Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit

Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.

I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.

I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:

- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10

uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.

So here's where the story becomes a rant.

In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.

And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.

So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.

The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?

gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3

(:

Just set up my own IoT device for free thanks to the guys at Losant.

I met them at codestock a couple years ago. They were running a workshop with some Adafruit boards and at the time I had never seen anything like Arduinos before. I was fascinated. So I walked up and asked about it. They said they sold the chips just to demo their IoT stuff. I said I'd buy one. I then waited like 40 minutes for them to get their card reader working. They gave up and handed it to me, gratis. That started my dive into electronics from programming.

Few years later, I needed a remote temperature sensor to make sure a certain unattended appliance never got below freezing. I suddenly remembered that kit (now buried under my heaping stash of electronics), followed the tutorials, and had the exact thing I needed up and running in like a few hours, with all the bells and whistles I could want. And for free.

The icing on the cake here? I went on their website to look at a kit to replace it. I found one with even more goodies in it, and the entire kit cost less than the cost to go to adafruit and buy just the board alone.

Thanks Losant for being awesome. If you wanna do IoT anything, look em up.

I spent about an hour today working on getting an arduino board working before discovering that my IDE wasn't the latest version. In fact, it was outdated by several years.
Why are the apt caches so old? I keep my machine updated constantly but what's the point if it's locked at an old package forcing me to circumvent apt in the first place?

My grandma comes to me with all her computer problems, but this time she came to tell me a story instead.

She said she was about to call me for help, and then thought about what I would do. "Google it."
And guys, she did. She googled it. And she got an answer.

I taught her to fish, guys :) I did it.
One down, 6,999,999,998 to go...

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

I write a hello world and then start importing libs and packages on top. Then I adapt the hello world to test those libs and packages. The entire thing is one big sanity check. The logic is done in increments as well.
Is this bad?

Ever notice that both Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the OSI model for data transfer both have 7 layers?

I have a layer three problem :/

How do you use youtube in china? Asking for a muggle friend in a foreign exchange program. I sent a link to proxysite.com but the lack of response makes me wonder if that was a bad idea without further precaution. I've never configured a VPN before and Tor is a very bad idea here.

Guys look at how tiny it is

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

I hate society for multiple reasons.
Stay safe guys.
"And after the gunman was shot dead by police, they reportedly remarked on the nice top they were wearing."

About time! Barely had any real estate left! :) Took about a month and a half. Obligatory pic!
Btw (related), thanks everyone who helped me get Debian working on here. I love it.

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

I wish I could read my code on other people's screens. I wouldn't sound like such an idiot whenever I leave my desk. *sigh*

Stop phrasing everything as 'When this happens. The feels when that'. Just stop it. This isn't Tumblr and you can all form coherent and interesting sentences without resorting to this grievously overplayed and grammatically atrocious cry of "find me relatable!" You're better than this.

Uh....what?
What exactly are they implying here?

try philosophy()
catch markAsSpam()
Do you ever think of organizations as people? People personify Google and stuff all the time, but I mean something deeper.
When I look at devRant threads, I feel like we're all part of a collective consciousness, growing and thinking and making decisions. Society is a living thing of its own, in the same way that living cells unknowingly make up an individual body. When a question is asked from one node, another node answers, and the result is a repository of questions, answers, opinions, and jokes on an app that might appear as the scrolling thoughts of a singular mind rife with pure, aggressively structured information.

I put a lot of work into trying to explain to you muggles what I do all day in a way you can understand (it's hard, trust me) and you still reject it as boring nerd crap. I'm sick of it! What if you told me working at that restaurant is "putting water on plates, wiping it off, and putting meat and cheese between slices of bread" and I said "wtf is that, and who cares?" Wouldn't that hurt your feelings, that I didn't even attempt to make a connection with you, friend? That I didn't even attempt to step outside my experience to meet yours? Isn't it equally insulting how far you have to dumb it down, just for me to lose interest entirely? And yes, I know that's not your specific task. That only proves my point further.

And why, exactly? Conceptually, you handle pre-digested poop all day.
_I teach plastic to think._ Sometimes it even thinks better than you do.
How is my job less interesting?
And what's more, why does EVERYONE seem to think so?

How do you expect people like me to keep your iPhones, bank accounts, and self-driving cars working if you alienate us like an alternate species for building those things? I mean really. You people treat us with a disinterest harmonious with homophobia. "Don't ask, don't tell." Except you do ask. And then you condescend as if working with my brain makes me less worthy of your attention than your exciting minimum-wage restaurant job.

Have fun with that, by the way.

Oh, and you're welcome for <object I fixed that wasn't really broken>. Maybe next time, just google it.
I know you won't.

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

The way to avoid procrastination is to understand and use what your mind is trying to do - give itself instant gratification.

I use this method:
Step 1: Prepare your workspace in every way possible.
Step 2: Leave. Go do something fun for 20 minutes or so (yes, procrastinate on purpose). Get your mind calmed down and get rid of the anxieties about starting by just not starting.
Step 3: Sit down in your prepped environment, free of distractions and with a calmed mind, and pick a task to start hacking away at.

I'm slowly realizing how much goofy code I put in my branch and overlooked. This code review is going to be interesting...

Some examples:

import plots as lel
<h4 id="title">Crunchatize Me, Captain! </h4>
go.Scattergeo(name="cheese", ...)
webster = { ... }

The commit messages are even worse.

- 'horizontalize' link list
- very messily hack in <feature>
- partially refactor some of the awful code from previous
- Remove one annoying space
- make background color less annoying
- remove seemingly useless property
- minor fix
- Apparently it's possible to center a DIV. Who knew?
- Made some cool bar graphs
And then there's just a bunch of reverts.

So sick of this shit.
It should be illegal.
I just want to get my stickers and never check the mailbox again.

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
-Bjarne Stroustrup

If someone complains about a framework, or language, or OS, or device, it means it is at least worth using enough to discover its flaws.
In a world of imperfection and chaos, isn't that enough?

!rant is a logic operator, right? As in NOT rant. So why do I so often see them on actual rants?
And for that matter, who cares? If there's a [Read More] tag, you'll click if you want, regardless.
Why is this a thing?

More Zo shitposting

First encounters with Zo

Left this for my boss... he won't see it...

It's going to be a long day...

Please stop reposting. It's annoying.

That is all.

I need ideas.
What's the best use for several old, moderately crap laptops (<= 4GB RAM) I have lying around? I'm using one as a minecraft server because 3GB ram is enough and the Pi isn't, but past that, I'm pretty stuck. They all work, mostly, have CD drives and mostly free hard drives.