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Call comes down from the CEO and through his "Yes Man" that some investors are coming by to visit and he want to show off the data center and test servers. There are four full racks of storage servers filled with HDDs and each server has 4 to 16 HDDs a piece.
I got told to "make all of the lights blink", which can be epic seeing it in action but my test cycles rarely aligned that way.
All morning I was striping RAID arrays and building short mixed I/O tests to maximize "LED blinking" for the boss's henchman.
Investors apparently live/die by blinking light progress and it was all on me to get everything working.21 -
Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
"For our app we are using Docker, so for the new server we will need a barebone Linux install"
"Oh please no, Linux is not for a stable server and is very hard to manage, let's install Windows Server 2002 and you can virtualize everything you want"
"Wait, we really can use our cpu cycles to something better..."
"Sorry, too late, already installing!"
Our sysadmin is a Microsoft integralist, we should RUN!20 -
10 years of repeating cycles of the following:
#interview
them: yeah, this is a gamedev position, c#, unity, prototyping, maybe some hololens r&d
me: cool! exactly what i was looking for, as i said a few times, i can't do php anymore, it literally causes me literal deppression.
them: don't worry, we have people for thaz, but we have nobody for c# and unity, with some art skills feel as well as you do.
me: great, glad we're on the same page. i'm taking the job! <3
them: great! oh btw, there's this enterprise intranet app in php that needs some additions, can you please do them?
me: ... what did we talk about during my interview?
them: yeah, but it's just gonna be a short thing, don't worry.
me: ...well...ok, i think i can do that.
*3 to 6 months still on the same, or the next, php enterprise bullshit app. i'm totally exhausted in all ways possible, stressed literally permanently, dreading every day, every new ticket, every meeting every contact with everyone, not able to give a shit about what i do anymore, thinking about suicide*
them: you lazy incompetent fuckup, you're fired!
* i stop communicating and coming out of my room for anything else than toilet, and shopping. stop communicating with my friends, with anyone, anxiety and exhaustion caused by even the thought of talking to anyone about anything, or doing anything, is usually unbearable. i spend 3 to 8 months like this, just sleeping, drinking, watching youtube, sometimes playing games but even that "activity", or rather even the thought of that "activity" is often exhausting. after that time, i kind of recuperate emotionally and mentally, start looking for another unity+c# gamedev job, find it, apply,
goto #interview8 -
!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.
It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!5 -
Non IT people controling the IT departments and ruining the development culture.
No one (where i am from) anymore considers the software life cycles, initial r&d work, normalized relational db or using proper algorithms. All this stuff is critical for critical systems but people just want the softwares to work on the front end and make money, no matter if its all duct taped underneath. And I strongly believe this is happening because of non IT people and marketers sitting on top of IT departments.
Computer science people have kind of lost all respect. They are constantly yelled at by non IT people and asked to do year's job in months.
This makes me sad19 -
Want to piss off the person reviewing your PR?
don't just return true or false use 1 == 1 for true and 1 == 2 for false.
Watch the glorious rage unfolds 🤘🤘🤘6 -
The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.
reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.
facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.
and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.
in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."
newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.
while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."
Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.
I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.
And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.
..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".
an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.
if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.
it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.
And so enters "political idealogy."
How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?
give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.11 -
Just tested my GPU code vs my non-GPU code.
Its a simple game of life implementation. My test is on a 80 x 40 grid running for 100,000 cycles.
The normal code took 117 seconds.
The CUDA code took 2 seconds.
Holy fuck this is terrifying.3 -
Help.
I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.
I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.
Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?
I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).
I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.
So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).
And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.10 -
I wake up, take a look at the clock: 5:21.
The alarm is at 5:40.
Thanks fucking sleep cycle for waking me up to wake up the alarm clock... FUCK!!!2 -
Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.6 -
PORTFOLIO INFLATION
when every junior is writing algorithms, the next step up, the only way to keep up is writing apps. When every junior is writing apps, the next leg up is writing an entire SN.
Eventually junior full stack devs are writing microservice streaming cloud backend content delivery optimized social networks wrapped in virtualization with load balancing, proper CI, public accessible analytics apis, written in custom webaseembly compiled scripting backend utilizing both the latest graphql and every single feature of postgres, while also being a web site builder, an in browser app, mobile optimized, designed to transmogrify your asset pipelines linearflow functional-oriented modular rust cratified turbencabulator while cooking your turducken with CPU cycles, diffusing your gpt, and finetunning your llama 69 trillion parameter AI model to jerk you off all at the same time.
And then the title "wizard" becomes a reality as the void of meaning in our lives occupied by the anxiety of trying to reduce the fear of rejection in job hunting, is subsumed by the brief accidental glance into the cthulian madness-inducing yawning abyss of the future which is all the rest of our lives we have to endure existing for until at last sweet sweet death consumes us and we go to annihilation never having to configure one more framework or devops deploy of another virtual environment.
And it dawns on us that we no longer develop or write code at all. No, everything has become a "service" in this new hellscape future. We slowly come to the realization that every job is really just Costco greeter, or eventually going to be reduced to something equivalent, all human creativity, free will and emotions now taken care of by the automation while we manage the human aspects, like sardines pushing against one another not realizing their doom has been sealed along with the airless can they have been packed into, to be suffocated by circumstance and a system designed to reduce everything to a competition of metrics designed by the devil, if the metrics were misery", and "torture", while we ourselves are driven by this ratfuck wheel to turn endlessly toward social cannibalism, like rats eating their babies, but for the amusement of wallstreet corporate welfare whores who couldnt turn a dime if it wasnt already stolen.
And on our gravestones, those immortal words are carved, by the last person who gave up the ghost, the last whose soul wasnt yey shovelled onto the coal fires driving the content machine consuming the world:
Welcome to costco. I love you.12 -
Is "++i" more efficient or "i++" ?
P.S. I already wasted more cpu cycles by posting this, than I would ever waste by using either of them....8 -
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 -
trying to do anything on the PS2 is almost fucking impossible
i imagine a board meeting where they were designing the hardware
"how can we make this insanely hard to use?"
"let's make decentralized partition definitions, allow fragmenting of entire partitions, and require all partitions to be rounded to 4MB. If you delete a partition, don't wipe the partition out, just rename it to "_empty" and the system will do it for you, except it actually won't because fuck you"
"let's require 1-bit serial registers to be used for memory card access and make sure you can't take more than 8 CPU cycles to push each bit or it'll trash the memory card"
"let's make the network module run on a 3-bit serial register and when initialized it halves the available memory but only after 8 seconds of activity"
"let's require the system to load feature modules called "IOPs" and require the software to declare which of the 256 possible slots it wants to use (max of 8 IOPs) then insert stubs into those. Any other IOP you call will hang the system and probably corrupt the HDD. You also have to overwrite the stubbed IOPs with your own but only if you can have the stubs chainload the other IOPs on top of themselves"
"let's require you to write to the controller registers to update them, but you have to write the other controller's last-polled state or the controller IOP will hang"
of course this couldn't make sense, it's
s s s s
o o o o
n n n n
y y y y
4 -
After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.
O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev
O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good
*An hour passes by*
O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*
TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.
Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer... -
Kevlin Henney said it best. Old is the new new. Tech goes in cycles. Lambda functions aren't new, they've been around since the 70's. Microservices aren't new. Linux is built out of small applications that do one thing, and do it well.
So what can you do that is "new"? Different. Learn a new domain. You're front end? Do back end. You're back end? Do some DB. You're full stack? Do some ML.
At the same time, finding the time to do those things is hard. I barely manage to do my job with other stuff going on.
You can also try to be better at what you do day to day. Find someone that's better than you. If you're the best in your team, maybe see if anyone needs teaching.
Kevlin Henney talk:
https://youtu.be/AbgsfeGvg3E1 -
My very first staggering steps with programming were made with Basic, and commands like INPUT that allowed me to create simple text adventures. As silly as it might sound, my biggest hurdle was to figure out how to make realtime action games, reading input from any sort of user device (using GET and JOY) without waiting for input, and designing game cycles in such way that they gave the impression of multitasking (keep in mind there was no such thing as threads). These machines and the Basic interpretor were extremely slow so making anything move a little...er...smoothly, let alone creating a game, was a challenge in itself.24
-
So I finally get code in Xcode able to compile and run after crashing in main()... due to obscure settings in it's build it does not like. Took hours of hunting around, googling, and used up all my craps table luck for the month.
Now, out of the blue, after a good 30 test run, edit, compile, run cycles... BOOM, the god damn thing starts crashing at before main() again. No friggin idea why.
Xcode says SIGABRT to me... yea well I got something for you Apple Xcode... 🖕🏼
1 -
Dear Microsoft 365 admins,
It's 2021 - get off your ass and uncheck the box that forces me to change my password just because it's been 90 days. NIST has been advising against this for years, and now (finally!) Microsoft has followed suit. Forced password cycles are annoying and actually FUCKING ENCOURAGE USERS TO USE SHITTY PASSWORDS! Don't believe me? Here - fucking read it for yourselves:
"Don't require mandatory periodic password resets for user accounts."
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/...5 -
I'm usually nice to people and try to look for the best in them... but this one time one of my colleagues gave me a code to review that, something about trees, can't remember, and the function was hammering the databases with 3 nested cycles, that's when I could no longer just watch. I was kinda mean on him that day, but as a result he did fix the problem and was really happy and I sensed a bit proud of himself as well.
Long story short, I believe he's not a software dev anymore. Kinda shame, I liked the guy, but he seemed enthusiastic of his new job and that is all that really matters in the end1 -
Much obliged if you stop reloading the folder and searching it every five fucking seconds you fucking cunts.
Good god damn this fucking 'feature' of windows 10 grinds my fucking gears. I hit 'x' to stop seeing the visual distraction of the fucking green loading bar when the folders already loaded. Same thing with music. All I want it to do is open and play my fucking song.
Does it do that?
No instead it spends precious cycles updating fucking indexes or sprinkling crack rocks on the corpse of my cpu or whatever cycle fairies at fucking microsoft programmed it to do while wasting my fucking time.
I wish I had a brick and a microsoft programmer within throwing distance, I'd be sorely tempted to nail the motherfucker square in his fucking big fat melon.
Cunts.
fuck count: 8
7 -
Is your code green?
I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.
I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?
* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.
Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.
I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.
In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.
This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.
Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.
I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.
I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.
I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.
The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.6 -
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from rant import depression as fuck
from WhiskeyBottle import *
import time
while bottle.contents > 0.0 and time.datetime():
fuck.rant()
Yeah ok, this will be one of a few, but I'll try to keep it short. Damn, whiskey is not helping. Nor various smokables.
So yeah, have you ever had a dream? I consider myself a gamer the whole life, always loved creative worlds, dynamics, mechanics, plots, stuff you could and couldn't do. To the point I promised myself I'd make a game - NAH - I'll be making games in the future. You know, good games, that you come back to. Like Doom. Or those porn games.
Never went to Uni or nothing. Was born in a poor European country with Internet more broken than my soul right now. Years later, after acquiring some good hardware, learning a bunch of languages, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and experimenting for about 10 years now with small scripts, apps and mini-games I've come to this realization.
I only made one "full" "game" in my life, and that was when I was like 16 in Klik & Play (early Game Maker). And it was shit. It was horrible, horrible shit. It literally makes you want to cry when you play it. It's 16-bit brain cancer. And it's the best I've ever published.
Now I've been through countless prototypes, none of which I've developed any further. I had ideas, plans, even made some more advanced roadmaps and dev cycles. Estimated costs, time, mechanics, gameplay hooks.
I never finish anything.
I get bored. Frustrated sometimes. There's always an improvement, something that "if I'd finish that it would be it! Screw this thing I was working on now, THAT will be worth sacrificing it." It's tiresome. I'm getting old.
And honestly, I don't know how people do it anymore. Trying to compromise those side-projects (they take all my free time which is not much) and work is just... draining. I'm losing hope. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed into the gamedev world after all. Maybe I'll just pump half-assed pieces of crap everybody will hate.
Or worse, nobody will care.7 -
I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.
Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.
So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.
Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.
Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.
Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.1 -
Dear Devranters, since recruiters love personal websites (and I'm looking for work), I spent the last two days making my own personal site using all the tools I know, including some 3d modeling of the stack I know
DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SITES? can you share so I can compare? thanks.
site is here https://bransongitomeh.github.io and I'm attaching the 3D render of my stack done in blender and rendered using cycles
the site itself is done in HTML and CSS is using some paid bootstrap template and I put it all together using https://github.com/BransonGitomeh/... so its minified and stripped down (could do more) and it's cute I think.
I'm not sure if recruiters care if I should use react and vue and angular, lol. I figured I should use the right tool for the Job.
what do you think?
39 -
probably every time I see my tests failing.
Each time I am writing tests I'm convincing myself "it's an investment", "spend 2 hours now to save 2 days later", "unit-tests are good".
And each time I'm chasing away ideas like "perhaps they are right, perhaps writing unit tests is a waste of time..", "this code is simple, it should ever break - why test it??", "In the 2 hours I'll spend writing those UT I could build another feature"
Yes, it is terribly annoying to write tests, especially after writing the production code (code-first approach). Why test code that you know works, right?
But after a few weeks, months or years, when the time comes to change your feature: enhance it, refactor it, build an integration with/from it, etc, I feel like a child who found a forgotten favourite candy in his pocket when I see my tests failing.
It means I did a very good job writing them
It means it was not a waste of time
it means these tests will now save me hours or days of trial-and-error change→compile→deploy→test cycles.
So yeah, whenever I see my tests fail, I feel warm and fussy inside :)3 -
The "click" moment always feels fucking amazing. TI made some retarded ASM routines (as usual) for drawing various things to the screen, most of the time whatever you try to draw takes upwards of 3 frames at 15MHz to draw. A LINE KNOWN TO BE 100% STRAIGHT SHOULD NOT TAKE 1/3 OF A FRAME TO PLOT EACH PIXEL OF. I managed to get it down to 300-some cycles per pixel on the 2 i've messed with, which still isn't great, but it's a massive increase in efficiency, so fuck it, i'm happy. The "click" was when I managed to get a serious optimization working that took over 3 hours to debug.2
-
Most awkward video meeting?
Can a conference call count? This happened several years ago.
Diving into international markets that could potentially make us millions of $$ (no pressure), while the phone was ringing the CEO's number (in Norway), my manager leans over and whispers
DevMgr: "This project will be managed using *proper* software development methodologies, none of this agile shit you want to use."
<CEO picks up>
I had already been in talks with their dev team to get a feel for their tech stack and we had discussed project milestones, potential release cycles (laying the ground work for using agile methodologies) before getting upper mgmt involved.
The partner dev team was listening and kept throwing out agile buzzwords and I could tell my manager was getting pissed. He would blurt out "Those specifications will need to be fully documented before PaperTrail writes one line of code!". No one said anything, but I could tell the other mgrs/VPs in the room were uncomfortable with the hostility towards discussing features.9 -
Windows 10 - You unreliable fucking piece of shit excuse for an OS!
The fucking thing smells urgency, I tell ya. And it fails when you need it the most! The worst part is, you can't even open the start menu without letting a whole bunch of background tasks and network fetches from eating your CPU cycles and system memory. I don't need your fucking suggestions for your lame ass apps. I don't want to give you feedback about the "Microsoft experience" (which I'm reconsidering), I don't want to be prompted every 5 seconds to reboot my PC for system updates to take effect. Stop fucking with my productivity!
FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!6 -
When your boss says "no more testing cycles until July because we've ran out, just push the builds" 🙃🙃🙃 🔫🔫🔫
-
My sleep cycles been reversed ! I am unable sleep all night, and end up sleeping throughout the day.2
-
Me and my mates rent a flat near the beach to work together on some code. We usually live in Saigon Vietnam which is a very nusy and polluted city. So beach is nice.
However，we went from office houra to full on， waking up and having breakfast at 5pm some days and others ant 2Am....
Right now i love on 12 hour day cycles.
Anyyyways. I also learnt to code this year.
So right now i was dreaming... And i did not dreami was coding， but my dream seemed to be organized like a code. For a split second，my mind was between the two worlds.... I actually thought to myself that i was surely a robot!!!1 -
what percentage of these dune hipsters haven't read a SINGLE word of any of the 6 books in the dune series (yes drooling losers, there are 6 of them)
I'm guessing > 90%
wow congrats you watched a 2 hour film, make it your entire identity 🤡
god the world has become ever decreasing cycles of cringe... they will decrease in time length until we reach unending - and therefore infinite - cringe
FullStackCircus Principle™25 -
Discords update "policy" is really annoying.
I daily-drive Manjaro and discord refuses to allow you to log in with an older client version when they release an update.
Manjaro's stable takes about two weeks to catch up so when this happens I'm stuck looking for an alternative way to update.
Usually I go for the AUR or (if available) unstable branch package but today the AUR wasn't up-to-date yet when I encountered this problem.
This is a minor inconvenience and was fixed about an hour later when the AUR was updated with the newer discord-electron-bin but I just don't get discords game here?
Why not allow the previous client version to connect and alert users of an available update like any other sane chat application does?
You could go for a time period like two weeks or a month and AFTER that start forcing users to update. I don't get why they force it the instant they release the update.
Just wanted to share this annoyance here, maybe someone encounters this possibility when designing update cycles for their application. I urge you not to instantly lock-out older versions. It's annoying, useless and restrictive. Or if you do so, opensource it so repositories can immediately build from source and sync and don't need to wait for a maintainer to update the bin in the repo.23 -
TI can't be competent enough to use their own fast circle routine that they implemented in their calculator but they have the braincells required to make the "update the screen" routine "rst 28h"?
i thought it was gonna require a flipped I/O bit or a farcall to another Flash bank that takes a few thousand cycles or something, considering how much sense any of this shit makes inside...2 -
My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.
Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.2 -
I just noticed that you can customize Firefox's UI with both drag&drop and CSS. My browser UI now takes up about half the space it did and I even increased the font size a bit. This is the level of UI customization I expect from all Electron apps and such. If you think it's too much effort leave the drag&drop and use a more basic config table, but if you're gonna spend MY CPU cycles rendering HTML and CSS you better let me change whatever I want about them.5
-
On Sunday nights I hate doing what I love for a job. Lying in bed for hours too excited to sleep. Brain won't switch off about the cool things I'll be too tired to work on properly in a few hours
-
Just noticed a thread on r/programmerhumor about bank code intentionally adding delays with all these JavaScript code blocks of how it's adding sleep cycles in.
So I spent an hour reading the documentation and wrote up an over engineered solution in COBOL just to prove a point.2 -
I don't know how to make this happen:
Me:
"And this is what the customer... wants?"
Someone:
"Yes."
Me:
"Oh ... could you devote a few more brain cycles to this discussion and tell me that again?"
Someone:
"Sure .... oh ... yeah this is horrible... I'll go find out what they really want"1 -
Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?
( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)
How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.
Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.
Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?
Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.
Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B
On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)
Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.
The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.
My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?
2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.
Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(14 -
some languages completely get lost in minutiae, disposable preciousism that looks pretty but mischievously gobble development cycles. Now, there's no doubt they make for skinnier, trustworthy, low maintenance code, yes, congratulations Haskell. Although, you see, Haskell, not every language out here is defacto an academic one. You hear me, Rust. So, for fuck sakes, Rust dear. You've macros, sis, you don't need a new languages feature every other naughty day. You need prototyping speed, not more complexity. I'm not complaining not really.... It's your fucking language server, your compiler... They can't take this shit no more. Have you seen their overeating problems? Please, Rust, stop picking plastic surgery instead of make-up and use macros instead
--
and google, dear, your auto completion sucks ass1 -
We use some odd names during development cycles as devs.
Anyone have favorite Git repository or code names for projects you have worked on?
I had project "furry-wookie" for a personal project once upon a time.5 -
You know what I hate? The periods close to a new release. It's that annoying time that managers start heaving impatiently to developers: "Push out new hotfixes! Push out new hotfixes!". Fuck you, man. Don't stress a developer. Kthx. If you think developing is so easy, come do it yourself, you IT-ignorant buffoon.1
-
So yeah I do work on windows laptop, with multiple remote sessions into windows servers. (deal with it)
I don't like restarting (who does?) so mostly put laptop to sleep. Sometime it bugs out after several cycles and clipboard stops working.
And I sometimes need copying / pasting texts into similar files on multiple servers.
Damn it, because of this bug I developed a mild paranoia in a sense that once i have text in clipboard I do ctrl+a, del in the target file and then paste, just to see visually that I did in fact successfully pasted that shit. -
Who else here is playing opus magnum?
I usually love zachtronics games alot, but this is so much more. Need someone to compete with for cycles and share gifs.5 -
I'd tinkered with computers for a long time but the breakthrough moment for me was a robotics class in elementary school where I programmed Legos in TC Logo.
That summer, I made a washing machine with multiple cycles and a door sensor to interrupt the cycles.
Soon after, I played with the code for Gorillas in QBasic to fix a race condition when running it on my 486 at home.
1 -
MySQL 5.7.32 breaks innodb zlib compression in combination with xtrabackup.
Oracle started the trend to break GA cycles....
https://percona.com/blog/2020/...
Seems like the MySQL ecosystem finally splits in MariaDB (as 10.5 renamed MySQL to Mariadb) and MySQL.
I hope Oracle MySQL dies.
What Oracle does is beyond madness.
MariaDB 10.5 has it's troubles too. But at least you can look up their sources, check their bugtracker and don't get surprise foot fisting up your arse.8 -
man if i could figure out how to do stuff and had the money to do stuff i'd be dangerous as fuck, but as of now i can only posit questions... it sucks.
Examples:
- What do modern browsers/crawlers do when hit with, say, an "HTTP 450 Blocked by Windows Parental Controls" or an "HTTP 374" status code?
- What happens if I do <xyz minor edge case thing> on <system?> (just use your imagination, this happens for every edge case i can think of for every system and the list wouldn't fit in a few megs' worth of half-byte ASCII, much less *here*)
- What if I made like a board to fuck with busses while systems were on? Press a button and for like five bus clock cycles pins like 6 and 7 are shorted? That sort of thing. As for system/bus types, *literally any* (old consoles with expansion ports, PCI/-e/-X/whatever, southbridge, etc.)
- What if I did <filetype> shenanigans by doing <something indescribably horrible> to this file? How do things react?3 -
After nearly four days of fighting with Ruby, Gem, Bundle and a dash of JRuby just to make a plugin for logstash install, I can officially say I feel like Ken Mattingly.
It is all about the sequence, and a metric ton of RAM and CPU cycles and patience.1 -
I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.
I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.
Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...2
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