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Git.
The smallest utility made its way to being the largest companies must-have, the most critical part of the whole development landscape.
Using just plain C, Git can shred huge amounts of data insanely fast. It never gets old.
Git is a developer's scalpel.11 -
Me: "Delete this file."
Windows: "Someone is using it."
Me: "Who?"
Windows: "I can't say."
Me: "I checked using a utility. It says your file explorer is the one using it!"
Windows: "Well, I had to show a preview."
Me: "Why?"
Windows: "Because you selected the file to delete it!"
Credit: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/...9 -
I use a lot of dev tools, but one of my favorites is the Linux screen utility. It's awesome to be able to keep shit running on servers whether my laptop stays connected tot he server or not. It's great for jobs that take a long time, can't get interrupted, etc.
If you haven't used screen definitely give it a try!14 -
!rant
I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.
So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.
My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.
I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.
This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.
So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!10 -
Notice :
We strongly advise people to use Windows as their primary operating system as it provides a totally free and a great tool or a utility known as Backdoors.
Here's a simple explanation of a backdoor for the people who don't know what a great tool it is :
Just as most of the citizens have a secondary door to their home through the yard, similarly a backdoor is a secondary access to your Computer which you (not us) can use it in cases of emergencies when you forget the passwords.
Please cooperate
Have a great day :)29 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
The thing that I hate the most about my job:
Manager: We need to get this done.
Me: okay. (after some scouring online) this open source library looks like a perfect fit for the requirement.
Manager: oh sweet.
*some eons later*
Me: dude, I developed this general purpose utility and I think this might be helpful to other developers and something that we could open source.
Manager: uh no. Company policy.
Me: but we make use of open source libraries all the time.
Manager: that's different.4 -
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...2 -
long rant = this;
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.
First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!
Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.
Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.
Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??
Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.
Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.
Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?
Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.
Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.
Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?
I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.
I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.22 -
When will Google understand what an ecosystem means ?
Love it or hate it. What makes Apple devices homely is the ability to build a banded and consolidated associative user space that feels the same anytime on any platform. Crafting an ecosystem might be a daunting task , and requires adaptive and perfective rework through a long period. But it pays of , just like apples utility app suite does today. It was a journey to get it right.
Now we have Google , a company that is confused most of the time , releasing new apps everytime they have new feature in mind. According to me , Google did a phenomenal job in building hangouts and Allo , hangouts was a huge step forward from gChat , and Allo was way ahead of its time for a fun and innovative IM app. But what's the need for 2 different apps ? One has video calling , text messaging , group sharing , everything the Allo had.
Then all of a sudden you get Google Duo " The best ever video calling app " Why wasn't this integrated with hangouts and marketed the same way ?
Trial and error is one thing , this seems a lot like the lack of effort in architecting coaction and a well designed internetworking application framework. A lot of unnecessary choices have led to the shutting down of majority of their apps. Allo and hangouts included , but all this would have been unnecessary if the goal was to always build upon iteratively.
While I believe Allo was marketed as a cross platform chat application unlike hangouts , an integration plan could have always circumvented this issue.
I have to talk about another one of Google's failed efforts in recognition of potential , the hello app , but this rant has gone a bit too far already. So I'll post 6 hours later 😅
Well I'll always have the hope to see Google integrate the best of their ideas in a more relaxed and realised structure than what exists today. :)
13 -
How I play mobile games:
-Try to hack it to get infinite $$$, God mode
-Success?
--Yes: play til bored or "finished" (they never finish)
--No: Uninstall
Is this efficiency optimization, maximizing utility, or cheating?15 -
Forgive me father, for I have sinned. Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins. Okay, a particular series of technical sins. Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit. Where was I? Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession. May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.
Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps". Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed. Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.
Fuck that noise. Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman. This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money. There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.
Automated it anyway. Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries. Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion. Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually. Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor. Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.
Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain. Vulnerability still there months later. Test using it for automated updates. Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility. Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it. Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time. Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now. Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work. Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.
Flash forward 6 years. Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies. Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system. Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.
It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system. There never was and never will be a SQL socket. Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.
I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped. I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore. I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.
Noone cares. Won't be my problem soon enough.
In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence5 -
I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.
They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!
I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.
But! No audio.
Damn.
Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.
Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.
But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤
(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)22 -
Just spent 20 minutes implementing a utility class.... then realized I don't need it...
The solution is actually much simpler... only takes 1 line of code...7 -
If Corona Virus, were to make a CV, it would make an interesting read:
1. Responsible for Global Digital Transformation.
2. Reduction of Global CO2 emission and Greenhouse gasses.
3. Global Hygiene initiatives: Ensured 100% compliance on washing hands and body bath.
4. Made industry shift to WFH - saved exposure and costs.
5. Reduction in noise pollution by making everyone keep their mouth shut (masked).
6. Taught cooking, vegetable shopping, housekeeping to many,
7. Provided ample time to all egoistic and self centered people, to contemplate on their mortal nature.
8. Provided a big boost to the Pharma sector and brought back small utility stores back into the limelight.
9. Highlighted the importance of governance, adaptability and long term planning, by all sectors.
Corona’s CV seems superior to many 😉2 -
Win10 shell has ssh? Oh boi, let's try that out.
> help ssh
This command is not supported by the help utility. Try "ssh/?".
> ssh /?
ssh: Could not resolve hostname /?: Name or service not known.
😲🔫9 -
My boss just asked me for a cheat sheet I have that lists all our app server's paths.
The paths are attached as annotations throughout some Java files.
Anyway I send him the one I have but he asks if he could have an updated one.
Now imagine if I were like most monkeys and had made this cheat sheet by hand....
2 mins easy vs an(other) hour of grunt work
Why is it that I'm the only person on the team that writes utilities to automate boring grunt work while everyone else just does it manually whenever it needed....
Isn't DRY a core principle of being a developer?
I'm the only person that builds utility apps that automate frequent tasks that people keep asking us to do....21 -
After seeing @Gregozor2121 share, I searched around in my bookmarks for similar stuff. Here are a couple of links that I feel is useful for everyone:
A massive list of Free programming books.
https://ebookfoundation.github.io/f...
(Also do explore anything marked as "awesome", cause it literally is awesome!! They have got tons of lists of resources for most programming languages, free software lists, famous stackoverflow answers, quotes & even Pokemon!!)
I also had this bookmarked:
https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh
Basically cheat sheets at your command line. Pretty neat utility.8 -
Sister of a friend of mine fucked up her Mac, her Dad, they called me to fix it.
Partition table is wrecked and her thesis is there, no backup.
Been working since yesterday, got to recover it. Recovered files.
Dad applies pressure, because she's leaving out of town today, I do my best but fucking SSD won't work, it says it's healthy but damn Mac says IO error, Disk Utility says exit code 8... oh, and her dad thinks it's easy, that Ive been delaying things and so on...
fuuuuuucking hell, I hate you10 -
Here in Saint Petersburg, Russia, our local governmental utility company that is responsible for providing tap water for the entire city, uses crayfish to monitor the water composition.
There are some crayfishes living at the plant and there are some scientists that constantly monitor the crayfish via optical fiber to measure how they feel. If crayfish feels bad, the water is cut out and the inspection begins. There are operators that are paid to watch for crayfish mood throughout the day.
This system works flawlessly since 2005 and helped prevent several accidents when toxic stuff that can’t be monitored on a large scale ended up in our local river.
I mean coal miners was using canaries and rats for years to detect what detectors just can’t detect good enough.
Our entire tap water system depends on some crayfish and it’s amazing.4 -
Idea was to make a little helper utility to be used once (only for myself, not client). But, I've kept adding layers of functionality over layers of functionality ... Long story short - this monstrosity (UI is bad, code not that much) was used for 10+ years (again, only by myself).
Finally, personal embarrassment was too big, so I took wooden stake and monster passed away. All related files deleted (but not before one final screenshot).
6 -
not sure if counts as a compliment, but the follwing exchange with my team lead programmer felt pretty good:
"... wait, where did you find this function you're using here?"
"i didn't, it was missing so i wrote it."
"but... oh, i didn't realize you're gonna need it, if i had, i'd have given you a different task... noooo, that's internal framework functionality, i write that stuff for you guys so that you can just use it, cause it's complicated... oh, god, no, where did you put, how did you imple... (right clicks, go to definiton)... oh, it's exactly where it's supposed to be... (skims the code)... and is written exactly as if i had written it.
(looks at me and smiles, then turns to the rest of the team), guys, that component i told you to wait with making because i first need to write that complicated utility function that you'll need to use? you can start working on it now, Midnight wrote that function for me. (turns back to me) Nice, quick learner. But next time, at least let me know first, yeah?"
(that was third day in a new job, corporate-sized system. the rest of the team had been working there on that system for the past 2 years.
(probably not a good form, kinda going over team lead's head, but tbh i didn't realize i'm not supposed to touch that code because "it's complicated", while doing my task i just realized i need a function similar to a family of already implemented ones, so i just followed their convention amd added it.)
tl;dr - best programming compliment is people being surprised/confused that i did something which they thought as a normal thing that they will have to do for me, because it's in their job description to be doing it for people on my position/with my job description)9 -
This freaking laptop.
The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.
The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.
The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.
nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.
In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.
Just. It's frustrating.
It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.28 -
How do you pronounce SQL?
"See for me, I just go my own way and pronounce it as ‘sqwool, or ‘sqwll’, which sometimes gets my coworkers (not db or programming people) calling it ‘Squirrel’. As such we have a custom written utility program which automates running certain SQL commands on various databases which is aptly named SQuirreL. Then we started to have fun with it: The ‘pre-defined’ sets of SQL are held in a ‘.nut’ file which you give to SQuirreL. When you want to see what scripts have been run, you check the SQuirrel’s .log to see what .nut files it has ‘eaten’. We thought about naming the log files .poop, but I felt that was too far. I know right now there’s people reading this cringing, but I say lighten up. My boss when presented with the tool, did not get ANY of the Squirrel/nut references… I mean the tool’s icon was a cartoon squirrel holding an acorn for crying out lout, but I digress.
So yeah, I call it Sqwll or Sqwool, but only when talking to people who don’t matter."
Source, in the comments: http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/...
I doubt this has ever been posted. =)9 -
Just as I wait for my train, some advertisers from a utility company here approached me. Asking what my company is etc..
Me: "well I'm making my own company..."
*Looks at their pamphlet*
"Oh, utility company you mean. My apartment building has solar panels."
Them: "oh you know about electricity right... And F-16, the fighter jets that fly at 3000km/h"
(My neighbor is a former aerospace technician who mentioned that previously, should be about right)
Them: "they fly faster than electricity!"
Me: "but um.. electricity travels at the speed of light..."
Them: *avoid subject*
Them: "yeah it travels 7 times around the globe in 1 second"
Me: *recalls ping to my servers in Italy*
"Yeah to Italy my ping is about 300ms if memory serves me right... So that'd make sense"
(Turned out to be 40ms.. close enough though, right 🙃)
Them: "don't travel too much at light speed, alright!"
*They pack up and leave*
Meanwhile me, thinking: but guys.. all I wanted to do was smoke a cigarette before my train comes. Why did you waste my time with this? And uninformed time wastage at that.
Advertisers are the worst 😶12 -
I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.
So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.
I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...
~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.
~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!
~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.
~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.
~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.
~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.
~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.
And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...1 -
Time: 0600 hrs.
Mental State: Almost falling asleep on my laptop
I get a call from my "random cousin" with whom I haven't spoken in a looooong time, and he says "Hey, Good Morning ! I can't connect to my WiFi from my Windows laptop running Windows 7. Can you help ?.."
That moment when you TRULY believe in the person who developed the "Network Diagnostics" utility on Windows and ask the "random cousin" who calls you up at 6 AM to try it...
And he sends you this screenshot after some time ...
And then you have to wake up and pinch yourself to see if you are in a dream...
Long sleepless day ahead...
5 -
A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.
"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.
Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."
Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL) -
I just realized.. The way I play Sudoku (I use autofill) ~= why I program and write utility libraries
Skip the boring stuff and get to the actual problem
12 -
These postings on angel.co
I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.
I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.
Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.
Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.
Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.
I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)
I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"
I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.
Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.
Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.
Narrowing it down to the companies then.
I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.
The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.
Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.
Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem
I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.
So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.
Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.
I'm still livid with this shit.5 -
Remember how CPU speeds stopped mattering after they reached 2GHz? (except for gaming and media editing of course).
I believe Internet speeds have also met that zero marginal utility point at 15Mbps.
I felt no difference when mine went up gradually from 15Mbps to 75Mbps now. (Thanks ACT, India)14 -
A coworker of mine was asked to make a utility C# app to help with our internal testing. The idea was that the app would collect data and display the results.
He decided that it was very important that the app have a command line interface. He's spent far more time building the app from scratch for the command line than he would have if he'd used C#'s built-in GUI utilities.
Today was our demo day and he shows an internal command-line app in 2017 built in C#. I asked about the GUI and he said that the command line functionality was more important. I suggested that it was maybe less user-friendly and he proceeded to explain to me how "non-technical" people might prefer a GUI, but clearly any serious developer would just want a command line app.
I feel like, in one fell swoop, he trivialized my suggestion, didn't address any of the data visualization needs, and suggested I wasn't a "real developer". Am I right to feel a little outraged by this?5 -
Today I told 3 devs that they either get their shit together or they can pack their things and look for a job.
I can get easily pissed, but it's rather rare for me to get to that point easily.
Now my dear friends, can you guess what they did?
I give you a hint...
They made a test suite validating a network library.
So we have roughly 200 plus lovely splitted tests, neatly put in a directory structure - lovely organization.
(I might have written in the ticket that as a requirement... Cause I know my lil hellspawns)
But as I started looking at some tests, there was always something missing...
Network library...
So we needed to create an endpoint... And handle of course the tests communication with the endpoint *somewhere*.
I'd guess you know already what these mofos did...
Yeah. We have one class.... That handles all tests endpoints... Via different methods... Plus additional methods like utility functions....
The ticket was easy they said.
Me chewing their heads off was easy too.
Jesus Christ, I really doubt sometimes that some devs are able to go to a toilet.
Maybe thats the reason some wear baggy pants - easier to hide the pampers.
*rolls eyes*5 -
More like a sub company/department inside a company: Android.
I still use it as my main driver, but every time I try to get back into development with it(did it professionally for 2 years nearing on 3 and was a lead Android dev, mind you not necessarily by merit....) I end up hating everything about it.
The tooling is meh, the API is hideous and even with the addition of Kotlin, which I do find a nicer language over Java I still dislike it. The ammount of shit needed to make something as simple as store data, manage fragments, integrate with the NDK, make JSON API calls or even shake motions is just ludicrous and counter intuitive. I can see why people would hate Java based on Android, a language that I generally love and defend.
I firmly believe that people extend frameworks or tooling for 2 reasons only:
1 the stack is so awesome that you just want to create packages and libraries to extend the functionality of a powerful environment, like gems for Ruby, python packages, Node packages, php composer, nuget etc
2 the stack is so fucking hideous that people need to fix shit: the entire android square utility framework, butterknife, flutter, react native, codenameone, etc etc
The case with Android is the second. I have not met a professional Android developer that completely likes everything about Android, but will seldom find people that HATE other frameworks or environments.
Android it is for me. Still my daily driver and I love every Android phone I have ever owned. It just makes me feel lots of more compassion for fellow Android devs.4 -
trs()
For those of you desiring to post non-rants, I wrote a handy utility function for you:
/*
* Toggles whether this post is
* a rant or not.
*/
function toggleRant()
{
// Check if toggling is safe
for(var i = 0; i < 999999999; i ++)
for(var t = 0; t < 999999999; t ++);
console.log("Crazy security checks came through.")
// Toggle ('isRant' is true by default)
isRant = !isRant
}
From now on, you can easily put 'toggleRant()' on the first line of any rant. As we all know, the 'isRant' on devRant is true by default.
Feel free to play around with it:
toggleRant()
toggleRant()
toggleRant()
This would also indicate that your "rant" is not a rant.
I've also wrapped the 'toggleRant' into another function with a shorter name for you lazy people (which most programmers are):
/*
* Wrapper for 'toggleRant'.
*/
function tr()
{
toggleRant()
trogus() // Just in case
}
Or if you type one additional letter, you also make sure that it's extra safe to call the function:
/*
* Extra safe version of 'tr'.
*/
function trs()
{
for(var i = 0; i < 746985768; i ++);
console.log ("Extra safe")
tr()
}2 -
Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...
Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.
In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.
When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)
Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.
Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?
Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.2 -
First rant, technically a sysadmin but getting into the nitty-gritty of programming with some things to improve my job (and hopefully moving into something more technical).
Have been doing a paid internship at my utility company. I do patch management with SCCM and sometimes the updates break. I've been using Powershell to reset the Windows update cache to make the computers work again. Unfortunately, this sometimes involves logging into machines to do some manual work and I have to notify users before I log in if they're already logged in.
Scripts can be run silently but I've spent a few weeks trying to automatically retry Software Center updates with Powershell … before realizing just today that the system center action "Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle" does indeed do the thing I've been attempting to do with Powershell for weeks now.
Wish me luck as I automate that part of the process and completely automate the sole job they gave me to do. Don't tell on me!5 -
!rant
If you have software in production please have some way for a user to find some contact email (create for this reason only if needed.)
I have run into crippling bugs in huge essential systems (state dmv new system, the ticket system utility marking) which they were oblivious to until I went out of my way, like a stalker to get some contact of someone remotely related to someone I could drop this info in the lap of, and so far it was a total shock to them (the dmv system was taken offline for 3 days to resolve)
I get not wanting to run a helpdesk to support users, but give technical users some contact info ( even if you think you have full coverage analytics because, being software, it may have a bug)
/rant3 -
I’m hired as pizza making burger flipper for $12/hr since I have no formal schooling and then I am walked out back to the utility room to do what cooks REALLY DO... Secret network engineering and admin... Never fails... They always find out and I always end up replacing whatever company or person they used for tech/admin work.
Time to at least get some Oracle certs and a nano degree!5 -
Never had full time mentors, just some great examples from great people:
Some years ago, I was new on the job. They sent me to see a colleague for the "transfer of knowledge" as he was leaving and I had to take over his projects.
He greeted me with a big smile and said:
"Oh, look, I just spilled very accidentally a cup of coffee on my pc so I've lost all information. Only thing I remember is that you have a call with this project today at 14 o'clock. I'll be gone by then but don't worry, just say we are late with delivery and it will be fine. I hope you all the best with your new job!"
I'll always remember him. I learned the value of improvisation, the utility of a cup of coffee and how to take things easy.
I always dream of doing what I learned from him sooner or later.5 -
Worst mistake ever...
Using PHP to write a server-side utility instead of Python. (Or anything else really, even BASIC...) -
A primary investor in the company I work for drops by every few days and always smokes cigars in the coffee room and shuts the door..
My coffee and his cigar routines have never collided before today, I'm now trying to figure out the lowest impact server or utility I can shutdown that will cause enough panic to get him out.2 -
TechSuppDept: There is a critical antivirus upgrade we need to do...
Me(email): can you give me 48 more hours, ive already spent 7days processing my data... cpu, mem already at 97% utility
TechSuppDept: Please explain your email.
Me: .
-
Created utility for installers..
Easter Egg:
Pressing Ctrl+Alt+D opens a new window with Duck Hunt game in it..
Did this about 6 month ago.. Used it today myself.. got stuck for an hour..
3 -
This was about two years ago, and is so fucking simple. But it's because I fucked up something so goddamn simple that I'll never be able to forget.
One of the stupidest fucking things I've done?
Went into the GNOME Disks utility trying to wipe a SanDisk Cruzer USB drive. BAM! There goes the entirety of my /dev/sda disk! Oh, and you know all partitions on that disk?? Gone!! Nothing I could do.
I don't know which pisses me off about myself more: The fact that Linux has more complicated tools that do the same exact job but make me think about what the actual fuck I'm doing thus preventing fuckups, or the fact that I was too fucking lazy to use them and decided to go with the dirt simple option and still managed to fuck myself over in the end...
Lesson for you kids that haven't fucked yourselves over in a way this dumb yet: ALWAYS have that backup installer USB somewhere. ALWAYS. -
Found out why Apple removed the headphone jack. Why need that if there are Bluetooth alternatives. Microphone might have a utility.
-
!rant
Been working on a custom html partial injector (js/jquery only) as both a personal challenge and utility to use for my website scaffold. Being a challenge, i decided not to look at any implementation from another JS framework. I won't lie, i had it 'working' at least 5 times now, but this time, after about 3-4 days, i think i got it for real. And the cool thing? It's a bit less code than my original implementation even with my generous whitespace and verbosity. And it even unwraps nicely so it looks like a regular html page in the dev tools.
I love when things finally work as they should--God knows i question my motives before then.2 -
oh, I have a few mini-projects I'm proud of. Most of them are just handy utilities easing my BAU Dev/PerfEng/Ops life.
- bthread - multithreading for bash scripts: https://gitlab.com/netikras/bthread
- /dev/rant - a devRant client/device for Linux: https://gitlab.com/netikras/...
- JDBCUtil - a command-line utility to connect to any DB and run arbitrary queries using a JDBC driver: https://gitlab.com/netikras/...
- KubiCon - KuberneterInContainer - does what it says: runs kubernetes inside a container. Makes it super simple to define and extend k8s clusters in simple Dockerfiles: https://gitlab.com/netikras/KubICon
- ws2http - a stateful proxy server simplifying testing websockets - allows you to communicate with websockets using simple HTTP (think: curl, postman or even netcat (nc)): https://gitlab.com/netikras/ws2http -
Imagine the horror of learning C programming with manual memory management, pointer arithmetic and without your cool utility libraries after programming for 2 years in Python just becoz it's in the fukin syllabus!!
13 -
MS Access and VBA.
This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...
Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...
Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...1 -
Fuck the managers !! Fucking Fuck Fuck !!!
I am in manual testing for 3 years. Wanted to move in to automation since 2016 January !
They kept delaying.
While waiting I kept autating stuffs and making utilities to use for everyone.
Recently automated a 5 yr old manual process.
Made an utility that can perform a 5 hours manual activity in 5 mins.
Our automation team had a vacancy.
The managers were asked to nominate names who could fill the spot from the current manual team.
They didn't suggested my name.
I am not bragging but I am the only person in the team who nows Selenium , UFT , Java , Python even though being in the manual testers.
The team is going to hire someone from the outside.
I just got to know it all this today.
These bastards should die in hell !!!!
I hate these bastards !!!!6 -
When are people going to understand that programming is not about quickly putting something together?
Programming may have its utility in helping us out building solutions, but that's a secondary function of it.
Ultimately and abstractly, as MIT professors said, it's about the imperative paradigm of solving problems.
I really dislike it when people treat programming as if it were a toolbox. It is a great engineering feat. That's like saying math is just about numbers. No, it is about concepts. We're thinkers, not doers.4 -
What's a good password manager for Linux?
A few (optional) conditions (in order of preference):
1. It's free
2. It supports ssh, gpg, etc.
3. It has a GUI (a nice one with gtk/qt support)
4. It's (properly) secure
5. It has FIDO U2FA support (i.e. supports physical security keys like Yubikey or Solo)
6. It has a browser extension
7. It's compatible/non-conflicting with gnome-keyring17 -
Somehow I enjoy creating flawlessly working nifty utilities a lot more than writing actual business code.
It's that versatility and reusability of a well-written utility that makes it suitable for many use-cases that puts a smile on my face.
A single-purpose business and use-case-specific piece of code doesn't do it for me anymore. I guess it never did, really...
I wish I could get paid for building tools rather than business apps :)3 -
Things that I will do during the next few weeks at work because I am an asshole:
Write an entire CLI utility in Rust for internal processes, no one on my city understands or even knows that Rust exists.
Write a small desktop app as proof of concept for another department that had made the idea some time ago in either: GnuSTEP Obj-C or Lazarus Pascal for the same reason as the Rust application.
Job security people. And I have a tendency to write things in stuff that no one else uses.8 -
I hate it when I ask about a way to solve a very specific problem in js, and people be like:
"You should use this x library, it has the y utility that will solve your problem right away"3 -
Most successful project at work: NodeJS utility for storing loads of measurements from an application running on various other systems and providing fast ways of getting at that data. No DB, just CSV files broken into time periods. Also has a search function written in C that can very quickly find all user sessions matching the criteria. It's not perfect, but it does the job pretty well and I can tweak the storage engine as much as needed for our use case since its all custom written.
Outside of work: Incomplete right now but I soldered some wires onto an old sound card and managed to get an Arduino to configure it and play some notes on its FM synthesis chip. Still quite a newbie to electronics so this was quite an achievement for me personally. -
the worst project I've ever worked on was a BIOS update utility for the desktop techs at work. They wanted a tool to open that would let them know when there's a BIOS update and install it for them. The problem was the file share that held the BIOS updates had no naming convention, Dell doesn't name all BIOS updates with Axx, people would fat finger the BIOS password and model numbers for the computers was a pain to match against the file share. After at least 800 lines of C# code I give it to them. A couple months go by and I still see them going machine to machine upgrading BIOSes in labs even though my tool does it to a lab silently with a switch... hhhhhh.
-
So today it finally happened.
Npm modules broke my system and / or endangered the security of my system.
Installed a global cli utility
That utility depends on package A
That depends on package B
That fucking install a bin called sudo
Yeah.. You heard it right a bin called sudo.
This bin goes in the global module folder that is piped in your path variable.
Now everytime you type sudo you are running somebody else code instead of your system utility.
I am shivering and at loss of swear words.
Opened an issue on the cli that started this matrioska game of horror.
Who the fuck tought that a bin called sudo would be a good fucking idea?
Oh and yes is even an harmless package that try to provide the sudo experience for windows (I went in to check the code of course..)
And I frigging need that cli for work
For now I aliased the sudo in my bashrc still i feel vulnerable and naked now.10 -
Some more favorite 'about mes' from users I've talked with in the past:
RememberMe
"Generic McGenericsson"
Real name: Smith, John.
Experience: University
Occupation: Doing stuff.
From: Somewhere.
kescherRant
Skills
"something I guess"
How I feel any given day.
Location
Vienna, Austria
Did you get rejected from art school too?
akshar
"please teach me React before php swallows me :c"
I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL! - php, probably.
SortOfTested
"Building software to make the electric utility industry .05% less shitty"
relevant: If you stare long enough into the abyss, it'll stare back into you.3 -
I recently got into an argument with some people, and I want your opinion. I did a speed code in Java (just sped up clip of programming, because it looks cool lol), and someone commented:
"Way too much static abuse here. Jesus"
In which I replied:
"Actually, sir. There is near none at all, just because I use static methods does not make it static abuse. A static method belongs to the class, and is somewhat permanent. It is not a type (instance, cat, dog, animal, etc.) class, it is a Utility class, much like other dependencies you'd use are Utilities and not types."
To which they reply:
"Getting and setting is a Utility?"
Boi. If it is a static variable, yes. Like, what?5 -
Ryzen Threadripper desktops talking:
Windows: Should I upgrade to ecc ram?
Linux: The utility of ecc is lost on an operating system that is orders of magnitude more unstable than the hardware on which it runs.
- Inspired by one of the comments on https://youtube.com/watch/...4 -
!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?
So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.
Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.5 -
Should I monetize?
I've created a spot-it like playing card generators online utility. There're around 800 users generating around 800 decks every month currently. I'm just wondering if I should think about placing advertisements on the app. I'm not completely in favor of monetization as they bother user experience, but it can give me some extra bucks to create more applications like this.
What do you say? Should I go for advertisements? How much can I earn from it?
https://funcards.github.io/match-it...6 -
Linux has been around since back when dinosaurs punched holes in cards, but for some reason it still takes a few hours of googling and error debugging to do something as basic as connect to a wpa2-enterprise wifi network.
What the fuck? Where's the "connect to any standard work or school wifi network" command line utility distributed with all os flavors? Why can't I just put in a username and password and be done with it instead of sudo editing networking adapter configuration files manually?2 -
Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.
First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.
But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).
So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).
Bingo. It works.
So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray4 -
I was just going over some projects I need to transfer to others team members and was reminded of all the utility apps I created. Particularly on that covers Windows paths to Linux....
Or basically path.Replace("\\","/") in a GUI.
I actually use it a lot whenever I hardcode a file path in Java for testing or make some partial path Linux compliant.
I think it saves me a lot of time but I'm the only person I think that creates these apps... basically for anything I find myself repeating often... Even these simple things.
Am I weird? Or just good at identifying things that can be outsourced? And outsourcing them?16 -
I don't know why people love taking pictures of their monitor screens, use a decent screenshot tool or just your inbuilt utility tool FFS -_-6
-
This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.
I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.
As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.
One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.
In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.
Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.
We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.
What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.
The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.
The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.
INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').4 -
My dad, the man who taught me cutting corners is less possible in the IT field than any other field and that you have to do it CORRECTLY unless you're deliberately asking for problems, is using the OEM recovery utility to reinstall the OEM copy of Win7 Starter onto a shitbook destined to be a diagnostics machine for smart cars *because he doesn't wanna go driver hunting.*
They're all literally right fucking here. On this one page.
My mentor has become the bad example he once steered me away from becoming.
1 -
What paradoxes taught me.
Perhaps each time a paradox is encountered in mathematics, there is a useful distinction or mathematical tool hiding in plain sight, one that hasn't be discovered or utilized. For cursory evidence I give you: division by zero, the speed of an arrow at any point in flight, and calculus.
Maybe this isn't true for some paradoxes, or even most, but as time goes on I suspect people will discover it is more true than they might have thought.
Undefined behavior and results aren't nonsense: They look to me like golden seams to be explored for possible utility when approached from uncommon angles with uncommon problems.6 -
Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.
What is a game?
I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.
both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).
a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.
theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.
now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.
Now what is a toy?
There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.
An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.
"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.
Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.
But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?
Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.
Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.
Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.
This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.
But what makes a good game?
A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.
In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.11 -
I seriously love rsync. Whoever made that utility is my hero. Not only that its CLI client is amazing and full of features, but rsync in daemon mode makes secure file synchronization a breeze! <38
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Ideally
UX designer:
User oriented, design stuff that fullfill actual needs of user
Engineer:
Focus on utility, how to execute designer's desin
Reality
UX designer:
Personal oriented, design stuff that "they" think user will prefer. End up design some unrealistic functions.
Engineer:
Working overtime to fullfil designers' fantasy thought -
Create something that will take humanity forward. Not just a utility software but make things that'll help solve the biggest problems humans as a society face - poverty, hunger, loneliness, pollution etc. All these problems are on my radar.
The idea is to use science to solve social problems. And not just stop at that. Make things that will help humans evolve into the next evolutionary phase.2 -
Oooh I have quite a few,
My favourite: accidently left a log. Debug("bollocks") in a try catch this made it through testing and does (still) occasionally go into production log files.
Worst: wrote an interceptor for jboss with the intent of checking cache for some lookup data. I picked the wrong one of two similarly named methods and instead queried the database, I effectively wrote a denial of service utility into our app -
At work I am "the" programmer and is the first time in which I actually enjoy showing different solutions to problems without having a fear of implementing large things without having any form of recognition.
Seeing someone get happy because of something you created is a great feeling and even tho most of us are misantrophic af we can still appreciate bringing happiness through code.
To me, software engineering is the closest thing to magic and I really believe that.
Two days ago I showed my manager a little utility to build small portions of the site we are building and make changes to it in real time without browser refreshes for whatever change she would like to do. She was super happy and excited and it made me feel real happy.
Such great feeling man. Nothing but good vibes brother!! -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.6 -
!rant
What kind of Easter eggs have you guys added to your projects (personal or work)?
There was one I added to a command-line utility for work that, as long as you ran the right command on an OS with a GUI, would open a browser and navigate to "Never gonna give you up" on YouTube. 😎 -
Just remembered that I still had a foobar invite link in my email inbox 😋
The challenges are odd though, first challenge was super easy (basically an idiot check), but while I was able to convert 3 cans of energy drink into a functional solution in half an hour, the verification utility is not very verbose at all. So in Python 3.7.3 in my Debian box it worked just fine, yet the testing suite in Foobar was failing the whole time. After sending an email to my friend that gave the link (several years ago now, sorry about that! 😅) asking if he knew the problem, I found out that Google is still using Python 2.7.13 for some reason. Even Debian's Python is newer, at 2.7.16. To be fair it does still default to Python 2 too. But why.. why on Earth would you use Python 2.7 in a developer oriented set of challenges from a massive company, in 2020 when Python 2 has already been dead for almost a whole year?
But hey now that it's clear that it's Python 2.7, at least the next challenges should be a bit easier. Kind of my first time developing in SnekLang regardless actually, while the language doesn't have everything I'd expect (such as integer square root, at least not in Debian or the foobar challenge's interpreter), its math expressions are a lot cleaner than bash's (either expr or bc). So far I kinda like the language. 2-headed snake though and there's so much garbage for this language online, a lot more than there is for bash. I hate that. Half the stuff flat out doesn't work because it was written by someone who requires assistance to breathe.
Meh, here's to hoping that the next challenges will be smooth sailing :) after all most of the time spent on the first one (17.5 hours) was bottling up a solution for half an hour, tearing my hair out for a few hours on why Google's bloody verification tool wouldn't accept my functioning code (I wrote it for Python 3, assuming that that's what Google would be using), and 10 hours of sleep because no Google, I'm not scrubbing toilets for 48 hours. It's fair to warn people but no, I'm not gonna work for you as a cleaning lady! 😅
Other than the issues that the environment has, it's very fun to solve the challenges though. Fuck the theoretical questions with the whiteboard, all hiring processes should be like this!
1 -
Bootcamp fked up during partition and macos disk utility disk utility simply sucks.
Now i have unaccessible 44gb space on this system. Also TIL, online help related to issues on Mac is terrible. Lol even stackexchange has no replies.
Apparently it seems i have to reinstall whole OS to recover it..
Or is there any other way?..
8 -
Some facepalm things I've discovered recently:
- Node's require("http") doesn't work for https - you have to require("https") specifically.
- Mongofiles (command line utility for Mongo, imports files as GridFS) cannot input more than one file at a time. Regex doesn't work. [Ended up making a puny Powershell script to do it].
- Airtable doesn't let you download your attachments, even if you export a csv - it's just a url to the image on their cloud.
It's been an exhausting day.1 -
2 years back when I was onshore, we were in the bad situation due to the size and complexity of handling big webserivces simulators. A single change makes the build red hence the face of other developers too.
These simulators were created using J2EE and VM templates 5 years back. With the time, application and data size grown. We were supposed to maintain consistensy in dummy data accross the applications. But some programmers made a copy of these simulators to finish their applications fast and made the situation worst.
Finally one of the team member dare to use stubby4j to solve this problem. Choosing the stubby4j was a good decision as it was the specialized tool written to create simulators only. But as the stubby4j was not having all the features a simulator need, he customized it's build for our simulators. All the team members were happy.
After few weeks, I picked a story to transform other simulators using stubby4j. The story was previously closed as it was hard to implement in stubby4j. I ingonred the comment and started working on. I spent 2 weeks but couldn't solve the problem. I read the comment in between but It was very late to take the step back. I was not able to give proper status update in the daily standup. Other team members (working from offshore) were thinking that I'm just passing the time. However my manager handled the situation very well and asked if I need some help.
This was friday, I took the leave as it was my wife's birthday. We couldn't go out due to the bad weather. I was thinking about the code all the time. Hence I started to write a new utility to handle all the requirement a webseervice simulator need. I took 2.5 days to complete it. On Tuesday, I demoed it to the whole team. And published it as an opensource application "STUBMATIC". In few weeks I received the good response from other teams as well.
I'm a full time open source developer now. -
Do you guys remember the fun little joke utility called fuck that corrected typos?
While debugging an absurd 2s shell load time, I noticed today that the command it appends to .bashrc to _set a fucking alias_ takes almost 400ms to execute.1 -
I dont know why but my team lead urges everyone to use empty string as a constant string variable from our utility class instead of just putting "" in our code... Its really cringe worthy... Why use Constants.NONE when you can put "" just to avoid null exception working with Strings..4
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whelp. fuck you grub2
fuck you for presneting yourself as a problem to be solved all over again.
fuck you for the efi partition containing a search for the fucking boot/efi partition by uuid
fuck my host system for taking a cloned drive and fucking around because it couldn't tell which drive the uuid was emanating from
fuck them using entries files with linux options specifying the uuid of the root partition which ALSO now must have a subvol parameter supplied to a rootoptions parameter to find the fucking root drive
fuck them for making it look like the fucking software is smarter than it seems.
and fuck them for not creating some kind of autoprobe fucking utility added to teh initial boot drive which is smart enough to load a stub of grub2 and then pull in teh rest of the slice partitions it shouldn't be using in the first place
and fuck you fedora for using btrfs in the first place and mounting a different partition for linux images and yet another under /boot/efi
and fuck you virtualbox for not producing teh shit the kernel finds IMMEDIATELY once in rescue mode !!!7 -
When I found out that the app I have developed basically in my free time to automate most of the monotone tasks that were needed at my first job, was being sold to customers as utility tool for our devices without me getting even a penny extra!2
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Needed a flash drive, went to the store and got a SanDisk cruzer blade and figured 16gb for a mix of personal files and the eventual installation of a different distro would be enough.
Got home and went to give some work to my new red friend, my laptop was running lubuntu, used it for like 2 weeks, didn't like it that much, figured I could experiment with mint, downloaded the iso, ran unetbootin and voilá, got a bootable usb drive.
Only that no. I didn't. Tinkered with it the entire fucking day and I couldn't make my laptop's bios recognize it, tried with every possible format that disk utility could format into, tried with 3 different distros and nothing.
Feeling determined to thrash out my current system, I went on a scavenge hunt, trying to find a flash drive anywhere in the house, after a couple hours tossing papers and a number of different things aside, I finally found a 10 years old Verbatim, loaded mint in unetbootin and finally, a bootable usb drive. So thanks Linux god!
By the way, I'm installing xfce mint, anyone have some tips on customizing it?4 -
So I'm learning docker. As I see it, I can make an image that runs code in any number of languages then I can package it into a .deb file that people on a few Linux distros can just install and run. https://blog.codeship.com/using-doc...
If I'm making a non-Gui command line utility, can I not also just pop the image into a .pkg, an .rpm, or an msi? Then my super crazy docker build can run natively in a shell on any machine that supports one of the packages I create? Or am I missing something?1 -
So I'm getting brought into a team for our backend services of our administration application, and they're explicitly using Flask (Python library) for their exposed API in their application and data tiers.
As I'm familiarizing myself with their code, utilities, and dependencies, I notice they're stacking 7-8 decorators on their routes from their in-house utility module.. After further investigation, I realized half of them were entirely unnecessary, and they were proofing payload responses three times for the same JSON format.
The fact that we're using Python instead of Node or GoLang for our REST services is pain enough, but these god damn in house utilities are killing me.1 -
Hi everybody!
I made a lighter alternative (307bytes) to lodash.get and Ramda.path, any comment would be really appreciated!
https://github.com/micheleriva/mjn2 -
My goal for 2020: actually finish a personal project.
Last year, I built 25% of a website, 10% of a companion app for a video game, and half of a command-line utility. I would really like to finish an entire project this year, but considering that I just started a new project that promises to be huge and unwieldy, that will probably have to wait for whatever project I try next after burning out on this one.1 -
supposing the complex plane were projected onto the surface of a sphere? besides measuring angles between points, would there be any utility in measuring the length of a curve between two points?
is this just the same as operating on complex numbers in polar coordinates?
I don't know enough to know what I don't know, thats why im asking.4 -
! wk95
My project back in university, where I used bash and NLP and Python to create a utility thay would execute sentences written in English. Much like typing "change my wallpaper to abc.jpg"
Even though the tokenizer took almost five minutes to tokenize a sentence ( longer than five words ), and the parser took even longer, I still love it, for it was my first dive into ML ! -
Cybersecurity firm Sophos announced that it has open-sourced the Sandboxie Windows sandbox-based isolation utility. According to the reports of Bleeping Computer: Sandboxie was developed by Ronen Tzur and released on June 26, 2004, as a simple utility to help run Internet Explorer within a secure and isolated sandbox environment. Later, Tzur upgraded Sandboxie to also support sandboxing any other Windows applications that required a secure virtual sandbox.
Sophos Director of Product Marketing Seth Geftic said "We are thrilled to give the code to the community. The Sandboxie tool has been built on many years highly-skilled developer work and is an example of how to integrate with Windows at a very low level. The Sandboxie user base represents some of the most passionate, forward-thinking, and knowledgeable members of the security community, and we hope this announcement will spawn a fresh wave of ideas and use cases."
You can download Sandboxie and its source code here.
https://www.sandboxie.com/1 -
I think they should update receipts with a barcode or numeric code that allows you to import item lists or at least budgetary categories into a desktop app or larger software system or utility so you can track where you money is going better
They put alot of things in bucket categories
Like somehow if I buy something at a gas station it goes into gas and transportation because that's what the company does...
Kind of dumb3 -
Do a simple fucking thing ... Hoo no that cross origin shit protection XD i know the utility of this protection but in dev damm just shut the fuck up and work
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Just finished the prototype of my HTML5/Canvas implementation of a visual novel engine. The actual script exists behind the scenes on a REST like web service (to act as a sort of drm). The assets for the game and UI layouts are stored in what I call a shit file. Their is s a utility called the shitpacker that creates a shit file from a directory structure. The name of my engine is the Pyst engine. Pyst stands for Python Stub...as the game script is actually a subset of Python that I created. Eventually I will probably move Pyst to JS so I could hypothetically support offline games.
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Why the fuck is windows always a bitch when it comes to font rendering. I mean we are not in 1995 to see such shitty fonts. The fonts look like shit and the ClearType text utility does nothing.
I mean even Android does hell of a lot better than Windows. I am comparing these two because both have to deal with fairly large amount of different H/W configuration and support them.
I already use Ubuntu so please don't tell me use Linux.
Also tried using the MacType third party tool. It works but not as good.2 -
So I am considering side games to add my main games. Mini games I guess they are called. I thought it might be fun to have random chessboards in game you can actually play. I wanted to actually have a decent chess engine behind the game. Off the bat I found a GPL one. I think it is designed to be communicated externally. So what does that mean for using it in my game? If I communicate to an external process is this violating GPL? I have no intention of making my game open source. Well it seems this use case is very nuanced:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/...
The consensus on a lot of these discussions is the scope of the use of the program. Are you bundling for convenience or bundling for intrinsic utility? This is fascinating because using a compiler on a Windows platform could be a possibly violation. That is a proprietary program calling a GPL one. This is actually handled in the GPL as far as I know. So, if I use a GPL engine as a mini game is that the same as a full blown chess game? What if I support 10 different engines in a full blown chess game?
Now to play devil's advocate even further. Are proprietary phone apps that communicate to GPL software that serve data intrinsically linked? The app will not function without the server or computer os the server runs on. A lot of the web tech is largely GPL or has large amount of GPL programs. Should the web code be under GPL? Should the phone app be under GPL? This sounds ridiculous to some degree. But is that the same as bundling a GPL app and communicating to it from the program via network or command line? The phone app depends upon this software.
Now to protect myself I will find a decent chess engine that is either LGPL or something more permissive. I just don't want the hassle. I might make the chess engine use a parameter in case someone else might want a better engine they want to add though. At that point it is the user adding it. Maybe the fact that it would not be the only game in town is a factor as well.
I am also considering bundling python as a whole to get access to better AI tools (python is pretty small compared to game assets). It seems everything is python when it comes to AI. The licensing there is much better though. I would love to play with NLP for commanding npcs.
I am not discussing linking at all, btw.3 -
I consider myself not all knowing, but even I understand that if there is a base-class, which requires its derived classes to implement a method to return, for instance, the EndOfLive date for the instance of that class and one chooses to implement that method to calculate and return a date, which isn’t always the right date, and then assume that who-ever calls that method magically knows that the result should be re-calculated and converted using an obscure, undocumented correction-method, located somewhere in a undisclosed utility, outside of that class which the person created not to long ago, that there is something structurally wrong with that implementation of said method and something structurally wrong with that person in general.
If a method should return X, then don’t return Y and expect that everybody magically knows that the result needs to be converted to create X. But, FFS, return X! -
so i need a utility written in C because MS-DOS but i can't figure out how MS-DOS APIs work and there's no docs available so if anyone has used Borland C i'd be grateful if you could help me out on how the hell anything works7
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Checkout **xtrv** a file archive utility I created while learning C.
URL: https://github.com/ttshivhula/xtrv
If you like it you can give it a star. contributions are welcomed!4 -
I really don't like this trend of building command line applications for controlling some <buzzword> cloud app or <buzzword> framework.
Why should I need or want to learn the exact wording of your gcloud command, or the path to your Ng cli, or some ass-backwards AWS search syntax when I can get the same functionality from your web app, where I can use my FUCKING EYES to work out where the "Create Instance" button is and how to click it!!!??
Stop pushing your shitty python monolith of a client where possibilities for the above task range from:
- google-cloud instances --add "subfjfechye thiq"
To
- gcloud /create /type=INSTANCE "rogdhyuffhue"
"BuT iT mAkEs iT MoRe aUtomaTaBLe"
I DON'T CARE. What is the point when I can use a proper programming language instead of bash, with actual code-completion and syntax rather than the horrendous excuse for a suggestion system that is the Tab key where it probably doesn't even work in the first place and I have to copy and paste some mysterious dbus command buried in an old documentation page on the Wayback Machine using a utility I don't have installed and a broken URL?
Go away.8 -
I've been working with Node and Typescript for a while now, and I wrote a wide array of very general utility functions. Examples include:
- Array.filter but you also get the residue array, it can also leave holes in both arrays if you want to join them later
- Array zipping and unzipping to and from tuples (especially valuable when you're manipulating the prop set with Object.entries() in a HOC
- Array maximum selection, with an optional mapper
- Cancelable promises, lazy promises, a promise that resolves when a given function on an object is called (excellent for DOM events), a timeout promise.
- A typed event with both immediate and microtask listeners depending on whether you need state guarantees (this idea I took from a Github gist and upgraded it)
I want to put them on NPM so I don't have to write them and their tests again, and so that if I ever think of an improvement it's easier to propagate it. Do you think I should release them as tiny individual packages which would be nice from a versioning standpoint, or should I make them into a compilation which would be a lot less work for me (and therefore would probably result in better documentation and more tests)?4 -
Windows => MacOS
Edge => Safari
taskbar => dock
File Explorer => Finder
Cortana => Siri
start menu => launcher
Control panel => system preferences
Notepad => Text Edit
Task manager => Activity monitor
Visual Studio => Xcode
command prompt => terminal
paint => preview
Disk Management => Disk Utility
Action center => Notification Center
everything is one app. just the name is the difference14 -
The evolution of code, in Python:
-Many scripts
-Refactor common functions into a Utility class
-Make the scripts into classes/methods with a "static main"
-Create a super script to run them all
I'd provide a screen shot of the last but to much propriety info... But yes it looks short and simple 😄😊 -
Motivation ? How about the utility bill & the rent ? Food occasionally , coffee definitely . No motivation , no pay . No pay , no coffee . A slope that the snowball continues down , motivated by gravity .
Does not end well .1 -
Found a bug today that made me groan in frustration.
It appears that the official elasticsearch debian package checks if the system's init daemon is systemd by... Checking if systemctl binary is available.
Issue is... Systems might contain that binary while using a different init, as the binary is part of the "systemd" package.
To actually switch to systemd however, the package systemd-sysv has to be installed, which creates a link from /bin/init to systemd's main executable.
What happens when your system doesnt use systemd then? The postinstall/preremove scripts fail as systemctl fails to talk to the system bus, and thus, the installation is marked as failed!
Oversights like this are exactly the reason behind my systemd dislike. We never wanted the systemd package, but another key package suddenly added it as a dependency one day...
Now to see if this is reported as a bug already, and if not, to report it myself...
(also, who checks for init by looking for the init's management utility?! Its like I checked if sysvinit is installed by checking if update-rc.d is installed!
And not like figuring out the system's init daemon is hard anyway! Just check /bin/init, or, better yet, check for process with pid 0!)1 -
so some controversial opinions
Our company is moving most of our code style to snake_case, even the JavaScript. Here's our resoning:
Take the CustomerAccountMembership model. In our Python server, we would access it as obj.customer_account_membership, in JavaScript as obj.customerAccountMembership and our API endpoint as api/path/customer-account-membership. Thus we had several String utility functions such as `camelize`, `kebabChop` (which is ironically camelCased) and `snakeify`, and we would use them in translating from URL path to JS to Python, which was troublesome.
Now HTTP allows _underscores_ unescaped and do not pose any significant meaning. JavaScript also accepts it as a valid character in variable names. On the other hand, HTTP is strictly lower-cased, and all computer languages use the -dash- to signify subtraction. Sooo the _underscore_ is the only style that is compliant everywhere.
Unless, of course, we go with customeraccountmembership, which I refuse to do.
I'm not that deep into code character rules.
Opinions?7 -
TailwindCSS, I don't get the hype around it. People say its awesome and it has changed its life. Wtf, it looks like a bunch of utility classes to end up writing inline styles.9
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when you give the lead to devs you'll often get all utility and no usability, but give it to non devs and you'll get neither3
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I’m paying for GitHub Copilot and it is serving me well in about 40% of the cases. It is nice to not have to type entire utility methods. Sometimes it also try-catches things that I wouldn’t generally do with a new library that I haven’t used before. Pretty cool.
I also used the Cursor IDE, that isn’t very useful in general cases, but helped me read and understand a horrible piece of 200 line-function with extremely cryptic variable names. Sadly, my free quota there ended.
I hope GitHub Copilot Chat is better at explaining things.3 -
First of all... What I really like is computing. Wearing a language T-shirt and defending a framework as a New World Order activist is not me. What matters is to make the computer perform the task that I programmed, in a way that it is easy to maintain and that it executes quickly. User needs to like and operate fast. And the computer should be respected and not make it work its ass off just because it needs to load my fancy libraries. Whether the task will be done in C, C++, Go, PHP, Java, Ruby, VB, or whatever the fuck it is doesn't matter.
Fed up with people shipping a simple 2kb utility with 2GB of runtime dependencies.
IT is the only profession that advocates branding and specializes in a single tool. I've never seen an electrician who only uses a single brand screwdriver.
Fuck you fan boys.1 -
I wrote a type checking utility that also considers all types (JS without TypeScript, so this meant arrays etc.). The desired type had to be declared in a config file and the data didn’t even come from the config.
What would I not do to prevent all possible attack vectors... -
I recently performed a huge refactoring effort on a Java project converting both the persistence and utility layers to Kotlin. Gotta say, I think I'm starting to fall in love with programming again!
Putting aside how pretty it is now, I've reduced those two layers by over 2400 lines of code -
Am I the only one that in order to keep C code clean has a horrible file with macros and util functions?4
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some reflections on "reports"...
Many of our customers are asking us to summarize the information in weekly or monthly reports, send them through email to the relevant members of the organization, and store them. Managers want to promote it as one of our most important featues and place many work hours into it. I get the utility of periodic reports in a pre-computer world... but we have the ability to show the whole history, and then seprate them into weekly or monthly averages. You can see the data in real time without having to wait until the next report. We could just give them a link and say "hey, if you ever want to see how your company is doing / history of your progress, here's the data." I feel like the only utility of reports is for people who don't have the initiative to look at the state of the company more than once a month (like investors)3 -
Friend: Bro copy the psd from my pendrive and make some edits save yours as v2
Me: Search for USB to USB C adapter....Disk doesn't mount...open disk utility and mount...try to make a duplicate file....This operation not Permitted
NTFS and Mac Story
What say should i hide apple logo with devrant #Stickers?9 -
!Rant
TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.
MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....
A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);
Dear Systems Analyst,
I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.
In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.
Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.
Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.
I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?
.... The Systems Analyst replied:
Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.
Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.
Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.
Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).
Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.
When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.
It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.
Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.
To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).
DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.
BEST WISHES!
Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.1 -
Was tasked to write a utility library for work that automates and streamlines a lot of the API related bullshit we use. But it's grown so big that I now need to read my own source files to figure out what the hell it does when I actually need to use it... 🙃1
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Not writing enough utility programs for those occasions where you have no option but directly modify database tables in production.
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nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.
stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...
enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻1 -
[please read my rant, i want attention lol, i am pretty sure you know me ^v^]
My devRant visits have decreased tremendously due to high amounts of school work, but finally I am doing something productive developer stuff!
There is this app that allows you to watch educational videos offline, but that only works in android, but I don't have an android tablet, and I don't want to watch videos in my S8, so I am trying to boot android from usb, stick in my surface pro 6 which i am gonna order soon, download the app there, and watch videos!
I knew OS stuff was complicated but it is way more..... Yeah, complicated than i thought. All those fuzzy words, grub, partition, format, sectors, qemu, etc...
Uhhh
And I have only windows, which is a plus since i can use easy2boot, a godsend utility to make bootable usb with any iso easily (not an ad) , but the minus is that i have limited testing capabilities, forcing me to install virtualbox eith vmeu or whatever that thing is called...
But what I really want to say in this rant which is completely out of control, I'd like to thank the easy2boot support team who was very helpful for me to understand their utility, and a random guy in phoenix os subreddit who told me where to start.
If you read until here thanks! If you have experience booting from usb wih surface, or any windows machine let me know your experience since i want to know more about it, and if i encounter problems, i can look at your comments, thanks!7 -
I am looking to create a cool little 2D platformer for Android. The thing is I've mostly only worked on utility applications and haven't had to deal much with animations and physics etc. I feel like unity is over the top but I don't really know of any proper alternative. Any fellow Android devs out there who could recommend a library or framework to use that is relatively light weight?5
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Tonight I learned that none of our automatically installed systemd-based servers had the /etc/machine-id created, and that that file used to be pretty central in the systemd world.
So that was the warning at the beginning of the boot log about a missing /etc/machine-id! Though until today, everything still worked fine. Only today, the machinectl utility was unable to find the local machine with the machine id missing.
Oops? At least I'll have stuff to fix tomorrow lol.6 -
Ok, we were troubleshooting a network connection problem. My boss told me: use fping, a small command line utility that gives you a timestamped ping. We can then check when did the connection go down. Ok. Since I've always advocated the importance of knowing advanced scripting tools, i tried to do it with powershell. I've been playing with Test-Connection for an hour to try to get not only the timestamp when the connection is ok, but the timestamp when the connection is down. Don't want to go into details. I've just a question. A solution that allows you to do such an easy task in say 20 lines of code is the proof that the system works or that it doesn't work? To make long story short, now i'm downloading fiping.6
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so here i am, recreating the same code.
i'm using an acceptable solution for running this on a linux system.
they updated it so blkid won't display information without root now, a dozen times. ok. fine. i get it blkid can also SET the id.
so.
lsblk -fJ
nice command, gets me the info I want.
implementing, recognizing the implementation.
good code.
why the fuck do I have to rewrite a relevant utility that bypasses google's shittiness ? why ? WHY ?2 -
WHAT. THE.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
1. watch video
2. comment your thoughts on it
3. read the following copypaste of my thoughts
4. comment your thoughts on whether I'm stupid or he's stupid
5. thanks
----
I am a programmer and I totally prefer windows.
1. I'm (besides other things) a game programmer, so I use the platform I develop for.
2. Linux is the best OS for developing... Linux. But I'm not developing linux. I want to use my OS and have it get in the way as little as possible, not test and debug and fix and develop the OS while i'm using it, while trying to do my actual work.
The less the OS gets in my way, the less stuff it requires me to do for any reason, the less manual management it needs me to do, the better.
OS is there to be a crossroads towards the actual utility. I want to not even notice having any OS at all. That would be the best OS, the one that I keep forgetting that I'm actually using. File access, run programs, ...DONE.
p.s.
if i can't trust you, a programmer, to be able to distinguish and click the correct, non-ad "download" button, or find a source that's not shady in this way, I don't want you to be my programmer. Everything you're expected to do is magnitude more complicated than finding a good site and/or finding the correct "Download" button and/or being able to verify that yes, what you downloaded is what you were after.
Sorry, but if "i can't find the right download button" is anywhere in your list of reasons why "linux is better", that's... Ridiculous.
6:15 "no rebooting" get outta here with this 2000 crap. because that's about the last year I actually had to reboot after installing for the thing to run.
Nowadays not even drivers. I'm watching a youtube video in 3d accelerated browser window while installing newest 3d drivers, I get a half-second flicker at the end and I'm done, no reboot.
the only thing I know still requires reboot within the last 15 years is Daemon Tools when you create a virtual drive, but that one still makes sense, since it's spiking the bios to think it has a hardware which is in fact just a software simulation....
10:00 "oops... something went wrong"
oh c'mon dude! you know that a) programs do their own error messages, don't put that on the OS
b) the "oops... something went wrong" when it's a system error, is just the message title, instead of "Error". there's always an "error id" or something which when you google it, you know precisely what is going on and you can easily find out how to fix it...18 -
What is the utility of using encapsulation when we can access public attributes. What is the reason behind defining private members?6
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God damn it, Gatling. Why didn't you put your fucking command line argument passing at the front of your docs instead of being buried under 'cookbook'? It's not a fucking recipe! it's core mother fucking functionality! "how do I run this command-line utility from the command-line by script?". "I don't know, maybe I should check the fucking cookbook since apparently it's not basic functionality that LITERALLY everyone using the fucking product will need!
So now I have to go back and parameterize one of the sims I've built AFTER I've mimicked our entire performance test matrix! FUCK! -
Do apps behave and perform differently on iOs?
Ofc they do from a code perspective, but I'm taking about outcomes and real-life utility.
For example, does a Uber driver get more rides with in iPhone?
Does an iPhone user get more matches on Tinder?
Cheers3 -
Utility libraries, because I actually get to see my life improve because I have them. Creating new projects becomes easier because I put parts I reuse somewhere else.
There was an old config file generator/manager I kept using for a while, some string conversion libraries between formats, some REST/WebRTC API wrappers, I have a web audio API I create tunes with in various projects. CI/CD scripts for laziness so I never have to know how to set anything up again. Lately the thing I'm most happy about is I turned some free text saving service into a makeshift database and it's been working well for about half a dozen projects now. Wouldn't handle large amount of users but can't beat free and easy.
I also find merit in prototypes/old projects, because I can reference random things I did in them in newer unrelated projects. Things too small to warrant their own utility library, argh! -
I was installing the .NET framework so I could run DSIII, but after installing it, it would still complain and not run. So I got a different version and... still nothing. Then I tried to fucking uninstall it, but it wasn't it the installed programs, so I got an utility that was supposed to uninstall it, but then the installer said it was already installed. So I deleted to actual files manually and even then it wouldn't bloody reinstall. Except that programs that were working before, just stopped working.
At which point I just reinstalled fucking windows.3 -
I am doing a small application using C++ as a side project to learn C++ Developement. It would be better if i have a small UI . Will ncurses be okay ? Does it have any utility now ? Is there a better way ? Please keep in mind i am a beginner in terms of application developement..1
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Spent the entire weekend getting nothing done because my xorg won't work properly with my UK keyboard.
Turns out that the keymap was "gb" and not "uk", and because of the annoying utility used to set keymaps I didn't know...3 -
As V1.0 I found Allo quite fine. Google assistant is so cool answering a lot of questions that you would rather switch to chrome and browse Google search results etc.. About encryption issues, I'm not a CIA agent and I have no problem if they use my data to improve the app utility. That's what AI and machine learning are all about. And please, don't tell me that Facebook or other services don't store your conversations. What is missing is SMS/MMS support and a Desktop client, that's it.1
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is there a fucking utility that will flat out list all installed libraries on a linux system and if cmake and/or pkg-config can find them ???17
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Wanted to start a little project of writing a website from scratch with a given template. No framework, just a basic thing. Apparently I've already done some work, long ago. And of course, I don't understand several parts anymore that are written. All knowledge and context gone. fuck...
At least I've realized I went for BEM css, instead of my utility css approach nowadays. Now the css has become hard to change, without accidentally breaking things. Also no git, surely because it was "just a small thing". Almost about to delete and redo. Fuck fuck fuck!1 -
I'm a fucking student, so no I don't recieve copies of the utility bills to my bloody halls, nor do I get paper versions of my damn bank statements, since y'know, it's 2016.
It's a goddamn £250 invoice I can't get now, despite getting at least 10 other payments for the same amount previously.
Fuck you in your Royal arse, peopleperhour2 -
I've ran into some problems because I misunderstood iOS `Decodable` protocol. After a while I've compiled some utility classes to transform it into something more expected.
I've written a short post about it here and I don't have any place to share for feedback. So I thought I would post it here.
- - -
Thanks for reading. (I cannot post an URL yet... So I guess I can only attach a screenshot of the title...)
2 -
Okay, so, I have a functional snort agent instance, and it's spewing out alerts in it's "brilliant" unified2 log format.
I'm able to dump the log contents using the "u2spewfoo" utility (wtf even is that name lol... Unified2... something foo) but... It gives me... data. With no actual hint as to *what* rule made it log this. What is it that it found?
All I see are IDs and numbers and timings and stuff... How do I get this
(Event)
sensor id: 0 event id: 5540 event second: 1621329398 event microsecond: 388969
sig id: 366 gen id: 1 revision: 7 classification: 29
priority: 3 ip source: *src-ip* ip destination: *my-ip*
src port: 8 dest port: 0 protocol: 1 impact_flag: 0 blocked: 0
mpls label: 0 vland id: 0 policy id: 0
into information like "SYN flood from src-ip to destination-ip" -
Depends on who you ask.
Facebook apparently thinks an utility for mass unfollowing is bad.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/...
I had the same problem years ago... And well just deleted my old Facebook account instead.
Created a new one just to join some groups so my new feed is pretty quiet of promoted content.2 -
...of course after carefully perusing the doco and ensuring the parameters are right the supplied conversion utility crashes with no error message .... of course it does
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Please slap me in the face... A week ago I remove my Linux partition on my main rig because I don't have a use for Linux on that system. But I forgot to deal with the bootloader.... Then a week after when I rebooted for whatever reason, I got a grub rescue (obviously). And I realized I had no hard drive with a rescue tool to boot on (I don't use optic drives). Took me 2 hours to find my sata2usb cable to recover an iso and put it on my utility hard drive... Then, when trying to set a proper bootloader, it listed all my disks, except the main SSD I wanted. Turns out, another hour later, I found that the power supply for that drive was a bit unplugged because I had to remove one of the drive to access it. All is running well now, but I wasted way too much time on that 😤
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Has anyone here used pm2 module of nodejs? For what purpose did you use it? like I wanted to know it's utility2
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a full stack JS application that estimated cost savings and environmental impact of 'going solar'. based on the users zip code and average utility bill per month, it would recommend system size, cost and financing.
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Is there money to be made in android app development via ad revenue? I'm learning more Java for a different purpose related to a job and think it'd be a fun side project. Maybe utility apps, but probably games.9
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How do you guys deal with spacing in react? I already tried: putting it in components' styles directly, creating a component for whitespace and making utility css classes. Still I always end up finding a situation where it becomes harder and/or requires a workaround.
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You know your cmdline utility sucks when you have to publish a cheat sheet yourself, too, along the manual.
I'm looking at you, Broadcom, and that horrible MegaCLI raid management utility. Storcli is superior.
https://broadcom.com/support/...
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