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Search - "end of universe"
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I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:
1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!
2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.
3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤
5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!
6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.
7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.
8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.
9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.
If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.
To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!
End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!
#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative16 -
When the scope of a project is the solar system and we end up talking about the universe... for three days. I just want to rage quit the meeting. 😐3
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Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.
First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.
Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.
Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.
Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON
Ok no problem, done.
Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.
The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD
Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.
I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.
Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.
My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.
I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.
Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.
"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.
I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django
Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.
But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.
Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.
Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence2 -
Just watched Avatar 2 in 3D 4DX. This is hands down the movie of the year. Might as well be the movie of all movies. 3 hours of watching and going through emotional rollercoaster and havent been bored. It keeps attention. It was so beautiful. The scenes the scenario the plot the CGI. Everything. I can't believe someone made this. I dont understand how this is possible to be made. How can i come back to this reality now? It felt like i was there, in the movie. A beautiful alien world with magic, life with actual meaning, nature, the wonders of universe. Life can be so much broader than our reality. I know it's just a movie and that reality doesn't really exist. But anything you can imagine or visualize means it can exist. Somewhere out there in this infinitely large universe. Out there in some galaxy light years away or ago. This movie is a brutal masterpiece. This is art. It reminds me to be thankful for what i have. Grateful for who i have. And gave me more reason to withstand the darkest days. Because if i work hard and succeed i might end up in a universe like Avatar. At one point in time as a life form. Somewhere... more meaningful than working like a slave and paying taxes to pedophiles and criminals in our current reality. Beautiful.8
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Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".
I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.
HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.
Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.
---
With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.
I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.
What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.
Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.
Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.
Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...
"It's for your security."
"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."
"But we can't, for security."
"It's not security. Get me your boss."
...
"It's for security."8 -
College is worse than cancer.
Worse than tumor.
Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.
I feel dull.
I feel DUMBED DOWN.
I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.
6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.
Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.
I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.
Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.
The professors and assistants have no morals.
They are INHUMANE.
Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.
If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.
Professors have NO COMPASSION.
NO DIGNITY.
They are just BRAINLESS robots.
Sentients, agents working for the matrix.
They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.
IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.
I gave my maximum effort.
I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.
Just to end up with school spitting on my face.
I feel DUMBED down.
Robotic.
Procedural minded.
As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.
Like a computer.
Because of college - i have no will to live.
Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.
Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.
Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...
I feel void inside me.
I also feel vengeance inside me.
SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.
It made me mentally insane.
It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.
PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.
MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.
What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?
What if the student is abused by a family member?
What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?
What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?
What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???
There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.
BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.
I feel soulless.
I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.
School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".
Lets talk about it.
What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?
To memorize pdf slides?
Memorize textbook?
Memorize notes?
Memorize formulas?
Memorize memorize memorize???
First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.
SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.
If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".
BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.
I self-learned everything.
6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.
NOT EVEN ZERO.
LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.
I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.
I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.
I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.
At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.
At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.
Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.
Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.
Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.
---
To all professors and assistants:
I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.9 -
Ugh, doing laundry sucks. Partially because the laundry area is adjacent to the living room and that makes it harder to hear stranger things, but mostly because it signals the end of the weekend. But I decided to be positive and share some positivity with you:
No matter what challenges you will face in the next week, you can do it. The Universe/God/The Flying Spaghetti Monster chose you to face the challenges because you can do. If the universe can believe in you, then so can I. And so should you. Get out there and rock fellow DevRanters!!! -
I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.
I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.
I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.
I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.
Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.
I barely sleep.
It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.
And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.
Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?
I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.
I don't fucking know.
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.
And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.
And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."
And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.
And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.
It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.
Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.
Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.
Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.
Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.
As if the universe were bored.24 -
Why the fuck is gradle so horrible.
I literally have no idea why anyone would ever use this thing (other than being forced too because somehow the rest of the world is using it).
Every plugin has an arbitrary DSL that you have to magically know by piecing together enough snippets. At that point, no one is actually intuiting anything based on the beauty of the DSL, every build is a frankenstein of different snippets that were pasted from different versions of gradle blog posts or SO posts.
And if you do get it o work then the DSL changes, or it isn't compatible with another plugin.
I just want to write a fucking integration test in Kotlin. Can I just add an `integrationTest` task in `tasks` right next to `tasks.test`? No, obviously it goes in the `kotlin jvm() compilations` section, DUH.
The first thing anyone in the universe should have asked is "how is this better than literally hand writing a makefile"? At least then I would be able to see the commands that it ran.
Now I'm googling how to make the new jvm-test-suite plugin work when you're using the Kotlin plugin but every single result on Google for `jvm-test-suite kotlin` just returns the docs for jvm-test-suite (whose snippets obviously didn't work in my project) because those doc pages have "Kotlin" written above each of the gradle snippets.
Please just end this.
Oh and dev rant sucks too. It thinks anything separated by dots in a url.2 -
I hate this feeling.
Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.
Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).
To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.
My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.
Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...
Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....
And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.
Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.
Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....
Those days.
I hate those days.
And I hate the timing of some people...
Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.
*gooozfraba*
And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.
Sucks to be in management.
You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.
To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.
Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.
*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*
Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.
*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*
Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....
"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...
You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.
For over 5 mins.
For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.
*Second round of whiskey*
Back to work after a wasted half hour.
What says monitoring?
Ah. Everything's working.
At least luck hasn't failed me.
Good server. Brave server.
Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.
The servers know your personality.
They're afraid. Terrified.
Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...
Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.
"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum* -
Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:
Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?15 -
This aesthetics in physics that is hard to explain to someone outside the field. How beautiful for example that you can express the whole classical mechanics in just 1 equation and electro magnetism in 4, that sense of symmetry and clarity they express. Essentially in what Einstein and others believed: that the universe is a orderly place not chaos and that its rules can be understood by our crippled minds.
And I think there is a similar notion in code. As physicists are driven to more general and powerful theories that shall some time explain all interactions of matter that we know of, programmers, I believe, strive for similar ideals: brevity, conciseness, generality, abstraction, powerfulness of your symbolic system - one line of code to end it all. -
I put an end-of-the-universe-grade password in (quadrillions of years to break) which hits all 4 criteria and I cant get it to pass. :O4
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Okay. I look at myself as a kind of intellectual person. My parents are not believers so I came out quiet normal. As engineer and fan of technology I believe in science and I have a fairly complete look at life and universe at whole, I do not need any religional explanation for anything. I do not believe in the conspiracy theories and in any highly organized global secret society who controll us. I have acquired my view and opinions by systematically rethinking every aspect of life and everything I knew and I was thought before, btw this is the reason I stopped to eat animal products too.
But after all this corona shitshow, I really don't know If the current situation is just rolled by stupidity of media and politics or its really some plan of some people. I mean you can legally buy cigarettes with proven death rate of 10%, they recommend you to drink milk while its ultra carcinogenic and like 60% of population is intolerant, you have to wear mask but not gloves while the virus transference is 90% trough hand contact, and there are many many many questions that makes me paranoid. And now this vaccination stuff with countries almost forcing it in population, ahh... Man, This complete story is too irrational and strange. I start to loose my stable belief system and slide out. I noticed that I am not sure and I am just silent when people talk about these things. I hope this nonsense will end soon.43 -
Starting to wonder why I tend to like our QA people so much: they often seem so much saner. Yes, sometimes they quibble as with the complaints about a page that is hidden from the user anyway, but they would usually not creep to deep into the hole creating most unintuitive workflows and abysmal logic.
Disclaimer: We're more like backend devs, but we had to do a UI which was beautifully slaughtered by the CEO messing with it - guess what's happening with the new one - and because of that... thing I already nearly smashed my Mac because stupid entered credentials for updating software would only be applied if you defocused once out of the password entry box. Fucked up stuff like this, which devs meddle with, give up, just shrug it off and dump it on the (l)user.
Or a more recent example: So PM wanted a stupid "Apply to all" buttons on a list that can be filtered. Guess to which items the actions should be applied if you filtered it and you currently only see a small selection in your window! Yes, of course it still applies to all items in the universe. QA guy who's just trying the buttons comes to me: "Hey, you sure this "apply all"-stuff supposed to work like that?"
Third example to end this long QA-praise: So there is this virtual appliance we build and we should support another stupid hypervisor.. and he found the kernel modules I have to activate additionally so we can just convert the existing image without having to create a new build system.3