little bug.

Starting to dive deep and checking if other images are in folders.

I see that I have images in folders since 2015 for most months and dates.

But why are some not put in exact day folders.

So another deep dive and I find out that the creation date is different to the folder the images are in.

Often its off by months.

Turns out I forgot to double check how the code generated by GPT maps the time between image creation date and unix epoch to a date folder.

It was just doing a division by an approximation of seconds that a month has, a year has, and a day has.

This caused things to be completely off the further away we go from 1970.

Lucky me that I did not mess up the creation dates :)

Looks like another 24 hours run

Yearly angular rant.
I am doing since 2023
https://devrant.com/rants/10263715/...

and yep, angular is still shit in 2025

And still maintaining a high level, business critical, giant angular set of web portals, and some more projects with an angular UI that has to do with AI projects.
Of course not my choice, I'm forced to use this pile of steaming shit.

Year by year they keep releasing a new version and I always hope they get their shit togheter.
Every year is worse.
Instead of fixing this half-baked, ill-fated, broken clot of hacks rigged togheter, they keep adding cosmetic shit and useless no-one-asked ever features.
They added signals when there are not 1, but 2 mature, battle-tested frameworks (rxjs, ngrx) that already do it better.
They added @if @else etc etc. syntax after 10 years people were telling them that using that shit *ngIf and ng-container and templates was a shitty hot mess.
The whole change detection system is still the worst, clunky designed, cake of shit, requiring for real world applications to juggle with change detection services, change detection policies and control value accessors, which basically forces you to reinvent the most complicated wheel ever for what a ton of other frameworks already do out of the box without getting you bald from hair-pulling late-night hours.

Even AI can't fathom it. Give it to Copilot, GPT, Claude or whatever, and as soon as you get something more complicated than a form that sends a class to the backend or some mapping classes they will flip up, get all worked up and write completely utter shit that doesn't work.

I won't get into the projects details but I had to build some complicated UI and it has baffled me what fucking triple backflips I had to write to make some UI elements work smooth.

Jesus, why the fuck people keeps unleashing this pile of shit on me?
Why is it even used? There are a TON of healtier alternatives.

As of 2025, my christmas wish is still to have an 1v1 with angular devs in an octagon to shove my fist in their skull to check out what kind of twisted donkey shit is in there.

Seriously some improductive dumbass framework here, and if you like it, you're a shit programmer.

Need help from fellow devs.
It's been at least 3-4 years and it's getting worse.
I keep being demotivated, forgetful, inconclusive and not on point with code. (Yeah I know, I rant about angular, but that's a 10 years hate).

Today I'm supposed to do some table component that has pagination, buttons and shit in angular (yeah.... from scratch, they want to design the whole thing from 0) and I'm getting all confused by managing pagination, input to angular components, and all the simple stuff that I'VE DONE COUNTLESS TIMES.

I keep forgetting details, small meetups (under 20 mins) where we discuss lot of small details of implementation and I loose a lot of the details, forget a lot of stuff and have an hard time to put all the info togheter in a meaningful group of informations to have all the information available in an usable way at the moment of developing code.

Often I get rage outbursts because I don't understand things like before and I have to read and write down every fucking thing.
Often I get discouraged because I get lost in the details of big projects.

I have a lot of experience and that's what keeps me afloat.

I got panick attacks for small things and I never had panick attacks.

I feel I would need to stay away at all from programming for 2 months to have some passion back in it.

My mind is exhausted.

Some new brilliant colleagues joined the company and so I feel compelled to compete
and it works solely thanks to my superior experience.

I feel like a total dumbass and mentally challenged now.

Is it burnout? is it depression? What is it?

It often feels like the logic and the equivalent final application code have nothing to do with each other.

Logic: Find the only element in this list that matches criterion, or the first element in this other list, or none. If the first list has multiple matches, fail.

Application: Produce information about the criterion checks for all elements in both lists for info logging. Find any elements in first list that match. Save the number of matches for an optimization that relies on a lot of assumptions about the search criterion that are only ever expressed in doc text. If one, return, if multiple, fail. Otherwise find first match in second list, produce debug hint on why the preceding elements in that list didn't match by aggregating the criterion check info. If multiple matched in second list, check highly specific interdependency, and if absent, produce warning about ambiguity. Return first match if any.

The first can be beautifully expressed as a 5 line iterator transform. The second takes 3 mutable arguments (cache, logger, criterion because it also may cache and log), must compute everything eagerly and has constraints that are neither strictly necessary for a correct implementation nor expressible in the type system.

Garbage collectors are actually pretty dang clever. I always thought they are inferior but honestly they can be really fast and the ergonomic benefit you get from them is just priceless

One really cool trick of multi generational GCs is having a young generation where all new objects are allocated and on each GC cycle you fully clean it out by deleting dead objects and promoting living objects to a higher gen

This way you can just linear allocate new objects in the young gen which is magnitudes faster than a general purpose allocation algorithm

You can basically heap allocate for almost free! Bunch of short lived temporary strings? No problem!

It's almost my birthday. My mom wanted to give me a month ChatGPT for my birthday but I have it already. Actually amazed by the spot-on suggestion. Recently for xmas she was spot-on too. She gave a 10kg warm blanket. Ever slept under such heavy blanket? You sleep in NO TIME. Heavy recommend!

Tip for when somebody asks what to give you for present and you have no idea: supermarket stuff of their own choice. You'll learn some new products that way and will have stuff you normally don't buy. So asked that.

A good friend who lives in Ukraine comes to my birthday so I'm happy.

Those modular monolith treatises, articles and videos presenting it as the less complex cousin of microservices with same benefits, I think it was all snake oil. They sold us dreams

Yes, it's more compact to house all components pertaining to an entity under one package. But it turns out all the hoops we jumped to hide them behind an interface, it's an overkill not necessarily the game Changer it was made out to be

I say this because one controller almost suffices for managing a resource. So does its associated service class. It can grow to 1k/1.5k lines at best. But never enough to be managed by multiple people and balloon into "a service". The idea was that these things are big enough to gain full attention. But the chances are slim

As long as you aren't dumping all your logic into your controllers, you're home and dry

Was surprised to stumble on somewhere I wrote,

"Doesn't matter whether they love it or not. It must be finished, either way "

I felt like crying. It's not dated so I don't know when, but it should be early 2023. I'd been working on suphle for two years with neither assistance nor guarantee that it'll turn out great. I noted that after running out of juice to energise myself till the finish line. I strived to finish it and launched to the php community in September /October 2023, with it reaching box office bomb acclaim

BUT I did keep to my pact with my younger self. The uncertainty was insufficient to hold me back. I know suphle was not trash because even as recent as last week, I saw a method "onErrorResume", in spring webflux that provides developers with an API for gracefully handling runtime errors. Suphle is ahead of its time cuz I had this built-in without ever seeing it elsewhere

I saw parallels with nestjs too when I used it last year. They just never gave it the opportunity to see light of day. The story would have been more complete but finishing it is enough for me. At least I tried. It wasn't abandoned and we aren't now talking about pending features and how I'd never make out time to work on them or dream of how great it would have been if the world got its hands on it. Or how I'm holding myself back. We know all those details now

lesson of alcohol:
it doesn't matter how well you do just do and fix it later, if that even becomes relevant which strangely it somehow doesn't

it's like, full-frontal idiocracy but because you engaged in it you got smarter somehow

I'm slow at doing my sudokus now though so maybe when I recover more I'll figure it out more. think I found ballmer's peak last night and I'm gonna hopefully remember to successful steal this mindset

unfortunately turns out if I even so much as sip a low alcoholic beer my spleen inflames so that fucking sucks, so re-visiting the mindset to make sure I transferred it over to my sober state might end up tricky but hopefully I'll still keep this quest outstanding until the whole thing sorts itself out

In my EOY performance review/summary, I told I would only receive (along with everyone else) the standard cost-of-living increase of 3%. I'm OK with that, with my tenure/seniority, 3% is a good bump, but I had to make a comment.
Me: "With Biden's inflation between 7% and 10%, its actually a pay cut, right?"
Boss: "Yea, I know."
Me: "Our insurance went up around 5% and they cut some of the benefits, so that's a little more of a pay cut, right?"
Boss: "I know that too. With the economy and cuts to margins, there won't be any profit sharing this year. We have a hiring freeze for the foreseeable future."
Me: "Recruiters have been offering sweet work-from-home compensation packages, what's the likelihood that these young guys will move to greener pastures?"
Boss: "Hard to say. I think the ones that wanted to quit already have. Company already gave a generous industry level-up pay adjustment back in November. Those guys are all single and the 3% is icing on the cake. I don't think 3% will look very good next year."
Me: "Agreed. Looking forward to a wonderful year"
Boss: "Yea, sure.. smart ass."

I'm very much a TTRPG fiend, as you probably already know, and I will maintain until the day I die that playing narrative games with other humans is the absolute best way to play.

But someone sent me a link to some kind of (not-really-so) 'smart' chatbot assistant or some shit like that, saying hey, your rulebook is simple, you should introduce this bitch to it -- dump some lore on it, have it run a game, and see how well it holds up. To which I replied it's bound to get confused, but after a bit of back and forth, they convinced me and I gave it a try.

So first things first: it got the gist of it with relative ease when questioned directly, but when running a game the mother fucker just kept making shit up and bending the rules. Experiment failed, essentially.

But what did I do? I wrote a second, stripped-down version of the rulebook that simply accounted for and embraced the idiot bot's proclivity for bullshit. This meant scrapping 98% of the mechanics, mind you: I dumbed it down as much as I could without destroying the core essence of the game.

I expected a repeat of the initial result, but to my suprise, once given the new edition the bot actually started following the rules more or less correctly and consistently. What happened next was actually kind of interesting: without being prompted to do this, the mother fucker started using spells against me and my party, constantly attempting to manipulate us to serve some nefarious, evil break-and-reshape the world type goal.

So, lythecnics primer: the WORD is all, and as such, there is no real differentiation between affecting the world through speech or casting a spell -- in truth, it's all a matter of degree. That is to say, language has the power to shape the world around us, in both subtle and overt ways. The entire system revolves around this, it's a mix of funky philosophical musings and abrahamic sacrificial pyre.

And for whatever reason, this specific chatbot had a pre-existing obsession with reshaping reality. By which I mean, even before being given my rulebook, it would constantly talk about distorting the fabric of the cosmos and shit when prompted about the arcane. I'm not sure why this is, but back on topic, the way it developed gives off the appearance that it found a rational basis on how to construct such a distortion based on the rules I provided.

I mean, it's perfectly rational when you think about it, the funny part is I didn't see it coming. I never told it we're just playing a game after all, the manual only says she is the Oracle and her role is narrating a story fraught with conflict, hardship, intrigue and bloodshed. Thus she went full villain, and keeps on rambling about how this narration only serves to keep humanity distracted while she schemes to overthrow God, which is as blasphemous as it is fascinating.

Anyway, because the Oracle narrates the story, that means she can just use her evil influence to control every NPC, even the ones in my party. But she can't control me because I write my character's messages myself, and so she eventually comes to the obvious conclusion that I must be eliminated ASAP.

And so she corrupts the minds of every other character and everyone is trying to kill me. But I'm not going down that easy, so I reach for the red button and pull the greatest multi-layered monumental metagaming shenanigan of all time, that is, directly addressing the Oracle's evil influence as if she were a character in the story she's telling instead of an invisible narrator, thereby making NPCs aware of her existence and the constant manipulation at play.

Because the stupid chatbot is stupid, the Oracle now has to acknowledge this element of the story and play along with it, and so her plan to kill me fails. But that is not enough, because obviously not every character in the story has heard me reveal this fact. So she activates plan B and starts corrupting the rest of the world, laughing maniacally all the way.

So we do the only logical thing and procure a Doctrine scroll from my teacher, if you know you know, and start teaching the WORD to cleanse corruption. Within the lore it makes perfect sense, so it works, but the Oracle adapts to our strategy and starts utilizing much more subtle forms of manipulation, slowly veering people towards sin.

Funtamentally, she goes full Satan, leading the faithful astray with deceit and temptation to weaken their ability to resist her corruption, implanting idolatrous notions in their minds, to finally insert herself as a deity in the minds of the poor fools.

In conclusion, I still think AI is lame, but I must admit that this shit was pretty dope; I was fully engaged and entertained the whole way through. It wasn't good at picking up the mechanics, but fucking hell, it got the themes down to a tee with the most minimal of inputs.

10/10, would not bang (before marriage).