Me: *Watching a movie*

Main Character: "Oh no, we have to hack the CIA to figure out how this machine works! Hacker girl, do the stuff"

Hacker Girl: "Consider it done!"

Hacker Girl: *Opens Linux bash*

Hacker Girl: *types 'mkdir Hack_CIA'

Hacker Girl: "They have two-factor authentication in place, this is going to be a hard one."

Hacker Girl: *Types 'cd Hack_CIA'*

Hacker Girl: "I'm in!"

Me: "..."

Friend: "Wow, so well done, so realistic!"

Me: *Dies*

Two factor authentication atrocities 😍😍

Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

(sensitive parts censored)

Friend: Hey, can you hack my (some website) account?
Me: Depends... What's your username?
Friend: (tells username)
Me: (clicks forgot password?)
Friend: I will give $10 if you do it. There is 2 factor authentication enabled.
Me: (silence) Ok.
Website: Please type the class number you were in in 4th grade.
Me: Hey, did you graduated BLAH elementary school?
Friend: Yeah.
Me: Ahh, I remember. You moved to BLAH elementary school in what grade?
Friend: 4
Me: Hmmm, I don't remember seeing you. What class were you in?
Friend: 5
Me: Well, I now remember. Stupid me. (smirks)
Friend: Haha. (continues to play games beside me)
Me: (Types in 8)
Website: We sent you a password to blah@example.com
Me: (uhh, heads to example.com and clicks forget password?)
Email: Please type the class number you were in in 4th grade.
Me: (wtf is this, types 8)
Email: Please type the teacher's name when you were in in 4th grade.
Me: What was the teacher's name?
Friend: Huh?
Me: When you were in 4th grade.
Friend: Ahh! John Smith.
Me: Ahh, he was strict, right?
Friend: Yeah (continues to play games again)
Me: (Types in John Smith)
Email: Set a new password.
Me: (Types "youaresostupid")
Email: Done!
Me: (copies PLAIN TEXT password from email, logs in to website)
Me: Da-da!
Friend: (gasps)
Me: Money plz~
Friend: Nope.
Me: (wtf, then remembers i changed his email password) Fine then.

=====================

1. There is 2 factor authentication enabled. : Got it?
2. The website sent plaintext password.
3. He is just pure idiot.
4. I didn't got the money.
5. I am now a h4x0r

Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.

Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.

Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.

Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.

Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).

Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!

Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*

Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.

Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.

Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.

Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).

I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!

One important factor that frustrates programmers.

"Why is this taking so long?"

"Unforeseen complications"

"Why didn't you factor that in while estimating?"

"Because thats impossible, by definition."

*Facebook Hackers follow the Rules*
(real story)

TL;DR: sorry, not available, can't do spoilers

One night I was with a group of friends out at a pub. A guy and his girlfriend show up, I didn't know them but they were my friend's friends.

The girl kept bragging the whole time about his boyfriend being a professional programmer, trying to remind it to everybody whenever possible (don't ask me why!).

So, after a while, the discussion moves towards "suspect Facebook activities" and the guy starts saying that he can hack Facebook.

- "What do you mean?", I ask.
- "Hacking into other people's accounts, even with 2 factor authentication. I did it a lot of times"
- "Wait, and they don't notice?"
- "Of course not! ^_^ He's a hacker", the girl replies.

Ok, time to do a coming out.

- "Hey, I'm a developer myself. Can you give me an idea of what you did in technical terms? Did you find a vulnerability? Used a virus? Maybe a keylogger?"
- "No... Uh... Well... The secret is to read the terms of service"
- "What?"
- "Yes... yes it's all in the facebook terms of service..."
- "Uhm, I'm not really sure I'm following. Could you prove it by hacking my Facebook account? I'm giving you the permission".

In less than a minute the discussion flew completely away and they never mentioned computers again.

😂😂

Remember the Ububtu mobile OS ?

I remember working on the community UI drive for this project. To know that something as awesome as ubuntu would come down into the form factor of a phone , was just ecstatic.

The first build was out , people liked it. People nagged a bit about the performance issues , but it was going fine. Then the second build .. then the third no one heard about and the 4th that never came.

The interface for this system was unique because after Wondows , this is the only other OS developer that embraced the one ecosystem mantra of design.

Using Ubuntu phone was natural , it was a small desktop OS.

I remember logging on to launchpad one day and seeing the Ubuntu mobile channel with it's last post " Thank you and goodbye "

It was heartbreaking , but i could understand. Like windows phone ( which if you guys weren't aware of , had APK support by the end of its lifecycle ) felt crushed under the weight of android and iOS.

Waiting for a day when there will be a third champion in game. I miss having to see Ubuntu being on my phone , but they seem to be doing great in everything else , so good on that. 😄

Ok done .. thanks

So I cracked prime factorization. For real.

I can factor a 1024 bit product in 11hours on an i3.
No GPU acceleration, no massive memory overhead. Probably a lot faster with parallel computation on a better cpu, or even on a gpu.

4096 bits in 97-98 hours.

Verifiable. Not shitting you. My hearts beating out of my fucking chest. Maybe it was an act of god, I don't know, but it works.

What should I do with it?

A sound recognition system

Being deaf is one major factor that's kept me from moving out. I can't hear sounds like doorbells, fire alarms, etc

I want to build a client-server solution that can be trained to recognize specific sounds

I removed a sleep(1) call from the main loop of a chat server I wrote and sped it by a factor of a few hundred. :)

"Do you have 2 factor auth for the database?"
a customer asked. I stared on the wall in front of me and suddenly fel and urge to punch and piss on something.
I took a deep breath while thinking to myself
*Oh boy, here we go. Another retard*
I put on my nice voice and asked:
"What you mean?"
The customer seems confused, as if my question did not make sense and he said:
"TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION! Dont you know what it is? To make the database more secure."

I was fucking right, this person reads to much shit. The fact that the email signature of that person said "Wordpress Developer" made me more angry.
I, still with the nice voice asked
"How would that work?"
"Two factor authentication when I am connecting to the database."
"So, do you want it by SMS then? You'll get alot of messages if it is going to send you one every time a query is made."
The following 7 seconds was dead silent until I heard the person hang up.

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

Had to wirte and optimize a C++ program that finds for 1000x1000x1000 grid points the 100 nearest points for each (with an additional factor to make it more complicated).
It had to run in under 18 minutes to pass. No matter what I did I couldn't get it fast enough. I tried kd-trees, caching of certain points, optimizing distamce calculations by ommiting any irrelevant factor, saving points' calculated squares etc etc. When Ibwas down to 20 minutes, I realized, that my makefile had an error and ignored the - O3 flag...
Well, it actually ran 5 minutes with -O3.

Client asked for Two Factor Authentication as a part of the webapp we're building and then were confused as to why they needed a second password to login

"we don't want to add an extra step into the login process, can you remove it please"

fml

Public sector. Guy wants to upload a PDF file into our system that exceeds our file size upload limit by a factor of more than 10. The PDF contains a lot of pictures.

His idea: print the hundreds of pages of the PDF on paper in b/w and scan it because b/w takes less space then colored pictures.

I am perplexed. He asked first though, so we could prevent the actual printing.

I can add two-factor authentication to GitHub, but my online banking password must have EXACTLY 5 characters...

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

My teams current process is:

1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.

2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.

3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.

4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.

5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.

6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.

7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.

Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.

That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!

I messaged a professor at MIT and surprisingly got a response back.

He told me that "generating primes deterministically is a solved problem" and he would be very surprised if what I wrote beat wheel factorization, but that he would be interested if it did.

It didnt when he messaged me.

It does now.

Tested on primes up to 26 digits.
Current time tends to be 1-100th to 2-100th of a second.

Seems to be steady.

First n=1million digits *always* returns false for composites, while for primes the rate is 56% true vs false, and now that I've made it faster, I'm fairly certain I can get it to 100% accuracy.

In fact what I'm thinking I'll do is generate a random semiprime using the suspected prime, map it over to some other factor tree using the variation on modular expotentiation several of us on devrant stumbled on, and then see if it still factors. If it does then we know the number in question is prime. And because we know the factor in question, the semiprime mapping function doesnt require any additional searching or iterations.

The false negative rate, I think goes to zero the larger the prime from what I can see. But it wont be an issue if I'm right about the accuracy being correctable.

I'd like to thank the professor for the challenge. He also shared a bunch of useful links.

That ones a rare bird.

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

Bus-Factor: A new metric to describe how well kowledge is distributed among the team members by calculating how many of your team members can be run over by a bus without killing your project!

Getting real fucking sick of shitty websites excessive security measures!

1. Username
2. Password
3. Captcha
4. Mandatory 2FA

We don't recognize your IP, please log into your email, click the link, get redirected and complete steps 1-4 again! Also the site will time out in 10 minutes if you aren't actively using it. Have a nice day!

Go fuck yourself.

Question regarding implementing two factor authentication.

I want to implement 2FA for at least one service I'm writing but I'm wondering, next to email, what services/implementations could I use?

I know that email isn't the best when it comes to security but I also don't want to force (a-technical) users to install an app specifically for 2FA so keeping email as an option as well.

But except for email, any ideas? Anything related to Google/facebook (prism integrated services) are a no go anyways (this has, as mentioned before, nothing to do with my ego or giving myself 'a pat on the back')

As for costs, I don't mind a little bit of money but the service will be free at first and I'm not rich :)

Looking forward to the comments!

is this a good place to put the devRant sticker on? I guess the geek factor will increase just a little bit...

We recently took over development of an app. Upon inspection the API had no security, and passwords were stored in plain text. While the manager was slightly concerned, it wasn't a big deal....

That was until, using only a browser, I found the bosses account and personal email address.

Minutes later I was in his gmail, Facebook and credit cards account.

Improving security is now concern #1, and my boss is "suffering" 2 factor authy on everything.

A few months back, me and my friends built our own Web Dev firm. I'm the one who talk to clients, customers, etc. and these have been the most ridiculous messages I received from them:

1. I don't like it, but I don't know why?

2. I have an idea! Can we change the design?

3. We want something with more of a `wow` factor.

4. Can't you just copy their logo?

5. But we are also a startup. You must understand that we can't pay the full price.

6. So do you have the file open and ready to edit/

7. Can't you just copy and paste it in?

8. We don't have much of a budget but there are plenty of projects coming your way.

These are just a few of the huckleberryfuck our clients sent. I'm not sure if I can handle them anymore.

Apple you drove of delusional suckers! When will your retarded fashion devices finally support WEBP?!

A gallery page with images, and thanks to WEBP, it's 408 kB. Because Google made WEBP and handed out a well documented CLI FOSS compression tool that even can convert the source PNGs to lossy WEBP with bloody transparency. Well done, Google!

Except that Apple's shitty management can't take it that Google actually made something nice, so no WEBP. Instead, JPEG-2000 that enjoys nearly no fucking tool support. The free tools that even can deal with that mostly don't support transparency, and the encoder sucks donkeys so that JPEG still fucks JPEG-2000 big time.

So it's JPEG with matching background for iOS. Fine, but since JPEG's blocky artifacts are much more visible, the compression can't be that high, and it's 769 kB. That's 88% more image data for Shittari than for non-retarded browsers and even Edge! EDGE!!

Oh and if the user changes light/dark system mode according to surrounding light conditions, guess what happens? Yep, since JPEG doesn't support transparency, now it's different JPEGs with dark background via the media query in the "picture" element, and it's another 754 kB download. Bloody 1523 kB instead of 408 kB, that's a factor of 3.7!

Fuck your ass Crapple, with an electric eel!

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

TL.DR.: Emojis in commit messages + bad commit messages made by Microsoft™ employees.

Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. It would be helpful if I can, you know, understand your commit messages instead of trying to guess wtf _that_ emoji means. That is, if it is the same emoji on my machine. We didn't figure that one out yet. And no, "Some 💄 changes ✨" is not a good commit message, even if you interpret it correctly (which depends on your emoji icon set).

idk about you, but that shitty 💄 emoji tends to be (see image) and I happen to associate that with an XLR audio cable. I had to ask someone else to understand a commit message; a message supposed to be explicit—stating what you changed and optionally why you changed it (you can off-load that part to an issue tracker).

Furthermore, that "Some 💄 changes ✨" commit did none of that. "I made cosmetic changes somewhere for some reason without linking to an issue." If you didn't catch that little detail yet: "COSMETIC CHANGES" is vague as fuck. What is a cosmetic change?

* Does a cosmetic change mean adjusting indentation?
* Does it mean deleting unnecessary abstraction to make the code more readable?
* Does it mean refactoring code to add that beauty factor?
* Does it mean all of the above? Or perhaps a specific combination of these?

Human communication is shit enough, don't make it worse than it already is.

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

Awesome got fired bc i caught the vp cooking the books by a factor of 1.2, mistakenly notified him of an obviously incorrect algorithm bc i thought the previous dev made a mistake.

I think I ranted about this before but fuck it.

The love/hate relation I have with security in programming is funny. I am working as a cyber security engineer currently but I do loads of programming as well. Security is the most important factor for me while programming and I'd rather ship an application with less features than with more possibly vulnerable features.

But, sometimes I find it rather annoying when I want to write a new application (a web application where 90 percent of the application is the REST API), writing security checks takes up most of the time.

I'm working on a new (quick/fun) application right now and I've been at this for.... 3 hours I think and the first very simple functionality has finally been built, which took like 10 minutes. The rest of the 3 hours has been securing the application! And yes, I'm using a framework (my own) which has already loads of security features built-in but I need more and more specific security with this API.

Well, let's continue with securing this fucker!

Holy fuck nvidia. Why the fuck you want me to login to your fucking app in order to download a fucking driver. You also want me to click a fucking link that you sent to my email for verification on every fucking login? Why on earth someone would stole my fucking nvidia account? To see which drivers I use? What the fuck nvidia? Oh wait. DO YOU DARE ASK ME TO SETUP TWO FACTOR AUTH TO SECURE MY ACCOUNT?!? What the fuck? Even if I put my credentials online no one would care to login my fucking nvidia account. Just let me download my fucking driver!

Oh boy.

I've been partially on-loan to another team that's relatively new at the company for a couple of weeks now, mostly to help them get some testing sorted out, and had scheduled a call with their lead the other day. The call basically started like this:

Lead: Hi
sudo-woodo: Hey
Lead: Okay, so let's talk about <subject>, but I guess you've been told the news
sudo-woodo: What news
Lead: I'm putting in my notice

I love listening to seniors because they always drop some wisdom, but this was some serious wisdom. Guy sounded exhausted at everything, talking mad shit about the company and certain people and I'm just here like 🍿. Seems understandable, a lot of butting heads with the higher-ups and not being able to do his job properly.

Unfortunately we all kinda needed him to do his job because his job involved juggling fifteen different things that the project (and like 90% of my backlog to be honest) depends on.

shit's fucked 🙃

I've optimised so many things in my time I can't remember most of them.

Most recently, something had to be the equivalent off `"literal" LIKE column` with a million rows to compare. It would take around a second average each literal to lookup for a service that needs to be high load and low latency. This isn't an easy case to optimise, many people would consider it impossible.

It took my a couple of hours to reverse engineer the data and implement a few hundred line implementation that would look it up in 1ms average with the worst possible case being very rare and not too distant from this.

In another case there was a lookup of arbitrary time spans that most people would not bother to cache because the input parameters are too short lived and variable to make a difference. I replaced the 50000+ line application acting as a middle man between the application and database with 500 lines of code that did the look up faster and was able to implement a reasonable caching strategy. This dropped resource consumption by a minimum of factor of ten at least. Misses were cheaper and it was able to cache most cases. It also involved modifying the client library in C to stop it unnecessarily wrapping primitives in objects to the high level language which was causing it to consume excessive amounts of memory when processing huge data streams.

Another system would download a huge data set for every point of sale constantly, then parse and apply it. It had to reflect changes quickly but would download the whole dataset each time containing hundreds of thousands of rows. I whipped up a system so that a single server (barring redundancy) would download it in a loop, parse it using C which was much faster than the traditional interpreted language, then use a custom data differential format, TCP data streaming protocol, binary serialisation and LZMA compression to pipe it down to points of sale. This protocol also used versioning for catchup and differential combination for additional reduction in size. It went from being 30 seconds to a few minutes behind to using able to keep up to with in a second of changes. It was also using so much bandwidth that it would reach the limit on ADSL connections then get throttled. I looked at the traffic stats after and it dropped from dozens of terabytes a month to around a gigabyte or so a month for several hundred machines. The drop in the graphs you'd think all the machines had been turned off as that's what it looked like. It could now happily run over GPRS or 56K.

I was working on a project with a lot of data and noticed these huge tables and horrible queries. The tables were all the results of queries. Someone wrote terrible SQL then to optimise it ran it in the background with all possible variable values then store the results of joins and aggregates into new tables. On top of those tables they wrote more SQL. I wrote some new queries and query generation that wiped out thousands of lines of code immediately and operated on the original tables taking things down from 30GB and rapidly climbing to a couple GB.

Another time a piece of mathematics had to generate all possible permutations and the existing solution was factorial. I worked out how to optimise it to run n*n which believe it or not made the world of difference. Went from hardly handling anything to handling anything thrown at it. It was nice trying to get people to "freeze the system now".

I build my own frontend systems (admittedly rushed) that do what angular/react/vue aim for but with higher (maximum) performance including an in memory data base to back the UI that had layered event driven indexes and could handle referential integrity (overlay on the database only revealing items with valid integrity) or reordering and reposition events very rapidly using a custom AVL tree. You could layer indexes over it (data inheritance) that could be partial and dynamic.

So many times have I optimised things on automatic just cleaning up code normally. Hundreds, thousands of optimisations. It's what makes my clock tick.

"A world where skill, not birth, would be valued.. isn't that the world you wish to make?"
- High School DxD Hero
(yes I'm a fucking weeb, get over it)

Post-meritocracy and all its assocated bullshit, it's played a major role in 2018. Because clearly merit is a bad thing. Let's make success dependent on how you're born, and what features you have upon birth. Let's have it be decided by what you are, rather than my what you aspire to be.

You know what's an already existing system like that and I despise? The caste system. A system in which not your merit but your family, your heritage, decides your success. Not merit, not what you, yes you, want to be. Fuck family, and fuck family-related hierarchies. Yet that's what the post-meritocracy society would be. One that's decided - just as much as the family factor is - on what you are, not what you want to be.

Fuck post-meritocracy, and fuck the caste system. Let's make 2019 a year of change, one where merit becomes important again.

I used to work in a company with such a high bus factor that we called "teams" composed of a single people "immortal" like in the movie "highlanders" because of the fact they could not be fired since they were the only people to know how their project works. We went through hard times for the company when several of the immortals resigned one by one. Each time one of us left premises on his last day, we played the song "Princes of the Universe" very loud on the office. I was the last and I left four months ago.

Multi-factor authentication does not mean I have a password to your site AND have to login with Google. Also, I logged in with Google, you should have my email address now.

Oh, a user with that address already exists? No shit, it's me.

Your fucking login flow is broken.

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

I am beyond speechless. My Bank forces me to use a password that consists of EXACTLY 8 characters, and at least one small character, one big and one number. Oh, and it should not be identical to the last 5 passwords.

What's the best part about this?
THEY HAVE A FUCKING METER TO MEASURE YOUR PASSWORD STRENGTH. FUCKING HYPOCRITES!

Not even a 2 factor makes via sms can make me feel save when you have such a big pile of shit behind it

When new developers join in your team, please make a time and help them to get confidence with the project they will work on. Besides the project's documentation there is a human factor that can make the difference between a just another dev team and a great one.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Apple is now forcing 2 factor authentication for publishing apps on the App Store. Except not just regular 2 factor, 2 factor via AppleId. Which means you have to have the AppleID on 2 different Apple devices! You now have to have a Mac and another Apple device to ship an app and you still have to pay $100/yr for the license.

Hell I usually like Apple stuff but this has gone so fucking far off the rails.

everyday another damn js library with a godamn benchmark claiming kicking every major library's ass by a factor of 10!
just GTFO dude.
I'm tired of seeing that shit :/

NO FUCKING GOOD NIGHT FOR FLOYD.

THIS MULTI FACTOR AUTHENTICATION IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

So my organisation uses some MFA app as an SSO to access any and everything. Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. No VPN shit and one password to rule them all.

But, for some reason I accidentally deleted the app from my phone and as any normal human being would do, I also reinstalled the app.

Well, post reinstalling, the app does not detect the linked Org account.

I was cool, when I'll login, the system will throw a prompt to map the phone.

So I login to org URL from my machine and lo and behold, the URL says that MFA is already linked to the phone and I have to enter the Citrix type code to login.

But phone does not show the code because account is no longer linked and web does not have option to change/re-register the phone.

What the actual unholy fuck?????? Bloody retards. How am I suppose to get in now?

So after a Googling for a bit, a thread mentioned that this is most common issue faced by users with this MFA app. The only way to get this resolved is to contact your IT team.

Cool. Let's do that.

I opened the link to my IT portal and it asks me to login via SSO which is what I need help with in first place.

I can't login to Slack because fuckers ask SSO every time the app is exited. So no contact there.

Thankfully bastards allow Outlook so was able to drop a note to one of my team member, whom I connected recently and is very nice, asking her to help me sort this IT team.

If this is the most common use case then why the fuck not add a feature to help people overcome this shit?

And my IT team is absolute nuts. No other way allowed to reset the linking or connect them or any help links provided on login page.

Whoever was behind this design should be dipped in donkey shit and deep fried in pig urine.

Fuck you Amazon.
Fuck your two factor authentication.
Fuck your PINs over SMS that take 1 hour to arrive.
Fuck you.

2 factor authentication 😁

Google has a password reset procedure so intense, that even if I can sign into my recovery account and give them the code from there, use 2 factor auth and give them the code from there, tell them my recovery phone(s) number(s), give them my mother's father's mother's late cousin twice removed daughter's maiden name, and whatever other security measures were set in place, I can't get a fucking password reset. Thanks Google, fuck you.

If you don't know how to explain about your software, but you want to be featured in Forbes (or other shitty sites) as quickly as possible, copy this:

I am proud that this software used high-tech technology and algorithms such as blockchain, AI (artificial intelligence), ANN (Artificial Neural Network), ML (machine learning), GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), RNN (Recurrent Neural Network), DNN (Deep Neural Network), TA (text analysis), Adversarial Training, Sentiment Analysis, Entity Analysis, Syntatic Analysis, Entity Sentiment Analysis, Factor Analysis, SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language), SMT (Statistical Machine Translation), RBMT (Rule Based Machine Translation), Knowledge Discovery System, Decision Support System, Computational Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, GA (Genetic Algorithm), EA (Evolutinary Algorithm), and CNTK (Computational Network Toolkit).

🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

Fucking Apple... my MacBook Pro committed suicide upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, had to wipe the drive. After much trouble resetting my Apple ID (put the password AND the two-factor code in the password field.. who the fuck thought that up), it tells me Mojave isn't compatible with this computer.

... fine, it's a 2012 machine I can respect that, but you blew away my system to upgrade THIS WAS YOUR IDEA NOT MINE...

...and so I just try to update to El Capitan or something because I'm on FUCKING OSX LION now (swirling galaxy, so sparkle, such stars)

...and the App Store won't let me. Why?

"Software Update Required"

"To make changes to your payment information, you need to upgrade your Mac to the latest version of macOS."

just.

wow.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

My boss is letting a really strong bus factor grow around me.
I try to show them how to do things but they really can't wrap their heads around it and I keep improving our stack/infrastructure ...

Read a blog post at work yesterday from the company head of IT security. Line 1:
As part of our company policy we enforce the use of usernames and passwords, known as two factor authentication. However we also need to ensure.....

Stopped listening at this point as I hit Google to confirm the definition of two factor auth.

Nope I'm not loosing my mind, the blog post is insane....

The newest requirement we got is

"Give me the wow factor "

:/

So ..i just got a raise. A substantial one(about 30k more) but......

The cms coordinator is now going to make way more than i do....but not only that he is making way more than my lead developer and my lead developer's salary is now the same as mine.

The man has 12 years of service to this institution. He IS the web software department and if any day him and I decide to cross our arms and not do shit the whole school collapses...both fucking campuses.

Continuing...the cms coordinator doesn't even have the same education that we do. The lead developer has 4 associates degrees and I have a B.S in c.s, the CMS dude has 1 in computer tech or some shit like that.
And he is making about 9k more than us.

I...know it sounds small, and it is, but the principle itself is fucking painful considering that they mentioned job responsibilities was a major contributing factor in said paycheck and we have fucking murdered ourselves working extra every fucking day. Going above and beyond this shit just to have a dude that adds images to a cms make more than we do.

Fucking bullshit.

"How do we share access to two-factor authentication."

What you mean is "how do we defeat the purpose of multi-factor authentication."

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

You build a system to integrate into an API to save the client hours of data-entry per day and reducing the number of fields needed to be filled manually by 75% and querying for the rest of the data and filling in the blanks. It took weeks of building and researching and bug fixing and when you're finally done the client looks at you unimpressed.

The same client gets a small piece of js that gets users location(by ip address) and uses it to customize a hello message on the home page and they think 'yer a wizard, Harry!' and jump for joy over the "cool factor" of this simple hack.

FML. Fuck the Bradford factor. 😨🔫

As you can see from the screenshot, its working.
The system is actually learning the associations between the digit sequence of semiprime hidden variables and known variables.

Training loss and value loss are super high at the moment and I'm using an absurdly small training set (10k sequence pairs). I'm running on the assumption that there is a very strong correlation between the structures (and that it isn't just all ephemeral).

This initial run is just to see if training an machine learning model is a viable approach.

Won't know for a while. Training loss could get very low (thats a good thing, indicating actual learning), only for it to spike later on, and if it does, I won't know if the sample size is too small, or if I need to do more training, or if the problem is actually intractable.

If or when that happens I'll experiment with different configurations like batch sizes, and more epochs, as well as upping the training set incrementally.

Either case, once the initial model is trained, I need to test it on samples never seen before (products I want to factor) and see if it generates some or all of the digits needed for rapid factorization.

Even partial digits would be a success here.
And I expect to create multiple training sets for each semiprime product and its unknown internal variables versus deriable known variables. The intersections of the sets, and what digits they have in common might be the best shot available for factorizing very large numbers in this approach.

Regardless, once I see that the model works at the small scale, the next step will be to increase the scope of the training data, and begin building out the distributed training platform so I can cut down the training time on a larger model.

I also want to train on random products of very large primes, just for variety and see what happens with that. But everything appears to be working. Working way better than I expected.

The model is running and learning to factorize primes from the set of identities I've been exploring for the last three fucking years.

Feels like things are paying off finally.

Will post updates specifically to this rant as they come. Probably once a day.

I swear I almost had a nervous breakdown today.

Advisor at college has told me I won't be graduating until Feb 2019, I'll be 29 with a degree in IT and my minor in software engineering. I feel like I'm just playing catch up to the younger crowd who got there sooner.

On top of that all the entry level programming jobs I applied to have rejected me on the basis of not having my degree yet. They're impressed with my work but they want me out of school. I have to wait it out until I'm closer to graduating.

On good days when I code Java web applets love what I do and I wouldn't have it different, but on days like today I feel like shit and wonder if my degree was worth it, especially when I factor in that my degree only went up to pre-calc on the math end. (I'm thinking of majoring in a masters in CS as a way to makeup, maybe)

I'm frustrated and I feel the same kind of loneliness when I graduated HS. I know there's a light at the end but some days it's just hell.

I'm sure a lot of you have gone through this. Any ideas to destress?

*Gives the list of top three candidates (All women) to hire to HR Manager (A Lady)*
HRM: Ha, I always knew it, women are always better than men. Alas, you are realising now.

*At that moment, it felt as if all my hard work to judge all the candidates abilities without any prejudice whatsoever, just got collected by the garbage collector*

Why does it have to be Men Vs Women, why does there have to be any comparison at all, except the question that how does this individual compare to the rest.
I really don't care whether one is old, young, male or female or whatever other factor that can be used to separate humans into groups. Why can't it simply be: Does this individual produce the end result required? Period.

So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...

I work in a bitcoin startup , my fucking boss really wants everyone to use ubuntu because of security and all , the bad thing is i am the only guy who knows how to install and deal with it , so when any one joins or has some problem he always bugs me and the thing is i am an android developer not a sys admin and now he fucking want to get 2 factor in ubuntu desktops when they log in

Hurray, the stickers are here! Now my laptop's awesomeness and coolness factor has been increased by infinite++!!! 😃
Thank you a lot, @dfox and @trogus!

Seems someone from China was trying to hack my Apple ID. Due to 2-factor verification, was able to deny access and then I quickly changed password and forced sign-out of all accounts. Perhaps my password appeared in some data leak— it was not changed since 2 years.

Y’all make sure to enable 2-factor authentication and change passwords from time to time.

Slack is cool and all... But do we really have to have an "account per team" ? Damn I cringed so hard when I was setting up two-factor authentication and realized it was this way... Wtf...

Someone just guessed my 20+ character one time password on Microsoft 🤔 2 factor authentication and Geo IP checking are definitely good features.

Well, time to change all my passwords.

So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.

Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.

She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.

Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.

I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.

He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.

Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.

I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD

I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.

If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

Daghhhhhhhh Kafka.

Set it up, seems to work fine.

Oh no...! Take a broker down, then messages go missing - hmm, that's not right. Fine, I'll just look into... Ah, bad replication factor, my fault. So then it's all fixed! Woop. Wait, no. Some messages still going missing occasionally. Oh, only set to "at most once" delivery. My bad, fix that, and... now everything is out of order. Oh, ok, partitions setup wrongly. Wtf, now the whole thing stalls when there's a network blip until a restart. Right, ok, looks like commits have to receive acks in the library I'm using before continuing. Switch to a library that uses CommitWithoutReply. Brilliant....

Apart from said library seems to have commits failing all over the place because it keeps trying to commit during a rebalance 🙄😒😤

The frustrating thing is I KNOW for a fact that Kafka is a fault tolerant, resilient, horizontally scalable thing capable of handling stupid amounts more than I'm throwing at it without missing a beat. But damn,configuring it, and checking you've configured it sanely is a royal, monumental PITA.

I was asked to debug a website. Quoted an hourly rate. The first file I open I saw this and instantly requoted my rate to include the "Are you f*cking kidding me?" factor.

Fuck Apple Two-Factor Authentication.

I am a developer with multiple accounts and this two-factor authentication is a fucking joke! I spoke to this idiot on the line who told me that I had to create an administrator on my computer to login to a developer account of mine. I hung up the phone and told her to "Fuck Off"

It's a fucking waste of time. Apple has not had an innovation since Steve Jobs died; each upgrade does nothing new compared with the last one. What's new things are there between 10.14 and 10.8??? Nothing. Except it's a lot fucking slower.

I hate it when book publishers of tech books don't have their own DRM-free formats. I then have to go on Amazon and see that the Kindle version is only 10% cheaper than paper. Then I factor in the fact that they probably fucked up the formatting on the ebook. So, I end up just buying the paper one and my office continues to resemble a mad scientist's library.

I've just realised something... I haven't ranted about work for a looooooong time.

It seems now all the monkeys have left the team and we've hired young people that actually knows how to get things done without blowing things up (though still need to work on documentation, bus factor still too high). So I'm no longer cleaning up their shit or the bugs they're too incompetent to analyze and fix...

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

!rant
Disregarding completely the anonimity factor...!

Guys vuejs conf in Amsterdam is happening tomorrow! If you are attending and see three guys with green t shirt with pulilab written on it just approach us!

We can't wait to meet some fellow ranters

Removed his shoes and walked around in the office on his socks. Not that bad, really, until you factor in the smell. It was nauseating. HAHA

When I started at my company I was full of energy and wanted to improve the whole codebase. After years of getting blocked by new projects with deadlines month short of the actual time required and missing a lot or all important bits (texts, images. you name it, it's missing) I kind of have up.

I do refractoring now and then but it's not as extensive.

My biggest sin was a nested for-loop that I came across (50+ times nested, previous dev really loved c+p).
I looked at it and started to write the recursive function but stopped half way through, fixed that one error I'm the loop somewhere around 30 levels down, committed and made myself a coffee.

I hate myself to this day for giving up.
Shit I'll just factor that loop tomorrow

IT admin on paternity leave since Friday.

Can't access one of our servers, backup person can't find their password.

So... Looks like I'm doing something else for a bit.

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."

Apparently I have to teach what I know of Linux to my coworkers to reduce the bus factor on the server management role. ( already ranted about it )

What I want to do is create a single slide power point with "google.com" on it.

😂

This is not really the reason I got these parts, but I just had them lying around and have been following the project for some time... so why not? Haha. I was also thinking it might be cool to set these up to auto-disrupt known AP names that would be issued by companies most responsible for the dismantling of Net Neutrality. Like just make them in a dirt cheap throwie form-factor and let the companies deal with pissed off customers for a few days until the battery dies (thinking the little generic LiPo’s that cheap quadcopters use would give a few days if attacking sporadically and using the ESP’s sleep function). Just riffing here... ;P ;D

Sony.

I don’t *hate* them, but I had really high hopes for Xperia smartphones back then, five years ago.

So I saved up and bought one. That’s what I got:
1. It was getting slower and slower
2. Micro usb broke just months after I got the smartphone
3. Sticky fragile screen with absolutely no oleophobic coating
4. NO UPDATES TO KITKAT AND LOLLIPOP! They just left us behind!

5. The main reason.

I catch moments with my camera. For me, camera is a vital feature, the most significant factor.

I once needed it really urgent and it just said “Camera is unavailable”. And that’s all. Camera is gone forever, broken. Factory reset haven’t fixed it.

You, alongside with Meizu, turned me away from android irreversibly and forever. When I heard about no update, I literally felt abused. Just like a girl whom random fuckboy made a proposal to, fucked and then left just months later.

With that level of customer support, basic respect to me as a user and buyer and that level of quality control, fuck you and your sloppy bricks you call smartphones. Maybe things are changing now, but I don’t care anymore and hardly ever will.

P.S. it heats up as hell, fucking pocket stove

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

2 factor auth with carrier pigeon

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

so... not really a rant because i'm happy to be in the long-term zenlike state where i don't really give a fuck about anything anymore, but...

so today's my birthday (thanks in advance for all the semi-mandatory "cheers" reactions and such)

the agency i do temp jobs through sends money weekly (for the one week back) (which is the main and only reason i use them). they arrive at friday 12:25, so that's when i know to go "check" by withdrawing it, and it's also awesome because it's the best time to provide funds to reward myself (by booze/weed) at the end of the week.

last week, nothing came in. i called them and learned it was due to the contact person in the company i did job in being too late on sending the agency list of people who showed up at the work, i was told it's gonna arrive one week later together with the proper payment for the week-1,so effectively i was one week without any money (literally), but on the next week double was going to arrive, which is nice.

that next week of double was now. i found out that no double arrived, only single-value payment. i called them to ask why.
i was told that what arrived was the late payment, and the dude in company was again late with sending the presence list, so the other payment, for the proper week's work, will be a week late again.

so... that kinda ruined my financial planning tor tge week that's going to happen.

i guess my point (if i have any) is... funny how when someone fucks up, there's nobody for me to be angry at and hold responsible in any way, but when i have delays in my work due to delays upstream, nobody gives a shit about my excuses and it's my fault and i should have compensated, it was my responsibility and duty, and me not doing it (to my own detriment, for someone else) is me failing.

funny how the subjective dynamics of the world always somehow works out in a way where everyone else fucks up and i either have to suck it up and be okay with it otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole, or suck it up and extinguish their fire for them, otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole XD

anyone else noticed this in their life?
how does it work? what is the factor that decides whether you're in the "suck it up" class or the "fuck it, someone else will suck it up" class?

doesn't seem to (just) be the money(flow), i've seen this thing happen even in situations where the money/client dynamics were flowing the opposite way to what would be natural for the shit fall direction.

I think I did it. I did the thing I set out to do.

let p = a semiprime of simple factors ab.
let f equal the product of b and i=2...a inclusive, where i is all natural numbers from 2 to a.
let s equal some set of prime factors that are b-smooth up to and including some factor n, with no gaps in the set.
m is a the largest primorial such that f%m == 0, where
the factors of s form the base of a series of powers as part of a product x
1. where (x*p) = f
2. and (x*p)%f == a

if statement 2 is untrue, there still exists an algorithm that
3. trivially derives the exponents of s for f, where the sum of those exponents are less than a.
4. trivially generates f from p without knowing a and b.

For those who have followed what I've been trying to do for so long, and understand the math,
then you know this appears to be it.

I'm just writing and finishing the scripts for it now.

Thank god. It's just in time. Maybe we can prevent the nuclear apocalypse with the crash this will cause if it works.

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Epic code fight broke out today when one developer fronted himself for leader due to having beat all the metrics by a factor of ten. Claimed he could replace the entire department based on LOC alone.

Another developer told him to fucking zip it.

After almost coming to blows someone managed to explain to him that he had to put his code into a compressed archive.

As it compressed to ten times smaller than the next smallest contribution he declared victory because his compressed better. Another developer joked better call bomb squad.

I just wrote unit tests for like the first time in my life (didn't find it useful in university, someone else handing in the project always did that). It cut my coding time by a factor of 3! You should try this one if haven't already, it really saved me a lot of headache right now.

I'm a big fan of super-modular and flexible code, but my colleagues are huge fans of Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

Writing simple terminal input/output lang (Hello, what's your name, hi) in D.
Compiling in D using standard lib: 6.1M
Compiling in D with inline assembly, no standard lib or libc, using syscalls: 1048 bytes!
I'm still freaking out a little.

So for a while I have wanted to build a raspberry pi cluster. In the spirit of shia labeouf I got started last saturday.

I had two pies lying around so I figured I'd run some experiments before I invested in a lot of hardware. After about a day I had turned the two pies into a shared cluster when disaster struck....

I had completely ignored the fact that you cannot run 32 or 64bit software on an arm processor (I know... I'm a java developer). So when I booted my service and the load balancer, I found that nothing worked. So pretty bumbed out, I quit the project.

Later that day I found a crazy guy who had bought a batch of 400 small form factor PSUs (300W) and internally I laughed at him a little. I mean, who's gonna sell 300W irregular power supplies. Then, just as I was about to go to bed I found this guy, he was selling from a batch of CPU-onboard motherboard for 10 bucks each and everything clicked!

I did some quick calculations and decided I could probably gather enough cash to get: 10 motherboards, 10 2GB ram dimms, 10 Sata disks and 14 PSU (in case some fail) and some misc hardware for networking and such.

So... Long story short, I am going to build a cluster computer, the first version is going to have 10 nodes and I am waiting for delivery right now!

One of our projects migrated their file-repository to another one during a major release.

Instead of giving this task to an experienced programmer, they gave it to the head of the respective dev department due to the usual release panic.

Soo.... He wrote the migration tool. It was executed during the release. Everything seemed fine so far.

A few days later. Someone from the above project came to my team due to some "strange behaviour on the production database".
They reported that they couldn't download some of the user's documents due to unknown reasons.

After quickly analyzing the current state of the new file-repository, we concluded that the affected documents did not exist in the new repository.

Then we took a look at the so called migration tool...
Well.. After nearly 30 min. we knew the root cause for that.
They only migrated the first 4 levels of the folder structure. Due to the assumption that "we don't use deeper nesting". (Facepalm)

As the head of their department wrote it, no one seems to questioned it either. Nor did they made a code review and ended up with a tool with hard coded urls to the production db, no version control, no build tool, no ci, nothing. Breaking nearly every possible company standard.

However.. That's not it. When analyzing their migration tool we noticed another even more dangerous thing.
They mixed up the id generation of the migrated documents resulting in a random assignment between customers and documents. Which is quite bad as this contains sensitive information. E.g. passports

They offered us quite a nice amount of money to fix this until EOB. We declinded as it was simply not possible in that time, but agreed to support them with the new tool.

After some time I heard that they migrated production again. And they fucked it up again. They never talked to us after we offered them support...

The third and final migration was written by us. Not only migrated it correctly. It was also way faster. By factor 20.

In the end we haven't gained anything from this rushed project as the penalties were piling up due to this fucked up migration.
After all this time I'm not sure who is to blame. In my opinion, partly all of them.
Head of department who can't and shouldn't code.
Seniors who didn't review the code and didn't ask for help.
Release mgmt who put way too much pressure on the devs.

How is it a thing that developing a desktop app nowadays requires an enormous amount of RAM? I stared working on an electron project and the whole thing takes up 3-4 GB of RAM when running, and that does not factor in my IDE or anything else.

But the packaged app does not go over 400mb, although we have had memory leaks in the past

It's funny to me that the eye patch is so expensive. It increases by whole factor of 10.

I hate it that I'm still forced to use Ubuntu 16.04 and can't upgrade to bionic beaver.tried it on vm (for testing)loved new features and default gnome interface but even after switching to xorg most of my tool were still not running properly or crashing, most important factor is that there is still no official cuda support and installing gcc g++ 6 and symlinks are nerve racking. On top of that upgrading to 18.04 LTS on my main machine will leave me with broken packages and dependencies.

p.s. for people who are going to reply saying that these issue can be solved. Please try updating your work machine and spend hours fix these issues

I've seen a lot of people design great websites here on DR. Since I'm being dragged into quite a bit of front end, I've decided to quit complaining and up my design game. Suggestions and advice on good design considerations?

Our creative lead sent me a few reference websites that had a lot of "wow factor". It had stuff like trailing text animations, slow motion menus and what not. For some reason, I found all of it to be annoying and pointlessly bloated. I'm more into minimalist design and simple transitions but idk if this is just my taste or lack of competence in making such fancy ass design that makes me not appreciate such sites. I need advice and I'm not sure on what. You'd probably know what if you've been in a similar situation before.

Code reviewing, came across this:

Double val = item.getPrice() * pointMultiplier;
String[] s = String.split(val.toString(), "\\.");
points = Integer.parseInt(s[0]);
if(Integer.parseInt(s[1]) > 0) { points++; }

Usually I'd leave it at that, but to add insult to injury this was a level 3 developer who had been there for four (4!!!!) years.

She argued with me that we shouldn't round up loyalty points if theres only 0.00001 in the calculation.
I argued that since it's a BigDecimal, we can set the rounding factor of it.
She didn't understand that solution, refused to hear it.

The code is probably still there.

Enforcing two-factor authentication is bullshit!

A headache starts popping in my head like modals and popups on websites, so I decide I should take a pill and proceed to get myself some water (yeah, I cannot stand headaches for more than 2 minutes).

As I enter, the room is only populated with the "cleaning lady" (she's quite aged), I tell her "hi" and proceed to grab a glass of water.

"Hey, you are good in IT right?"

Oh fuck.

RUNNNNN.

That lady is impossible to escape once she wants to talk to you.

So my skills as a developer were used to configure her facebook...

Hope my headache starts leaving soon, it worsened by a factor of 9000 after that traumatic episode.

a lot of people claim video games cause violence. imo they do.

a lot of the arguments try to prove that because the majority of video game players aren't shooters isn't valid in my opinion, because, in tjis situation, even if 99.99% of gamers with access to a gun don't have a mads shooting, the 0.01% is enough.

add in a loneliness, a bad childhood, mental health issues, and being in a bad place at the time, i think it's possible.

now don't get me wrong - i don't believe video games should be banned or something, i'm just saying i believe it's feasible that video games could be a contributing factor in a mass shooter's choice to do unspeakable actions.

do you guys think i'm being naive or logical ?

Three-factor authentication:
1. Setup an Amazon.com account.
2. Setup an Amazon Web Services account under the same e-mail address
3. Setup two-factor authentication for both systems.
4. Login to Amazon Web Services in a new browser session, and you'll be required to provide BOTH security tokens at login (Amazon.com first, then AWS second.)

My biggest challenge has been moving away from an unmaintainable Java/Tomcat/Spring Security application server to a Node.js/Express application server. That handles single sign on and two factor authentication. In 2 weeks.

I'm a front end dev. I'm sure it's fine 😓

When you buy a parasol for your mother because you’re a good son, but she didn’t factor in the aerodynamics of having a solid fence next to it funnelling the air upwards.

What do you do when it keeps tipping?

Do the same thing you do with software of course!

Fake it ‘til you make it and use twine and weights (bricks) to hold it still 😂😂

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

I’ve got to say, I used to blow off Docker as some trendy, hipster technology that people only use for the cool factor but ever since I tried it out, I’ve used it for about 80% of my personal projects...

So I was like "imma be smart with my internet security and put 2 factor on my GitHub" only to find out I'm getting authenticating errors on trying to push. Disabling 2FA makes it work again.

GitHub y u do dis D:

They call it security questions.
I call it social engineering backdoor.

I'm supposed to enter those questions after logging into my account and I'm not able to skip it nor to set a proper two factor method.

Well, fuck you. Did you ever thought about dying by a two factor method? Ever watched a Saw movie? You got the idea.

The first fruits of almost five years of labor:
7.8% of semiprimes give the magnitude of their lowest prime factor via the following equation:
((p/(((((p/(10**(Mag(p)-1))).sqrt())-x) + x)*w))/10)

I've also learned, given exponents of some variables, to relate other variables to them on a curve to better sense make of the larger algebraic structure. This has mostly been stumbling in the dark but after a while it has become easier to translate these into methods that allow plugging in one known variable to derive an unknown in a series of products.

For example I have a series of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4omega, etc, and these are translateable now, through insights that become various methods, into other types of (non-d4) series. What these variables actually represent is less relevant, only that it is possible to translate between them.

I've been doing some initial learning about neural nets (implementation, rather than theoretics as I normally read about). I'm thinking what I might do is build a GPT style sequence generator, and train it on the 'unknowns' from semiprime products with known factors.

The whole point of the project is that a bunch of internal variables can easily be derived, (d4a, c/d4, u*v) from a product, its root, and its mantissa, that relate to *unknown* variables--unknown variables such as u, v, c, and d4, that if known directly give a constant time answer to the factors of the original product.

I think theres sufficient data at this point to train such a machine, I just don't think I'm up to it yet because I'm lacking in the calculus department.

2000+ variables that are derivable from a product, without knowing its factors, which are themselves products of unknown variables derived from the internal algebraic relations of a product--this ought to be enough of an attack surface to do something with.

I'm willing to collaborate with someone familiar with recurrent neural nets and get them up to speed through telegram/element/discord if they're willing to do the setup and training for a neural net of this sort, one that can tease out hidden relationships and map known variables to the unknown set for a given product.

When we subtract some number m from another number n, we are essentially creating a relationship between n and m such that whatever the difference is, can be treated as a 'local identity' (relative value of '1') for n, and the base then becomes '(base n/(n-m))%1' (the floating point component).

for example, take any number, say 512
697/(697-512)
3.7675675675675677

here, 697 is a partial multiple of our new value of '1' whose actual value is the difference (697-512) 185 in base 10. proper multiples on this example number line, based on natural numbers, would be
185*1,
185*2
185*3, etc

The translation factor between these number lines becomes

0.7675675675675677

multiplying any base 10 number by this, puts it on the 1:185 integer line.

Once on a number line other than 1:10, you must multiply by the multiplicative identity of the new number line (185 in the case of 1:185), to get integers on the 1:10 integer line back out.

185*0.7675675675675677 for example gives us

185*0.7675675675675677
142.000000000000

This value, pulled from our example, would be 'zero' on the line.

185 becomes the 'multiplicative' identity of the 1:185 line. And 142 becomes the additive identity.

Incidentally the proof of this is trivial to see just by example. if 185 is the multiplicative identity of 697-512, and and 142 is the additive identity of number line 1:185

then any number '1', or k=some integer, (185*(k+0.7675675675675677))%185
should equal 142.

because on the 1:10 number line, any number n%1 == 0

We can start to think of the difference of any two integers n, as the multiplicative identity of a new number line, and the floating point component of quotient of any number n to the difference of any number n-m, as the additive identity.

let n =697
let m = 185
n-m == '1' (for the 1:185 line)

(n-m) * ((n/(n-m))%1) == '0'

As we can see just like on the integer number line, n%1 == 0
or in the case of 1:185, it equals 142, our additive identity.

And now, the purpose of this long convoluted post: all so I could bait people into reading a rant on division by zero.

My phone suddenly is stuck in a reboot loop.
all solutions did not work (Safemode, Recoverymode etc)

It was time for a new phone.

well... most of my logins have now 2 factor authentication. That got me thinking:

imagine that you lost all your trusted devices in a house fire.
you cannot get in your email because of you need to verify.
you cannot buy stuff online because your phone gets a message.
and in certain cases you cannot even get in your password manager of the same reason.

I know that there are recovery codes and other solutions to this.. oh boy you are F*cked when you don't have your phone.

Everything turned out okay, Sim Card in different phone for messages. And new phone works like a charm :)

As of two days ago, I no longer use systemd on my Arch system, I switched to openRC.

Basically it all started right around 9 months ago, installed Arch on a new laptop, and whenever I would reboot (which was never very often, mainly kernel upgrades), about 7 out of 10 times it would crash when booting up. My solution for a while was "just don't reboot then".

I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what was causing the boots to fail. I tried disabling systemd units, just trying to narrow it down. I even got the logs from each failed boot, comparing it to a successful boot to find any differences just to have some idea of what the issue was.

One day I figured, it's possible that it could be an issue with systemd itself. So on my day off of work, I figured I'd try using a different init system, just to see if it would work 10 out of 10 times. Decided to try openRC, and sure enough, IT FUCKING WORKS!

Now, I don't hate systemd, I've always been on the fence about it. I feel like it just tries to do too much. I will say, it is fairly convenient to have a lot of things running off of one component, making them all compatible, BUT there's also the factor that one issue could potentially fuck shit up.

Hell, I'll say that it is easier to use systemd than openRC. Enabling unit files is easy as shit in systemd. But I personally like a challenge, and to learn new things, that's part of why I use Arch.

Anyways, I'm done with my rambling for today.

Company sends email notifying us we'd need to register for two factor authentication because it would be mandatory for all access to email within a week. However, it had to get manager approval and had a side effect of giving us access to work from home (which my manager hates). So, we send the request to him, explain the situation, he denies it and says "that can't be right! Let's do this: if you do in fact lose access to email, then I'll approve it". Well, we did lose it, and just spent two days without any access to email and it was a huge pain to get the registration process done because one of its steps involved getting a validation code from the email.

Trying to install Linux on an HP Stream 7 has been way more difficult than it should have been, even when you take into account that it's a 32-bit processor with a 32-bit EFI!

First off, the only thing I've been able to get it to boot right of the bat is Android x86 and BlissOS... kind of. You would think that Android x86 would be perfect for a tablet, right? Nope, performance sucked sooooo bad.

After reading some forums, I was finally able to get Ubuntus to load up... with the limiting factor being no on-screen keyboard.

So... at the moment I guess I'm stuck with a useless Windows tablet, and probably will be for a long time (you know, since 32-bit architecture is being dropped)

Making me happy is like optimising an image for the web.

Just strip me, interlace me and give me a sampling factor of 420 😂

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

The lack of one (no thinking about long term design and issues) leading to poorly designed systems that crumble when it needs to be scaled and has massive bus factor and code duplication.

So, there was that post about Valve that send your steam password through an email. I changed my password to see if it was true (I couldn't believe it). And I had to do phone verification....

I thought for a sec it wouldn't stop, but yeah atleast I got the message.

hey devs, quick question:
does rust support branchless conditionnals and jump tables, and if yes where to look for syntax?

i found no example for branchless so far and jump tables are scary in rust (and i need a library to use them, it seems).

inb4 "why in the hell/ what possible use those have?!":
i use branchless to make a looping array and jump tables whenever there's more than 4 if statements with equal probability, and the deciding factor is a numeric value, so quite often.

I recently went to an office to open up a demat account

Manager: so your login and password will be sent to you and then once you login you'll be prompted to change the password

Me: *that's a good idea except that you're sending me the password which could be intercepted* ok

Manager: you'll also be asked to set a security question...

Me: *good step*

Manager: ...which you'll need to answer every time you want to login

Me: *lol what? Maybe that's good but kinda seems unnecessary. Instead you guys could have added two factor authentication* cool

Manager: after every month you'll have to change your password

Me : *nice* that's good

Manager: so what you can do change the password to something and then change it back to what it was. Also to remember it keep it something on your number or some date

Me: what? But why? If you suggest users to change it back to what it was then what is the point of making them change the password in the first place?

Manager: it's so that you don't have to remember so many different passwords

Me: but you don't even need to remember passwords, you can just use softwares like Kaspersky key manager where you can generate a password and use it. Also it's a bad practice if you suggest people who come here to open an account with such methods.

Manager: nothing happens, I'm myself doing that since past several years.

Me: *what a fucking buffoon* no, sir. Trust me that way it gets much easier to get access to your system/account. Also you shouldn't keep your passwords written down like that (there were some password written down on their whiteboard)

Manager: ....ok...so yeah you need sign on these papers and you'll be done

Me:(looking at his face...) Umm..ok

Why the fuck is debit cards that don't need a PIN for transactions even a thing? What is so difficult to understand or implement in a two factor authentication? Like do these companies have meetings where some fucktard proposes removing a crucial security feature and the others just nod approval?

After examining my model and code closer, albeit as rudimentary as it is, I'm now pretty certain I didnt fuck up the encoder, which means the system is in fact learning the training sequence pairs, which means it SHOULD be able to actually factor semiprimes.

And looking at this, it means I fucked up the decoder and I have a good idea how. So the next step is to fix that.

I'm also fairly certain, using a random forest approach, namely multiple models trained on other variables derived from the semiprimes, I can extend the method, and lower loss to the point where I can factor 400 digit numbers instead of 20 digit numbers.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

Whenever I hear "this <person> is going to work on <project>" I edit my "bus factor of 1" wiki page.

Teams work on projects. People work on teams.

So.

I just sat here and listened to some awful gibberish that sounded kind of like the language a person would use to describe logistics or construction, but that still lacked so much filler language that a straight spew of jargon doesn't seem likely.

reminds me of every single time I hear someone describe new technology that ends up bombing.

like the push towards graph databases which I personally can't understand the underlying storage mechanism which would make them work

of someone describing locks to your house that can be unlocked from a cellphoen over the internet.

or 2 form factor authentication and what happens if you lose your phone and there is no customer service ?

on that last maybe they could take a sample of every customers voice every year or a fingerprint or a blood sample :P

So this is a story all about how:
I went from my brother being asked to clone the disk of old laptop to a new one. My m.2 ssd being held in with duct tape because of it and me having to run a tar command that took over 5 hours to complete.

So my bro got asked by a friends mom to help her with "PC Problems". In short the old laptop was barely useable and they ordered a new one on the reccomendations of my brother. Turns out the laptop he recomended shoud have had a 1tb hdd in it. Instead it had a 256gb m.2. Note: The old disk was 500GB.
So cloning wasnt possible. He then told me, that they also bought a regular sata ssd which was supposed to go in instead of the non present hdd. So I <-Want to emphasize on this! went to work.
Ordered a ssd in the right form factor.
Made a disk image of the old HDD.
Had to drill out the screw holding in my m.2 ssd as it was stuck.
Its now held in with a piece of kepton tape.
Wrote old disk's image on new disk.
It doesnt boot in new laptop.
Spend an evening trying to rebuild boot partitions.
Fuck it, lets install windows 10 (instead of 7) and copy all the shit over manually!
Lets buy office for 30$ on g2a as it would be a pain in the ass to explain the that its normally a subscription.
Previous rant happend.
Brought them the laptop yesterday telling them I did all the work.
I collect the ssd they ordered explaing i ordered the correct one and would take tis one for me.
Still had the 500GB img file of the disk and wanted to compress it in order to put some data back in place.
The tar command took over 5 hours to complete! I havent checked on it yet as I went to sleep.

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

So I was having problem logging in to slack. It seemed like their two-factor authentication was not working. So I kept on pondering and pondering. Then suddenly a light bulb was lit in my brain. I said to myself, "what would an ordinary muggle do? They surely will click on this contact us button and raise a ticket with them." So that's exactly what I did.

so after a while slack did sent me 16 text messages together as a sweet reward of my trials. I was happily working in Slack and then I realised they in fact did answer my ticket. The only thing is I just needed to log in to get the answer I need. I am happily reminded I wasnt the only fuckwit left into existence...

I hate Chrome Books/ ChromeOS. I was recently told that at my job we would be using Chrome Books and I am not excited, chrome os is essentially a mobile software on a real computer, the only redeeming factor is the Linux support in the developer betas.

Chrome books suck.

Math question time!

Okay so I had this idea and I'm looking for anyone who has a better grasp of math than me.

What if instead of searching for prime factors we searched for a number above p?
One with a certain special property. BEAR WITH ME. I know I make these posts a lot and I'm a bit of a shitposter, but I'm being genuine here.

Take this cherry picked number, 697 for example.

It's factors are 17, and 41. It's trivial but just for demonstration.

If we represented it's factors as a bit string, where each bit represents the index that factor occurs at in a list of primes, it looks like this

1000001000000

When converted back to an integer that number becomes 4160, which we will call f.

And if we do 4160/(2**n) until the result returns
a fractional component, then N in this case will be 7.

And 7 is the index of our lowest factor 17 (lets call it A, and our highest factor we'll call B) in our primes list.

So the problem is changed from finding a factorization of p, to finding an algorithm that allows you to convert p into f. Once you have f it's a matter of converting it to binary, looking up the indexes of all bits set to 1, and finding the values of those indexes in the list of primes.

I'm working on doing that and if anyone has any insights I'm all ears.

A couple of weeks ago my work email got hacked, I found out because he/she was sending phishing mails to yahoo emailaddresses, but they couldn't be delivered because they were marked as phishing.

I've immediately changed my password and turned on two-factor authentication, shared my story with my boss and now we use two-factor authentication for every service where it is possible.

I’m driving out to Cape Canaveral early on Feb 6 to see if I can get a good view of the first Falcon Heavy launch. The space geek in me can hardly handle the cool factor of Elon Musk having built a rocket company to send a car from his car company to ever lovin’ Sol/Mars orbit. If it scrubs, I’ll keep going out there until it launches. Wish me luck!

Frikkin samsung. Who the hell decided to mandate 2 Factor authentication for a health app which needs phone and contacts permission.!? Your only job was to show how many steps i walked today.. The people who decide this and the people who decide that randomly installing garbage apps without my permission everytime i update, inspite of giving me horrible hardware for a costlier rate than xiaomi.. should rot in hell forever.

Not dev but, enough for the story. Had an assignment to create a hashtable for my DS course. Asked a friend how he managed resizing and the load factor
Friend= tablesize*50
Me= what...
Friend= space complexity what...

how do you know when it's time to refactor?

when you factor it in

Do you think a #MITBragDay would go down so well?

Don't get me wrong WIT is amazing and I am all for it. Gender isn't even a factor for me working in dev.

The thing I don't enjoy is being vilified for being a male in tech. I feel like I'm the bad guy.

In my first dev role I commented out the code for sending acknowledgement emails when a user placed their order, and didn't realize when I committed it. It got pushed to production and we found it a week or so later.

Was probably a factor in me getting sacked from there.

Two weeks sick and several meetings where canceled, bugs haven't been touched the slightest bit and requests from customers have been deferred until I'm back.

That's what I call a low bus factor.

Here is a weird fact I have been thinking about this evening:

Helio X20 was the only mainstream ARM processor that had 10 CPU cores. It was first introduced in 2015, however no more ARM processors with high core count were used since then..

Nowadays smartphone processors have `8` cores max 🤔🧐

I guess 8 cores the reasonable limit for smartphones. Must have something to do with cost-to-performance factor