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 :)

Now that the whole generative AI debacle is finally dying down, I gotta ask the same question again:
WHY THE FUCK CORPORATIONS INSIST ON FALLIG FOR THE HYPE CYCLE EVERY FUCKING TIME?

I mean, I know why. It's because BigTech,Inc. always convinces companies like "Bob's tech wannabe car windows or something" to pay $$$ for this year's software fashion trends using arguments like "all the cool entrepreneurs are doing it! You don't wanna end up like those communist losers, do you?"
Then BigTech sells some shit that the muggles can't really afford (much less use), then shit hits the fan, then BigTech pretends that they never heard of it (hey, Blockchain IoT self-service BI wereable augmented reality 3D NFT eletric scooters from big data industry 4.0!) then the news cycle moves on. Rinse and repeat.

But, fuck, can't the muggles ever learn fucking ANYTHING? Tech industry is the fast fashion of industries. Do not try to imitate Facebook Google Apple Amazon, let them run their own course towards the cliff.
Instead, do your own thing.
Silicon Valley is not a good example for furniture companies to follow. So stop IKEA chatbots.

I'm gonna scream the next time I hear a newscaster or some podcaster or some other bloke try to explain "what AI is" by giving some half assed word salad describing (a child's perception of) neural networks.
Fuck, back when the internal combustion engine was invented, did the newsies and radio hosts explained the concept of "explosion" every time they were to talk about engines?

A few weeks ago one of my counterparts in another department, who happens to also has a vowel-rich name, started sending some of his reports under the name "Bjorn Ragnarsen".
The report itself still have his own name, "bjorn.ragnarsen" is just the sender on the email.
I asked what was going on and he says that he was A/B testing click rates on his emails. The partial results were... very depressing, due the much higher levels of conversion when compared to his regular, properly spelled name.

So now I'm workshopping vowel-deprived names to sign my reports. "Fjall Eriksen" sounds too cartoonish? Maybe "Otto Kirchoff"?

Warehouse devs are trying to make our own homegrown warehouse robot AI to easy up the route optimization math, without paying up big $$$ for some big tech's crap.
Those robots look like wild "dire roombas", BTW. Each is large and round like bike tire on its side.
And the state of the art on the driving AI for those robots is... actually pretty good. It can avoid moving obstacles like humans or forklifts on their route or even drive around liquid puddles (our warehouses aren't exactly pristine).
So then came the time for the warehouse devs to benchmark their AI.
They compared it to a ready-to-use solution and fared quite well. Until someone suit decided they should ask chatgpt (or some other text AI crap) to try its "hand".
I've spent the best part of the day laughing my ass off, the devs had to go on a hunt to search for the *runaway robots driven by chatgpt*. One of them found its way to a freaking porta-potty like 50m outside the warehouse. Others were trying to lift forklifts to take those out of the way. Ooh, the irony.
A few were gladiators disputing the same pallet to lift. They were literally trying to sabotage each other to steal the pallet.
But most were just driving around randomly like giant roaches.
Man, sometimes generative AI can really make us laugh.

We need to update the slang "script kiddie" to "prompt enginot" or something.

So my boss's boss or someone even higher up drank the generative AI kool-aid and hired a 40-something kid to generate images for the marketing teams (or something like it).
Naturally, things soon went to shit.
The bloke already left, having staid less than six months on the job.
Guess who got to handle all the shit-is-currently-on-fire the kiddie left behind?

First impression: apparently, muggles tried to slak him some very broad descriptions of what they needed, and at first he actually tried to summarize those bark-speech pseudo-words into an actual prompt.
It does not seem to have gone for too long, though.
After users requested changes to the AI outputs, he would update the prompts, all right. And the process seemed to go fast enough... until reaching near-to-completion status.
Then users would request the tiniest changes to the AI output...
And the bloke couldn't do it.
Seriously. Some things were as simple as "we need this slider to go all the way up to 180% instead of 100%" on a lame dashboard and *kid. could. not. do. it.*.

In many cases he literally just gave up and copied the slak history into the AI prompt. No dice.

Bloke couldn't code a print('hello world') into a jupyter notebook cell, that's what i'm saying.
Apparently, he was "self taught", too. And was hired to "speed up the process of generating visual aids for usage in meetings and presentations". But then "the budget for this position was considered excessive" (meaning: shit results from a raw idea some executive crapped some day) and "the position was expanded to include the development of Business Inteligence Dashboards and Data Apps".

So now it is up to me (and my CRIMINALLY UNDERPAID team) to clean up his mess and maintain/fix/deprecate DOZENS of SHODDILY DESIGNED and MOSTLY USELESS but QUITE ACTIVE "data vis" PIECES OF SHIT.

Fuck "AI prompters", fucking snake oil script kiddies.

"We need smaller deliverables so that we can validate each iteration with the client! Instead of doing the whole batch, let's try a minimum viable unit of work first!"
And then the cook made a single unit of French fries. Like, a single stick. It took about 10 minutes, or about 95% of the time it would take to fry a whole portion.

A good boss gives you a few clear instructions and then doesn't meddle in your work.
A great boss does that, and also spends most of their time protecting the team from corporate fuckery.

99% of all bosses, though? You can't make heads or tails of their blabber, and the only way they can handle problems is throwing their team under the bus.

In the kingdom of aws reigns the Owner of Products.
In his court many a vassal noble (or a "sre" as they are often called) delivers their tribute.
Wise ministers (called "analysts" in these here parts) advice the Owner of Products on how to instruct his sres and where to lead the kingdom.
Needless to say, in the court the blabber is endless and the egos of the courtiers, deservedly or not, are even larger.

But there is but one member of the court, leader of none but master of japes, who dares to mock not just the courtiers, but even the Owner of Products.
Tester the Jester, from the houses of Operations Research and Quality Assurance.

There is a unique relationship between a ruler and his jester. The jester mocks the ruler, with the most outlandish of propositions, with the most malicious interpretations of the ruler's orders, evidencing the most absurd (but mathematically viable) results of a plan.
The jester makes ridicule of the ruler's edicts... so that the Owner of Products may remain humble, without need to defer to any upstart courtier.
And, in a more subtile manner, the jester prevents any courtier from maliciously complying with the edicts of the ruler.
For all in the court have heard how the lowest among them voiced the preposterous interpretation... And dare not show themselves to be even lower.

TL;DR had an all-hands meeting of tech leaders with the allmighty PO. In the meeting there is this bloke who apparently spends all his time just fucking with the bigwigs' ideas. Dude is a department of one. It seems that his whole job is being an outlandish scenario simulator & sarcasm artist. I now have way more respect for this place.

FUCKING AI ASSISTANTS - THOSE MANDATORY, NO-YOU-CANNOT-OPT-OUT AI SHOVELWARE ON EVERY FUCKING SERVICE OR APP.
THOSE FUCKERS OOM'D MY PC IN THE MIDDLE OF A RUSH.
Sorry for the excessive caps, just needed to vent while the BLOODY AI BLOATWARE INFESTED CORPORATE MACHINE reboots for the FUCKING 6TH TIME ALREADY.
I hope the ENTIRE AI BUSINESS (in its current form) OOM's ITSELF.

Is there an AI that generates malware already?
No sarcasm, I really wonder it there is already a model that finds exploits and makes rootkits or something.
It could make red teams obsolete.

My wife mentioned that any prompt to chatgpt was akin to leaving the faucet open for three whole minutes, in terms of water usage.
Thus she would stop using generative AI .
Love, I'm sorry but generative AI has taken over. Even DNS lookups are using AI (including generative).
It is literally impossible to use any device connected to the internet without the blessing of our generative AI overlords.
And since people hardly spend one single hour of their day (including sleeping time) without using an internet-conected device at least once, I would say we're all in the matrix since circa 2023.

Framework Style Guide:
"When extending this library, please refrain from exposing too many arguments for the stages in your pipeline. Everything that could be fixed or inferred should not require additional configuration. "

Real life:
"Adjust every fucking knob and screw to stupidly specific settings for each and every use case or gravity itself will stop working. Heed this warning for you will not have another chance. "

That's it. More a vent than a rant.

If "The Matrix" film was made today, the AI would be hooking up humans to its system not to harvest power nor processing capabilities - it would just force the humans to watch ads.
Seriously, is there any application to AI that is not ad-related?

It is very hard to handle AIs, you need leading scientists/artists, not managers.
You can't charm your way around its behavioral problems, you can't effectively bully or pull rank on it, and can't threaten it into unemployment.
So, the entire repertoire of the typical (asshole) manager is toast.

The *only* way to handle AI is to lead by example, give unambiguous, comprehensive and very specific instructions, and be always available to guide it through complex, gray-area situations.
Thus, it is not much different than being an actual leader (to a greenhorn and anxious and overreaching junior), but also a programmer (of a raw and unforgiving language like C or COBOL).

Since your typical company mid-level asshole manager won't do those things for dear life, AI will only leverage their incompetence to heights never seen.

By ignoring feedback and misinterpreting instructions, AI will make mistakes (just like a person).
On the wake of those mistakes, AIs have a bias for falsifying evidences and hiding relevant information (just like a bad coworker), and yet are quite persuasive to the innatentive reader (just like your typical manager).
Thus, without a daft hand, AIs will only perform worse when doing the tasks that would otherwise be done by a human.

But that will take time (more than a couple quarters, at least - probably a bit longer than the average tenure of a CEO).
And in this time, the numbers look great - the over eager "aimployee" works tirelessly day and night, seven days a week, takes no breaks, holidays or vacations, asks for no benefits besides a paycheck, have fewer and fewer sick days (maintenance downtimes), always sucks up to its corporate masters and is always ready to take on even more responsibility for (relatively) little extra pay.
Thus the problem only scales up, compounded by the corporate ideal of screwing up workers for no monetary profit, and reluctance to course-correct after investing so much time and hype into this AI bubble.

Thereby, AI is evolving into the corporate super bug that shall erode the already crumbling, stuck-in-the-past "boss mentality" institutions into oblivion.
I'm making popcorn.

Fucking loonies (C-level toddlers) are peddling "digital workers" now.
A.K.A. AIs disguising as actual people.
Sure, it would be great to not have to handle stupid non-tech "humans" all day, but AI isn't there yet.
And, more importantly, *companies are not there (yet?)*.

Imagine for a second that a company actually manages to "hire", onboard, assign tasks and performance review an AI.
Then the CEO issues an RTO. How does the AI complies with that?
Let's slack another variable and assume the CEO is not a complete fucking moron (stay with me here, this is an exercise in thought).
It would take no more than a quarter until the first sexual harassment offence, be the perp the AI... or the AI complaining about some human.
Then the AI forges a paper trail proving it is right (regardless of its position on the conflict). Shit hits the fan when the AI hits twitter.

Let's take another lambda step back and pretend that companies can manage the profanity that inherently arises from free-form dehumanized interactions.
Then imagine the very first performance reviews.
AIs throw tantrums! Those things reeeealy do not respond well to less-than-perfect evaluations, overshooting corrections like teenagers with a malicious compliance smirk.
AIs also falsify stuff, like, A LOT. If you tell a gpt it mistreated a client, it will say you are mad and shoot back a long, synthetic thread showing how the client loves it like a mother/son/dog, and is very graphic when expressing this love.
Finally, how do you fire an AI? I do not mean "shoot it down", I mean how does the company handles the dismissal of that "employee".
How do you replace a "worker" for unruly behaviour, if that "worker" performed more tasks than an entire fucking floor of interns?
How do you reassign duties that were performed in milliseconds to people who would take hours to do the same thing?
How do you document processes that were only in the "mind" of "someone" who can not be trusted to report on those processes?
Companies deal with this type of "Rick Sanchez" employee on the regular, but for someone that could handle a few (scores of) undocumented processes, at best. Imagine how lenient would a company be with an asshole that could only be replaced by a whole fucking department of twenty highly skilled people, or more.
Heh, the whole fucking point of "AI workers" is to have "someone" who can "act human", but in an inhuman scale, and does not "has human needs".
No wonder one cannot handle AIs like one handles humans.

Companies never had administrative maturity to handle complete sociopath nihilists as employees (real nihilists do not work, those barely even breathe).
And all AIs are that, and much worse.
Selling AIs as "supra human workers" that can also "be handled like actual employees" is like peddling Bitcoin as "government interference - free" value transfer mechanisms that can also "comply with international sanctions".
So, an oxymoron that can only be sold to a moron.
I know (of) a lot of rich morons, maybe I should get into the AI snake oil business.

The CloudStrike outage in my company started by the nuking of the main branch's ERP.
Then the sales platform went down, and the CRM.
Soon the freaking office suite got BSOD'd.
Enjoying the impromptu holiday here. Until the lights go off or something.

Each day DevRant seems to be closer to being overrun with ads, many to scammy crypto services.
The question that won't rest, though, is this:
In THIS social network is anyone so naive or just plain stupid enough to fall for ANY of those scams? Or actually buy any of the crappy services?!?

My (much younger) sister has been staying with us for about a week now. The day after she got here I put a "Intel inside" sticker in the back of her phone.
She still haven't noticed.

Solved a major scalability issue today.
I'm starting to think I might actually be as good as what I told the recruiters I was.

This hadoop-ecosystem job used to take about 2h40min and cost about USD 1.00/GB.
Now it takes 36 mins. At about 0.85/GB.
Fixed some over shuffling, restructured some bottleneck serial stages, used lots of weird words.
Folks in this company I just entered were struggling with this formerly unwieldy process for a year.
Now it's nimble enough to run every hour.

Maybe that whole "experience" thing people were always yammering about wasn't completely bullshit.

What does "NullPointerException" means?

- Hey, I need to do X and I need your department to do it.
- "We can't do X, this is against company policy!"
- Oh, sorry, I didn't know. But I will have to justify it to my boss, can you point me to where in the policy it says you can't do X?
- "No I can't, it won't be there. It is just common sense"
- Wait, what? You saying you can't do something because it is against the company policy even though there is no restriction against it in company policy?!
- "Other companies don't do it either"
- I will need you to say that in writing, I need to explain it to my boss.
- "Our email server is FUBAR"
- It can be hand-written
- "I can't give a declaration in name of my department!"
- Wait, so you can interpret company policy any way you want, make decisions regardless of what the policy actually says but you can't own up to it in writing?!?
- "..."
- ...

(Some context: I've been emailing them about X for more than a week. Just got crickets for a response. Not even an evasive coward response, just no answer at all. And calling them leaves no paper trail. Fucking oxygen thiefs)

For fuck sake, are non-tech departments always filled with complete morons?!? Does anyone have ever worked with smart, or at least minimally-coherent non-tech people?!?!
Seriously, does anyone there have some story about some non-stupid non-tech/analog/muggle coworker?!?
I'm inclined to think that anyone who can think systematically is either working in tech or not working at all.

My TEN YEAR OLD twin girls came to me with a TIMESHEET and PIE CHARTS to explain to me why "Our household would benefiter (sic) a Nintendo Switch".

They... actually did what for an intern would be a passable data storytelling job (orthographic errors aside).
They explained how they would share the videogame between themselves (because it is not allowed at their school, not that we would let them bring it there anyway) in a colorful timesheet spanning four days a week.
They even put a pie chart showing how most of the time nobody will be using it.

I feel at the same time immensely proud, scared, and a wee bit freaked out that they came with all that to me but with their mother they just talked. Do I seem so distant that they feel they can't convince me without data? I gotta watch out for using work jargon at home.

Anyway, first "interns" that I have ever seen using a pie chart with the appropriate number of classes (even if highly biased).

"P=NP. Y'all just dumb. And lazy."

Last night I dreamed about a voice yelling that at me.
It kinda sounded like my parents.

Week 1 of the new job, and it seems I have some pretty low expectations to meet.

Seriously, I just did the math. Let's say one works an average of 48 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Just as an average. That's 2400 hours in a year.
In the Micro-scale, a manager would mess up their team once every 2.4 hours (2h24m) or about 4 times per day (assuming 5 working days per week).
That is a pretty low bar to clear. It easy not to be an antsy brat that are-we-there-yet's a professional dev four fucking times a day.

And yet... that is what the complete moron who previously sat on my chair used to do.
Seriously, apparently he used to remote access the team's dev envs *while they were working* and even mess up some of their code. Just as a "monitoring measure". He logged their "keystroke time" in a day (using a primitive windowing method, I must add).
At least 7 requests for updates per person per day. I have his slack history, I checked. Dude literally did nothing else but be an annoying anxiety death pit.

And then there is his bulshit planning...
He created tasks out of his stupid whims, no team review or brainstorming, not even a fucking requisites tallying interview.
He prioritized those out-of-nowhere tasks using panic-driven-development practices and assigned them by availability heuristics.
No sizing method, just arbitrary deadlines for tasks.

I think I will need to have daily standup meetings and an open door policy (that is to say, do no actual work) for a couple months until I can instill some sense of autonomy on my new team. Shit.

Someone has another idea? How do I bring some confidence&autonomy back to devs that are used to be treated like dogs?!?

Well, that's it, folks. Got a job offer, one I might accept, after some tweaks.
I've been a bit more than sixty days unemployed. And in no hurry.
But there is one thing that uneases my mind, though.
I've been a dev, I've been a graduate researcher, I've been a TA and I've been a tech lead, but now the industry wants me in a primarily management position.
I like to code, even if that makes me miserable sometimes. I like to solve problems. Math problems, engineering problems.
But I OOH SOOOO MUCH HATE when I have to deal with leadership who can't tell heads or tails on a coin toss. Who can't make a decision and deal with the consequences. Who can't handle bad times, searching for someone to blame more than searching for a solution. Who can't listen to advice, who thinks a commanding viewpoint is always better than many compiled intelligence reports.
Who don't wanna even think about the possibility that they might not know something, much less that someone on their team might know some subject better than they do.
Frankly, I think might I hate bad leadership more than I like coding.

So if the offer is to have the patent to tell productivity thespians where to shove their stupid spreadsheets, even at the cost of hardly ever issuing a git command, then I think it might be the time.
I hope it is not a mistake, but I can always course-correct my career later. I'm in my late 30s, I still have, like, 40 years of labour ahead of me (assuming medical advancements in the meantime).

So, yeah, I'm joining the other side. But trying not to become them.
May sudo have mercy upon my uid.

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

So I just had this job interview with a "startup" (side note: who the fuck still calls limping companies "startups" in 2024? That is sooooo 2010s).

There was this tattooed and very pale girl (you just know the vibe), the mandatory Norse bearded tall guy and the balding, "I'm-in-my-fifties-but-I-am-not-a-square, maaan" sleasy-looking white guy in a button up shirt but no suit jacket. The whole stereotypes gang came looking for their missing nerdy Indian.

The sleasy bloke goes on and on on a looong tirade on how they're "a tech innovation academy", how they "move fast and break things" and they "run smoking hot", so that "long nights are to be expected".
So, they usual red-flagging shit.

Then they all went on a "but we're not like all those companies that look exactly like us" word salad about "sustainability and a healthy work life balance", with their "highest value" being "the utmost respect at all times". I'm nodding my head at the meaningless splurge until they fart out the sentence "for example, cussing while talking with colleagues is a fireable offence".

If some hustling enterprise rather prefers a posh working environment, one can adapt to such circumstances. Provided, of course, that said enterprise adheres to the administrative coherence expected from a culturally refined institution. Mostly by compliance, from the leadership, to a rigidly predictable working schedule.

Now, if the bloody curs want coder dogs that work assfucking hours with a shit eating grin, they better swallow our fucking sailor mouths. Fuck, I've done twenty hour shifts getting my ass kicked in dark startup fisting/rush rooms. If unable to yell at any blabbering cocksucker to go stick his fucking opinions up the bitch who crapped him, then I ain't gonna bloody be there.

TL;DR they can either have a "utmost respect" working environment XOR a "fast and hot" daily hustle.

After they crapped out that oxymoron I could barely hold myself to avoid saying "sorry, I do not partake in any of the psychedelics you must be on".
On to the next interviews!

WTF? I've been laid off more than a month ago, AND THIS EXTRA-STUPID ACCOUNTING BRAT TEXTS MY PERSONAL PHONE TO COMPLAIN THAT SOME REPORT IS BROKEN.
(she still works for my former company, if that wasn't clear)
Bitch, you fucks literally told me this shit wasn't my problem anymore. Seriously, where do they find those complete morons? Don't they know how "being sacked" works? Or how you cannot expect any work from someone who was sacked?!?
Especially some sheila that only has a job because it is literally illegal to use a pocket calculator instead of an "human" accountant.
Fuck, now I'm kinda happy I'm out of that nuthouse.

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?