Okay, I have to ask you guys this question, given that most ranters here are experienced devs.

I keep hearing this sentiment that "Oh, back in the day it was super easy to land a job. You just show up to an interview, and you have a pulse, and you were hired".

I call bullshit on this sentiment. It's not like people weren't facing rejections back in the day.

What's your take on this sentiment?

Fuck golang, apparently enums are too complicated for the human mind. Someone looked at C and decided to make it shittier, like now I have to deal with C shit, and use a garbage collector on top of it or use fucking C++

Remember my LLM post about 'ephemeral' tokens that aren't visible but change how tokens are generated?

Now GPT has them in the form of 'hidden reasoning' tokens:
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/...

Something I came up with a year prior and put in my new black book, and they just got to the idea a week after I posted it publicly.

Just wanted to brag a bit. Someone at OpenAI has the same general vision I do.

So now I have to pay taxes because I'm employed. Fair enough, sounds reasonable.

Go to the government's diseased scrotum of a webapp to tramit some ID stuff and shit. All good. Then I go to the bank, so I can open an account, so that I can receive the money, so that I can pay the government.

What happens? The guy at the bank tells me he can't access my ID, so he can't open my account. Understandable. I go once again to the gonorrhea infected maggotsoup that is the government's mother fucking webapp. THEY BLOCKED MY ID.

Problem? I had to attach images of some documentation, they say the images are illegible. I try again with a clearer image, ten fucking times the resoulution.

Is that good enough? NOOOOOOOOOO0=00=======0===000 oo O O OO O O, I am the government, my sole purpose in life is to be a dick in your asshole.

So what do I do? I, calmly, grab the documentation, go to the nearest office, and politely explain the situation to the dude behind the counter. Surely, he can verify himself that my papers are in order, no?

NO. HE CANNOT.
IT CAN ONLY BE DONE THROUGH THE APP.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
WE ARE DOOMED AS A SPECIES.

LISTEN TO ME, DEAR GOVERNMENT.
AND DEAR TAXMEN.
AND ASSOCIATED BUREAUCRATS.
PLEASE HEAR ME OUT.

IF YOU DON'T UNBLOCK MY ID, I CANNOT OPEN A BANK ACCOUNT.
IF I DO NOT HAVE A BANK ACCOUNT, I CANNOT RECEIVE ANY MONEY.
IF I CANNOT RECEIVE ANY MONEY, THEN I CANNOT PAY **YOU**.
SEE HOW THAT WORKS?

ITS OK.
JUST SUSPEND THE PAYMENT I OWE.
YOU KNOW, THE ONE THAT'S DUE IN A FEW DAYS??

OH RIGHT!
YOU'RE STILL ASKING ME FOR THAT MONEY.
SILLY ME.
I THOUGHT I MAY BE EXEMPT.
SINCE YOU YOURSELF HAVE FORBIDDEN ME FROM PAYING.

ARRHGHHGGHGHGHGHGH!!!!!!!!
YOU IRREDEEMABLY STUPID FUCK.

If finally happened. My cats broke me down.

After years of spotty internet, in which I couldn't resolve websites, to which the solution always was to reach down and push the RJ45 jack with the broken off clip that connects my router to my pihole back in, because my cats pulled it out once again.

They made me do. They finally made me do it. After all those years. Today, my cat pulled it out like ten times in a row... So I finally did it. I walked over in the other room, grabbed a new cable and plugged that one it.

Try that again, cat. I dare you. Try it again!

Why do these article sites of news channels have a shitload of adds in it , so much that you can barely even see the article ... and even worse , some of them add random pop up modals in between of their article.
Like I am reading about salt or sugar which is better to add in curd and suddenly I see a f*cking deaf person trying on a hearing aid and smiling like some girl in sanitary pad advertisement after she aced in her exam because she used the extra wide pad.
And some of those website feel so delusionally confident about their articles that they decide to add a "Sign up to Read full article" thing in it ...
I was just trying to read "top 10 places to visit this monsoon in [city name]".

What I'm reading today:
Transformers with drop-out attention

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/...

Lately I've been noticing a lot more errors in spelling lately in articles. And I'm beginning to wonder if this is all being done on purpose, a small way to let people know that the article was not written by AI.

Windows 10 User here.
I am really going through my system settings quite often to find potential trojan horses, spyware and what-not that installed itself over time (most security threats come through windows updates IMO).

I was baffled to once again find a bunch of "auto-allowed"-settings that are a potential threat to the security of my system, accompanied by their mysterious services and processes that now appeared (dont know when exactly, but last time I looked, probs a month ago, they pretty surely didnt exist!)

Have a look for yourself.

I of course am in the middle of migrating to linux due to the increasing severity with which Microsoft threatens PC-Security (and mine along with it).

F*CK MICROSHIT!!! >:((

The fact that I can buy a game for $70 price tag today, and still run the risk of it getting taken away from me, by the company that built it, is why I'll always pirate games.

If buying is not owning, then pirating is not stealing.

As someone who works in AI and actually bothers with cognitive models, general intelligence, theory of mind and such shit, I find the current state of the field laughable. I don't get why people panic about AI. Like, yeah it's gonna take us a while to adopt and regulate, but... it's just not there, and nowhere even near there, yet.

... Unless we're comparing AI to moronic idiotic mofos such as my neighbors. But let's not do... that. 😒 Let's just not.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

Everything is an object, untill you tell this your girlfriend.

What I want to say when priviledged Europeans complain about inflation

https://youtu.be/sfBYJf6AoNc/...

The guy I work with was pissed because I asked him the status of his task during the daily meeting.
He doesn't want me to embarrass him because he hasn't finished this task. He said not to push him further as he will do it soon.

Dude, the point of having a daily meeting is to give updates of all pending tasks. it's been one week, you're procrastinating on this task is delaying the progress of my task.
Mind you, this guy has a PhD but he can't even understand a simple project management like this.

Hehehe this whole team is clown world 🤪🤡

Feel free to make fun of me on this one.

> be me.
> Write a function that calls a second function to get a returned value and continue work.
> That second function always returns null no matter what changes are made.
> Spend half hour scratching head.
> That second function has this written at the end

return null;
//return $returnVal;

> fml.

CEO of spotify saying that content creation costs are nearing 0.

Saying nothing about that content that costs 0 to create have also 0 value.

the internet was so good before corporate interests took everything over and made it garbage

before you found real people, instead of shills
real hobbies, instead of someone wanting to sell you knockoff shit by pretending to have information on your hobby
real information, instead of stupid politics which pretend information doesn't exist and keep changing Wikipedia pages or brigading forums with spam or reporting websites or servers as violating rules to remove innocent people and ruin their shit

before you could find tools and use them
and there were no ads
even when there were ads they were just banner ads where you got free iPods and maybe a virus
but they didn't subscribe you to their service monthly and then play psychological tricks on you so you couldn't cancel
even when the popups came we had popup blockers, and the web browsers were on our side and made the feature widespread and viewed the popups as malicious, and now the world's biggest ad company serves the most popular "open source" browser and is in a war against usability because they have to display their brain malware ads to you or else

and you'd get excited to get an email, instead of annoyed it's more fucking corporate spam you don't want from a random website that required you to give your email address so you could've bought a trinket for your friend Bob's birthday that one time and now their subscriber list keeps "forgetting" you unsubscribed

phones have a billion sensors but the app stores are so infested with bullshit none of it matters
it's all rot
everything is starving and making your life worse

we used to do so much with so little
and now we have so much and leave it all on the table to throw poop at each other

don't forget that brigade science tells you nostalgia is you remembering something to be better than it was. be gaslit. webpages disappear now, too. they get changed. archive.org has the records, and got DDoSed the other day. I knew this day would happen. everyone who lies would love for there to be no archives, no records. to burn the modern books

This guy told me that I was unprofessional because I called him reckless.
He thought that reckless is unprofessional word?!

Are you fucking kidding me?! 🤬

I was just pointing out his recklessness of wanting to delete files in our shared platform without permission from the owners.
These files may be important and he only gave us 1h to back it up. He's the one being unprofessional.🤪

Anyhow, this is not the first time I have had a fight with him, and certainly won't be the last.

What in shit world was that last paragraph:

its two years since ive told a story here but lets go.

we got a new client, who is revamping their infrastructure. i gave some tasks to 2 dev ops guys (i am not devops). they were primarily bash scripts that needed to be altered. (ofc i can write scripts it takes a moment, its their jd)

after a week of chasing them around, getting no result from them, i end up doing it myself because client needs it and the company needs this client. for one task, they told me it does not apply to the component we were working on. (it did, and i did it)

we have a meeting with higher management, they asked me how did i implement it, i show my entire working, my backtracing etc (everyone knows this is how you approach huge system, component focused strict deadline task). it was infuriating how they approached it by trying to understand complete system in one week. i asked them why they hadn't taken component specific approach. they said they tried but failed because..

[this because is the whole reason for the rant, because i believe this because should be a fire-able offense]

..because we were not using VS code to find things in files

HOW IS WHAT TEXT EDITOR YOU USE OR DON'T USE AN EXCUSE

ARE YOU GUYS GETTING THIS?

Math is hard….

I’m expanding my storage with 8x 20TB hard drives. With raid5 on it I would get approximately 126TB of storage space.

This would allow me to download full common crawl dataset and play with it locally.

I hope this is not illegal content, as I don't want to "Advertise" here but would like to share my first game on Steam with the community, as I am really proud of it.
There's a free playtest soon and dev opinions are much appreciated! Let me know guys what you think. https://store.steampowered.com/app/...

If you opt out all forms of media for a year then talk to a hardcore facebook user; The dichotomy is extreme.

fuck taxes, fuck you gov, you've done shit for me, actually, you're always assfucking me every fucking chance you get. So, yeah, I don't pay it in full, oh no, I put my shit where you can't find it, you fucking leech

you want my taxes, yeah? How bout you get off you fucking cockroach ass and gimme something I'd actually want. Legalize weed or abortion, you sick fuck. Reform the police, for fucksakes! Instead, you're always draggin it, pleasing then herd 🦬 well, then, keep taxing them cows and stay the fuck out of my wallet!

I applied for a position as an engineer for a nonprofit organization that helped kids across the country (and the world) and got the position. The people across the organization were wonderful and, without a doubt, mission driven to help kids and it felt good to do the work. The agile teams worked well together, every team had their roadmaps, and management always emphasized family first. The organization was making crazy money so we were given all the tools we needed to succeed.

Then, within a few months of my hiring, it was announced that the non-profit organization was being bought by a large, fairly well known for-profit company which had also been recently acquired by a venture capital firm.

The next thing we knew, everything changed all at once. We went from building applications for kids to helping this company either make money or build value for their owners. Honestly, I did not know what my day-to-day work was doing for this company. The executives would tell us repeatedly that we were expensive and not a good value compared to their other teams. It felt like we were only being kept until the systems were integrated and their had access to our decades of data.

You might think I'm being paranoid but a year after the acquisition, we still did not have any access to any of their systems. We operated on a separate source code solution and were not given access to theirs. When requests came from them that would facilitate them connecting applications to the data, it was to be considered highest priority.

The final straw for me was when I was told my compensation would be cut for the next year. We were strung along for the whole year leading up to it saying that the company was evaluating our salaries compared to others in the industry. Some of us figured that we would probably even go up knowing that we were underpaid for a for-profit tech company because we chose to work in a non-profit for a lower rate to be able to do worthwhile work. Nope! We were told that we were overpaid and they talked about how they had the data to prove it. One quick look at LinkedIn would tell you they must be smoking something that had gotten stale in a shoebox. Or they were lying.

So that was my rant. If you think you are protected from the craziness in tech right now just because you are writing code at a nonprofit, you might be wrong. Dishonest executives can exist anywhere.

My work lappy just now invoked an OOMKiller.

Mem[||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||56.7G/62.5G]

*sigh*
`swapon -a` it is then... :(

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

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

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

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

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.