A day in my life. This morning Dell was doing it's update on my laptop before I left for work, so later when I knew my wife was up I asked her via text to shut my laptop off.

W: "You left your laptop on this morning."
Me: "I know, it was still doing an update this morning. I sent you a text."
W: "Leaving your computer on all day is going to burn it up."
Me: "Its 8:30, been maybe a half hour isn't a day."
W: "Still wasting electricity. How do I turn this thing off?"
Me: "It's just like yours."
W: "No, your computer is way different than mine. Just tell me how to turn it off"
Me: "My computer is running Windows 11, yours is Windows 10, shutting down is exactly the same"
W: "I don't understand, yours looks completely different. Stop being an ass and just tell me"
Me: "Select Start, then shut down"
W: "Select what? There isn't anything that says Start"
Me: "Sorry, click the little icon in the bottom left. Looks like four little blue squares. That's the Windows Start menu button, just like yours."
W: "OK, now what?"
Me: "Shut down"
W: "Shut down what? I don't see anything"
Me: "The icon that looks like power button next to my name"
W: "There is nothing next to your name except your picture"
Me: "It'll be on the right hand side"
W: "Where the clock is?"
Me: "No, on the Start menu, where you see my picture, there should be a button to turn it off."
W: "No, it went away"
Me: "What do you mean went away?"
W: "All that disappeared when you told me to click over by the clock."
Me: "I didn't say to click on the clock, anyway, doesn't matter. Start over, select the icon in the bottom left"
W: "You're not listening. There is nothing there when I click that. You're such as ass. You cannot even tell me how to turn off this stupid computer. I'm busy, you can turn this thing off when you get home."
<a few minutes later I text my daughter>
Me: "Baby girl, can you turn off my computer?"
<10 seconds later>
H: "Done. Anything else?"
Me: "Nope. Thank you."

If ChatGPT calls my problem a "classic" or it's solution a "subtle quirk of <framework>" one more fuckin time I'm gonna be the first human to murder an AI

Finally got paid (apparently they sent my money to the wrong account lmao).

So I bought:

- A Guitar Rig Kontrol 3. It's an old hardware designed for some specific soft, but it contains a soundcard, 8 foot switches, one expression pedals (continuus), 2 other expression pedals input, 2 audio input, 2 audio output. So I'll be able to plug my guitar and control FX from there. All of this for 50 euros at the pawn shop

Being a programmer helped me tremendously for electronic music because I can write actual drivers for old hardware.

- I also found an old bike on the street. Brakes and transmission, seat and tyres are fucked, but the frame and wheels seems healthy enough. I can get a decent bike for the price of parts and labour.

Static Types work great with my wife !!!
I ask: "how much it costs?"
She sits down, and starts "well, it depends.."
me: "number"
she: 500.

Amazing! I'll try object/enum style next, see if she can answer 'return {cost: 500, cur: "GBP"}'.

Then I'll try Rust strings for shorter tales of her co-workers :)

> Ok, the client is performing this HTTP request, it's missing some parameters, let's fix it... inspector has this handy initiator tab, lemme just BY THE RINGS WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

I still refuse to believe anyone looked at this burning pile of shit you insist on calling a framework and was like "yeah this deserves to be released"

"We really struggle to find people with this skil set"

So you're going to hire me, pay well, and not be full of shit, right?

ever meet a person and he's very interesting but then his retarded girlfriend gets in the way

I hate

I'm not even interested in him this way. now their relationship broke up and he's disappeared and I'm so mad. I wanted to nerd out about occultism not get sucked into some fucking insecure kink whore's sexual drama oh my God. she made him feel bad and self destruct and I don't wanna date him so now I have to wait for him to get over it so I can talk to him and nerd out about shit again. I hate

Friday afternoon.
Boss: “Can we push this small fix before the weekend? It’s just a button color.”
Me: “Sure, what could possibly go wrong?”

Fast forward 20 minutes:

Whole CSS is missing
Login page is blank
Server panicked so hard it restarted itself
I’m now "that guy" who deploys on Friday

Moral of the story:
No fix is truly “small” on a Friday. :(

Still alive. Wrist’s been hurting lately so I’ve had to stop crocheting 😭

But I got into paint by numbers!

This is a truly WTF moment about messed up responses to X11 session removal in Gnome.

2 weeks ago I published a blogpost about the upcoming plans of GNOME 49 and the eventual removal of the X11 session. Since then, instead of looking at feedback, bugs and issues related to the topic, we all collectively had to deal with the following, and I am not exaggerating one bit:

Fascists and Nazis
Wild Conspiracy Theories that make Qanon jealous
“Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
A culture war where Wayland is Gay, and X11 is the glorious past they stole from you

In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on

I’ve typed a question into google and the AI generated response was directly contradicting every web search result on the first page.

So, you can’t even rely on it to pull out the correct info, on top of the fact that it might have hallucinated.

Completely useless and deceptive.

It’s depressing to think about how many people blindly rely on this crap not realizing how bad it is.

"Mercury poisoning is a type of metal poisoning due to exposure to mercury. Long-term complications may include kidney problems and decreased intelligence."

decreased intelligence, huh... so how many thermometers do I have to eat to become jestdotty?

Putting people on too many projects (6 projects) is bad because when it comes to reviewing your work (let's say 30 x 200 lines of code), they will spend 5 minutes on it, 10 tops, give a shitty, lazy review and then they get back to their projects.

This is just pure mismanagement. You're stressing your employees to get everything done, the 'quality' is then spread so thin everything turns to shit.

is it just me, or is reading LLM-generated text really annoying?

It feels like I'm reading the same thing over and over again, in different contexts about different things.

My wife went to do some work for a charity. They "got her the best computer available". It was a poor mangled MacBook whose better days were somewhere in the dawn of the last decade.
She tries to type anything... and only gibberish appears on screen.

She comes to me, absolutely me puzzled. I try to type anything... gibberish. I boot up in safe mode, everything is OK.

I look around for system configs... there is a custom keyboard mapping enabled by default.
We check the weird stains on the keyboard... they are regular and in all keys. Like if there used to be adhesive stickers on the keys, and those stickers were later removed.

I boot up again... and type "q". It becomes "a". I type "w". It becomes "b". I dread typing "e". Sure as bug, it becomes "c".
By the love of byte, someone asked for a custom keyboard layout... IN FUCKING ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

It was easy enough to change the layout after that, but the weirdness continues: my wife asked around, and apparently the laptop used to belong to some old dude... who was convinced there were characters missing from his keyboard. Apparently he could never find them in a regular QWERTY layout.

I wish I could give some encouraging words for the kid who came up with the solution. Working around technophobes is a drying art, that needs to be rewarded.

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/...

Everything development related I see recently are related to LLMs and I’m starting to get sick of it :(

In my company I now have 3 browsers.

Chrome for company stuff that only works in Chrome.

Safari for company stuff that only works in Edge or Safari.

And Firefox for actual work.

🤡

You know how LLMs always imitate expertise and understanding? That isn't specific to English, it happens in code as well. It's harder for them to get away with it because even the best guess isn't likely to be approximately correct, but they still try and it still sometimes works.

One of cucumber scenario tests now contains a deadlock somehow. We run them one at a time. I need some rakia.

We had a teambuilding last Friday. We went indoor karting and it was a lot of fun. My project manager does not have a driving license and it did show.

The karts have a boost button (electric karts) and my project manager used it before a turn and then slammed into wall. Now he got a few bruised ribs haha

Also, it's still funny to me that I was part of the teambuilding during my resignation but i'm not gonna complain about that. :D

There is nothing special about psychedelics, it’s just a drug that temporarily affects the brain which controls how we perceive the environment, there is no extra dimension, no spirits/beings, just a really hard drug. Take it from me, I had a really bad trip about a week ago.

For me, per day:
-> what the client pays/ what the gatekeeping consultancy sells me for: 1200 (profit +- 400/66%)
-> what the gatekeeping consultancy pays/ what my consultancy sells me for: 600 (profit +- 200/66% - extralegal advantages cost)
-> what my consultancy pays me gross: 300
-> what I get net after wage taxes: 150

The state takes +- 500 in wage & company tax in the whole process.
That´s why I give you my full 20%-capacity effort.

For fuck's sake, management is now asking us to provide data converted in % as to how genAI is actually making us more efficient as developers. How the fuck do you even measure that empirically?

It is already BS enough that they track how much we query these AI tools everyday in our development environments, but now they want genAI to produce most of the code templates in our SDK. It can barely produce a working regex or a working python script, let alone a small piece of code that won't stack overflow itself into oblivion. It sometimes takes more time to debug and refactor than to do it myself from scratch.

They ask for our professional opinion, we tell them, they don't give a fuck about it, proceed to think all is rainbows and unicorns, and still ask us the same moronic things as if they were the new messiah's on earth.

Don't get me wrong, genAI can be useful, but why the fuck does management think it will magically solve all our problems when they don't even understand how it works even on the surface.

The only thing that would make sense is a lot of them got money at stake in some AI investment sales pitch bullshit and they try to jam it up our collective throats because otherwise they will loose their investments like there is no tomorrow.

Fuck all of this, I just want to do engineering and build something useful to society. Is it too much to ask?

my scrum master keeps changing the format of retro and it works worse every time. We're at the 2.5 hour mark right now. It is aggressively hot and humid in the office. Everyone is asleep.

I don't think there's a way to explain to him that the purpose of a retro is not to magically fix things within the format but to financially commit to the preference for conversation, from which the hidden work of resolving conflicts can be billed.

Manager: Keep the debug logs
Me: I won't use them as I use the status report or run it manually to see the problem, but fine whatever.

1 week later

Manager: the debug logs are hard to read, the status report is hard to read too but it's a bit more concise
Me: Yes. The fuck you want me to do? I don't use logs and don't care. You can write code, make the logs more useful to you if you want to use them.

Once upon a time, there was a young, clean-shaven dev.
Soon in his career the smooth faced dev realized he had a knack for cloud setup. He understood permissions and network configurations, he could tell apart security groups from access groups, he could get all the information needed for an IPSec VPN in a single breath.
But if things got really tough, if the network layout was really messy, if the security settings too arcane, some older, bearded senior dev would come to solve everything.
Time passed, the junior dev got better at stuff, switched companies many times, solved a million problems, delivered countless projects, attended infinite meetings - twice - and, as often is the case, the senior devs, one by one, left the companies and run ever more scarce each day.

One day, a long, loooong time after his first meeting, the once young dev was solving network problems. Weird ones. Tough security requirements. Poorly documented cloud services. For hours, the dev and his colleagues toiled away, chipping at the problem without getting at its core.
The silence fell in the meeting. Everybody looking at each other, waiting for someone to say something.
Then they all looked at the dev, their eyes crying for help.
And the dev realized that he hadn't shaved in weeks.

-------‐‐-------------------------------
I've shaved since then.
And I did solve the problem. Took many more hours, though.

You know you’re in a good mood when every song that comes on sounds good

my plan for perfect state:
- powered by nuclear energy
- metric system, 24-hour clock
- state-owned and built midrisers for public housing with regulated prices, privately owned and built luxury housing
- free healthcare, free generic drugs, option to pay for name-brand drugs. option to choose the gender of your urologist/gynecologist
- free public education, free kindergartens
- free centralized heating, Russia-style
- same-sex marriages are legal. legal documents for polyamorous partners, though not the same one as what you get when you get married. they grant some rights and don't grant other rights
- gender-neutral bathrooms in all state-owned buildings. privately owned places have the choice to make non-gender-neutral, separate bathrooms. bathrooms for wheelchair users are mandatory
- weed is legal, psychedelics are legal. you can grow, but there are limits
- possessing any drug in small (relative to the drug) quantities is not a criminal offense
- free HRT & voice coaching for trans people. But puberty blockers are illegal. gender-affirming surgery for children is criminal offense. let kids wait till they're able to consent
- Swiss-style gun laws
- no official religion, but the capital city has state-owned churches of all major religions. religious leaders are elected
- pragmatism, statistics, no ideological & demagogic bullshit
- extensive tram, metro & rail network
- bike and pedestrian-first roads
- multiple "city centers", all walkable
- scientology and other cults are banned
- no free parking on publicly owned land, option to pay for a parking lot for your car. All paid lots are equipped with fast charging for EVs
- no petrol cars in cities. no car restrictions in the countryside
- Barcelona-style superblocks
- all office workers have the right to work remotely and visit offices only if they want to
- free abortions
- mandatory vaccines for children, free vaccines for everyone
- free, state-owned bike "rental" network
- airbnb and other short-term rentals can't occupy more than 10% of the city center, companies that own airbnb places can't be incorporated overseas, they should be present locally
- Japenese-style "obsessed with fairness"-style local elections
- free shelters for the homeless, dedicated shelter network for domestic violence survivors of all genders
- refined sugar content in all food products (except for 100% refined sugar) is regulated and limited
- all vegan food items that are designed to replace meat-based items can't cost more than their meat counterparts
- four day, six hours per day work week. for people working in shifts, eight hours per shift max (you'll need three shifts to fill 24 hours)
- mandatory vacations, paid for by the company
- six months worth of salary if you're laid off, two months worth of salary if you quit on your own with two weeks notice
- autobahns with no speed limit
- no noise after 21:00
- ban underground and overhead crossings. people shouldn't climb to just cross the road
- Swiss privacy laws
- well-funded, well-equipped police force. all bodycam footage is public. turning bodycam off is grounds for termination. small task-force within police to fight corruption
- every citizen gets a free domain name of their choosing
- bike theft = car theft
- graffiti is not a criminal offense, but city cleanliness laws are Singapore-style (though not as harsh)
- all phones have user-replaceable batteries
- PRISM-type shit is illegal. all electronic devices sold here should be stripped of backdoors & surveillance
- completely ban hostile architecture
- government secret service should exist, but the number of people there should be limited
- ban exotic pets
- real, long sentences for pedos (pedos in the us are basically free, they barely get any time)

overall, I think there should be more separation between city and countryside laws. no one needs a Ford F-150 in my imaginary city, but some farmers do need it in my countryside!

Tomorrow I'll get the contract for a new job \o/

Americans love to complain that schools don't teach students about taxes...
If American schools started teaching American youth about American taxes, how they work and where all this money is going, it will end in either First American Socialist Revolution or the Second American Civil War.