Corporate Windows group police disables customer wallpaper. You get the gray corporate logo so you know you're in hell, and that's it.

But if you replace the corporate "TranscodedWallpaper" file in your profile and call `SystemParametersInfo()` it will update your wallpaper. I made a Powershell script to update my wallpaper.

It stopped working though. Add-Type which gave me access to the win32 function I needed in user32.dll now trigger a FalconSensor virus protection.

...and the wallpaper has been stuck on a photo of an ex-girlfriend who I loathe that I took years ago in Croatia. Why did I even keep this in my wallpaper rotation folder?! Oh god ... I'm in fucking hell.

Last week a friend of mine asked if I was alright; learning there was a layoff at my company. There was a layoff at my company? I had to look it up and, sure enough, there were layoffs.

I thought maybe it was just drivers. Still, no official announcement, nothing in team meetings and I went back and saw nothing in my e-mails.

I grabbed a drink after work with one of my co-workers. He said, yes they were layoffs. They axed W--, one of our devs.

I had only worked with W-- a little, but she knew what she was doing and had been there a long time. She wasn't on our team though, and our team just hired two people in December!

What the hell? We're laying off while we're hiring developers? There's no public announcement so I had to find out from someone who doesn't even work here? What the hell?

Manager invites us to a 9am meeting at 8:44am. Struggled getting up this morning and was 15 minutes late. No big deal since he missed out 1-on-1 yesterday, except we haven't had a 1-on-1 in over a month an a half.

He hasn't even watched either of the short (6min, and 8min) videos I put together on simplifying the entire architecture of this massive project, and keeps editing the core models I've already migrated to another project.

My manager uses Claude chatbot for writing all our user stories while we're on the call with him. It spits out so much shit! He'll say, "let's make sure it hasn't hallucinated anything .. nope"

There's no way he can be reading all that. I'll call out stuff early on, and he'll say "that's wrong, it hallucinated," and fix stuff and remove half of it, but 45 minutes into the story session, I think everyone tunes out.

Implementing this is going to be fucking hell.

I'm so over this new job. Things move so slowly, everything is broken down into waaaay too many micro-services. Managers have to micro-manage because there are no integration tests and there are always production problems.

My last place was so streamlined. When things got in, they were in. Continually testing/continual deployment. The thing was a massive beast and had problems, but I could run Linux and there was a real sense of everything moving.

There's only been one chat in the 9 months post layoff in our old TeamBlind room and things seem to be going alright. They're finally hiring mid-engineers to replace the layoffs/attrition. They finally dropped Kanbanize, a terrible project management tool, and went back to Linear.

I'd never work for them again, but the work did feel more meaningful and the engineers were a lot better. It was also $30k more per year.

Manager scheduled an 8:30am meeting .. then send us a message saying he was delayed dropping off his kids at school and would be 15 minutes, then showed up at 9am. 😡

I love this new era of AI generated cute horrors:

https://djsumdog.com/@FloatingGhost...

At the company town hall yesterday, one of the questions asked was about allowing more remote work. The c-suite leaderships mentioned how productivity went down in 2020 when many were working remotely. We're in logistics and that's a relationship business. It's important to have people at terminals talking to the truckers.

Most of the IT staff is fully remote, except for the managers. They're expected to be on-site (I think it's 2 days a week, maybe 3). I did go in yesterday and was reminded of how much I don't like being in the office. They don't even have full cubicals. They have the room for it, but it's all open-plan work spaces.

I was hired on as a senior, with questions on if I'd want to continue on into management. I do want to get out of the development role at some point, and tried to get into management positions at my two previous jobs. One place promoted the youngest junior dev over all of us to manager and brought in an external director. The other job laid me off after three years.

This current shop has a lot of badly engineered, way too small, micro-services. It's a maintenance nightmare and everything they plan just really makes the overall situation worse.

Do I stick it out in the hope of getting into a management position? I'd honestly come back to the office for a year, if that year added manager to my resume. I'm going to stay for at least a year, but do I want to start looking for new work again after that?

Everyone knows nVidia is a bubble. Even fucking Bloomberg is reporting on the circular flow of money between nVidia/OpenAI/Intel/AMD/Anthropic/CoreWeave/Oracle (remember, Oracle's first customer for its first 3 years was the CIA).

Even the US Government has put money into this scam by propping up 10% of Intel for .. national security or something?

So everyone can see this bubble clearly. Can anything be done about it? How do you keep a bubble from destroying everything when it's in plain sight?

Whoever is able to hold their shorts for nVidia is going to make a shit-ton (*not financial advice)

I've been using name dot com for over a decade, but I'm sick of their increasing price hikes. I looked at Porkbun not too long ago, but don't like how their DNS services are run by Cloudflare (the shit company that has censored multiple websites, actionablely defaming them, over the past decade, while still allowing animal crushing sites to use their service).

But maybe I should just bite the bullet and switch over. It adds up to a considerable amount of money, even if I let some of my unused domains expire into the ether.

It will be the 2nd time in my life I've moved domain registrars.

My old company had a board on TeamBlind.com, but it was a startup and people rarely posted. There has been one post since the big layoffs and zero replies to it.

Meanwhile, my current company doesn't meet the minimum number of people to enable the private board (need 30 more) and it's been around for decades.

LLMs gave me shit for this problem. I found this 16 year old StackOverflow question asking the same thing:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/...

The bottom answer, written 4 years ago, is the correct one. Some of the functions were off, but I updated this 4 year old answer with the right syntax and gave it an upvote. Some lesser engineer would still just be prompting the Weighted Random Code Generator (AI) over and over, or just let it remain in a partially working slop state.

It's amazing just how bad Visual Studio/.NET is .. and the way this shop does stuff.

I was just copying existing projects and renaming/modifying everything for new tasks, but this time I tried to create a new project from scratch. No matter what I get:

Could not load type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RequiredMemberAttribute' from assembly 'NJsonSchema, Version=11.3.2.0, Culture=neutral

Everything has the right .NET framework. Dependencies look mostly identical to other projects. No one in the work chat has seen it before. I'm about to move this project to a tmp dir, copy and existing project, search and replace all the name, empty it out and copy my source into it. What you want to bet it will "just work."

I hate everything about Windows/.NET .. I'm glad I have a job again, but .NET is just so fucking painful. How has Visual Studio remained this bad for this many decades? I swear VS 2022 is just like VS6 with a fucking dark theme.

There's only so much Lo-Fi music one can take on a normal coding day.

It's weird being back in the .NET world after using Linux at work since 2012 (Scala, Python, Ruby, etc.) Visual Studio hasn't changed much in the past 20 years. It's still terrible, and Windows 11 has somehow gotten so much worse.

I guess I should be glad to have a job again after being fun-employed for six months, but the new place is already slow, backwards and has ancient processes. I'll try to introduce improvements when I can, but in a few months I might start looking for a shop where I can use Linux again.

DevRant seems terrible slow. Wonder if someone is crawling/data mining it.

I avoided blogging about /pol for most of the year, until summer hit. I'd rather be writing tech articles, but I'm glad I got this out this week:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/...

No matter where you are in the political spectrum, it will probably make you mad. 😇 But it will hopefully also make you think. 🤔

The most radical position in America today is the one that rejects both political parties.

Started a new job in logistics at the beginning of this month. I was laid off in March. New job is all in C#/.NET; the first time I've not used a Linux machine at work since 2012!

First time on Windows 11 too. It is really horrible. I've started using GlazeWM and it's okay. I plan on making a blog post about making Windows usable.

It's also the first company I've been at in a decade where they gave me a used laptop. Most shops order new ones for new devs. I'm not a snob and wouldn't have minded if they had cleaned it first. I had to wipe it down, get some stuff out from around the keys. Took all of 30 seconds to make it not disgusting.

All the other devs use the same laptops; old ass 11th Gen Intel Dells. Literally the worst generation of Intel chips next to the massive 13/14th failures (which didn't affect laptops). It's got CrowdStrike and it's so damn slow.

Also, Local Admin is limited to a week or two. You have to reapply via ticket just to get admin access and update your tools.

Judging by my coworkers, it does seem like expectations are low at least.

After over 20 years, I finally got around to beating Final Fantasy VIII

https://battlepenguin.com/gaming/...

I finally got a refund for my Purism Libre 5. It only took SIX FUCKING YEARS!

Fuck Purism. That company should die in a fire.

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

If anyone needs a casual game that's not long, and that you can play after you put the kids to bed, I recommend Neva. It's a fun, indie, left-to-right platformer.

My full review: https://battlepenguin.com/gaming/...

Stack Overflow has really gone to shit. I had a bad experience with a recent Qt6/Python question, or really two questions both of which were closed and deleted!

I was just going to ignore it, but some recent talk on the Fediverse made me write up a full post about it:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/...

I finished Hogwarts Legacy. This game had so much potential, but was an ultimate disappointment.

https://battlepenguin.com/gaming/...

I haven't been on in a while because I got laid off two weeks ago. I made it three years and survived two layoffs. I'm relieved honestly; got a decent severance package. Technically I got an extra week of "PTO" where I still had access to two Slack rooms if I wanted to say goodbye to people.

I've taken two weeks to unwind. Time to update my cover sheet and get back into the flow of contacting old buddies to see what work is available.

I've been at it for over 20 years at this point: Java, Scala, Python, Ruby and even a couple of years of devops/sys admin. Let's see how bad the remote and local job markets suck now.

I've been off caffeine for over two months*. I've also had a ton of 8am/9am meetings and they hurt so much. Last week I picked up a vape for the nicotine because I desperately need a stimulant for focus as I'm behind on tasks at work. I'm hoping I won't need another vape once this runs out.

Thankfully the US has the daylight savings switch next week, so my 8ams move to 9. It lasts for three weeks before they move back to 8 since they're scheduled by someone in the UK and their DST comes later.

I'm also going to talk to my manager about the 3x 8am meetings last week and how I'm not doing that again.

I hope I can get this PR done today.

* (with the exception of 1 Dr Pepper Blackberry Zero, and 1 Coke Orange Cream Zero because they're new and I wanted to try them)

Does anyone actually like Notion? My current job uses it for all our documentation and I hate it. The organization is a mess, the search isn't great, and the UI sucks.

It's like a massive step backwards from tools like Confluence. I've had to use it for over three years and I still hate it.

I woke up early for an 8am today that got moved to tomorrow because one frontend dev couldn't make it.

I was angry enough I responded, "Could you do this the night before in the future?" with 😴 😩 emoji.

I had an 8am Monday, 9am Tuesday, got up for an 8am that didn't happen today and now there's an 8am tomorrow.

One of the devs was let go after his probation period. Today was his last day. I didn't review a lot of his code, but it seemed to be fine. I'm not sure if his output was just slow.

Either he wasn't working out or the startup decided maybe they shouldn't have hired new people yet. There's been a freeze for a while and this guy started in October. The company's revenue targets keep slipping. Profitability was moved from 2026 to 2027.

We're on a slowly sinking ship.

Why does the girl in the Google Meet permission dialog have anal beads for hair?

I wonder if the devRant devs have ever considered implementing ActivityPub and opening this site up to the Fediverse, in the same way Minds (🧠) or Threads (🤢) did.

It would make this a less isolated corner of the Internet for sure.