Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"

Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)

In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic

Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them

In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure

Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?

Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...

Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea

Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'

I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:

Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine

Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know

And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews

"Sometimes you just gotta see your code from another angle"

!rant

1. Person who passionately disagrees with you ++'d your comment!

2. Person who gets a response with a counter argument says "I had not looked at it from that angle before" instead of "That's mainstream propaganda, I hope you die of cancer"

Just two reasons why this community is amazing.

You actively inspire me to be a bit more sweet than bitter on the internet.

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

A company just offered me 15,000 USD over what I asked for. I've been treated like poo so much at my current job my mind immediately went to "what's their angle... what trick are they playing on me".

The amount of torture I've been through is too much. I gonna tell everyone. My headphones only work at an angle.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

I am seriously getting pissed off at these so called web developers on Instagram... More often than not I stumble upon an image of vs code with some Lorem ipsum code on the screen.

Just now I saw a picture that drew my attention, so I clicked on to the profile and fuck me in the rectum from a 90 degree angle this is what I see. Visual communication does not FUCKING EQUAL WEB DEVELOPMENT.

DAMN IT, JUST FUCK OFF.

Password policy for a big water company site in Spain.

Translation: Between 6 and 10 characters (only letters and numbers, no spaces)

In guess they have a VARCHAR(10) password field in their db?!?

Yesterday I experienced a developer related situation in a completely different scenario. Let me explain:

A friend asked me if he can borrow my angle-grinder. As I was curious, I asked what he needs it for. As he is not that experienced in woodworking he wanted to cut small piece of wood with it. Of course I told him, that this tool is a complete overkill and recommend him to use a small saw.

Now what makes this programmingrelated:

I believe that often unexperienced programmers tend to use to heavy tools for small tasks. His lack of experience let him choose the most powerful tool, but made him blind for analysis of the actual problem.

Please help me to find it.🙏

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

Google

I used to be a fan, but recently they really stopped listening to users. No one asked for a wide angle selfie cam. If you give us that huge notch at least provide a FaceID equivalent or something that makes up for the notch.

Remove the headphone jack, cool. But then make the adapter and Bluetooth reliable. Even after a year the adapter isn’t working and the Bluetooth doesn’t connect on the first attempt. Never. The fix is constantly “coming”.

Google copies Apple without thinking. Apple gets away with shit because they provide something in return.

I was an Android user for almost 10 years, and I’ll say this: I bought the iPhone XS (I’m a purist, non-stock OS is a massive no-no) and it’s a much more usable device than the Pixels or other Android devices I used. It’s lacking in a lot of ways, but overall it’s a much better phone.

Google really needs to hire people who understand what people actually want. An amazing camera on its own isn’t enough these days.

"The password must have 7 or 8 characters (numbers and/or letters)”
says Movistar, the biggest ISP and telecom company in Spain ... I can't even.

A colleague and I were asked to build a website to show every product from a chain of hardware stores. Each product (1000+ products) needed a 3D model and we needed to recreate the model ourselves from stock photographs. The idea was the user could rotate a product and it from any angle. We also needed to write a description for each product without ever seeing any of them. There were only 2 of us, a 5 week deadline and it needed to be made in Silverlight. The whole thing lasted about 3 days before we convinced them it was impossible!

I decided to work with #atom lately, and I made a fresh install on a VM to test some packages outside my real dev machine.
Just occurred to me that "by #GitHub" now means by #microsoft... So MS now really controls the IDE market from any possible angle.

I've been thinking about how to answer this for a while, but I'll approach it from a different angle. The time I (nearly) lost faith in my dev future wasn't because of a technology, bad programming language or an external influence. It was *me*.

The first job I had after the PhD, I was (in the first couple of weeks) tasked with updating various packages on a live Redhat server. "No problem", I thought, "I've done this before many a time on Debian, easy as pie!"

Long story short, I ended up practically bricking the server because I mistyped and uninstalled something I shouldn't have, didn't understand a piece of configuration, then tried to bodge it back and cocked things up further. Couldn't even log in via SSH, the hosting company had to be called, a serial connection set up, etc.

To say I was mortified, embarrassed and had my pride dented would be a massive understatement. I seriously thought I'd get fired on the spot, and that I should perhaps change careers to something where I couldn't cock things up as much.

...but you can't think like that, otherwise the world leaves you behind. So I picked myself up, apologised profusely, took some relevant training, double checked everything I was doing on that server in future and got back to work. After a few months of "proving myself", it was then seen as nothing more than a rather amusing story, and I became a senior dev there a couple of years later.

So, learning Java at the moment.

Thoughts so far:

“This IDE is going to make me so lazy! It can write getters, setters, AND toString() for me?!”

“Oh my god, angle brackets. It’s like someone with a love of nesting was made fun of for wasting space and retaliated by crafting a language that inlined nesting data types.”

“Whoa, this would safeguard what kind of input went into the function SO MUCH.”

“DOES THIS MAKE IT EASIER TO WRITE UNIT TESTS?! *excited*

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

Dear providers of SDKs, when you claim to have a full documentation for your SDK, please at least provide the info about what unit (radians or degrees) the Angle properties are. Especially important when the iOS SDK is taking radians and the Android SDK is taking degrees, as I found out by experimenting. I don't even care so much about float on Android and double on iOS. Just make use of the fucking documentation and provide some actually useful info there. "Sets or gets the angle" is fucking NOT useful.

Took 5 weeks, but they finally made it to Spain. Thanks @dfox

Due to a very unfortunate rectangle packing solution, my bed is currently at a 30° angle to the grid of the room. It's unexpectedly hard to fall asleep when every object in my vision adheres to a single shared grid except for my bed.

Me and my friend > trying to attach a touchscreen display module to raspberry pi.
The module has two rows of female pins like
: : : : : : : :

The pi (model: zero w) has two rows of male pins soldered to it.
One row is fine but another row is @ 90° angle to first one.

** Who the hell bent these pins **
** A glimpse at jumper wires **

Ya let's do it,

After connection,

So many wires, totally messy & ugly

But alas it works

:)

Unreal Engine fun continues...
so I need to set limits to rotations within a skeletal mesh. So in other programms, like blender, you can specify a limit per axis, setting max and min angle. Makes sense, right?

Unreal Engine:
1. Let's call rotations sometimes xyz, sometimes roll pitch yaw, and sometimes swing1 swing2 and twist so that nobody knows what it is anymore.
2. IK node 1: limits? what are limits?
3. IK node 2: ok, you can set angular limits but they are all symmetrical to god knows what and to all axis apperently.
4. Physics: yeah you can define joint constraints but we give you only symmetrical constraints also
....
WHY. Were does this make any sense? One node is not like the other, and they talk rotations but use 100 different terms for them, since, hey, why the f not. And let's limit everything symmetricly so you can only set one value or have to fiddle with offsets to achive the range of movement you want.

I mean, one could just stick to xyz (or even roll/pitch/yaw, whatever) and min/max but hey, that's one extra field and then it would be easy to use. Who would want that? ....

The guy who leads the Objective Programming classes/labs told us that we have to make a game or an app to pass this semester.

I was so hyped, I've instantly started reading up on creating a 2D engine in C++ (which I don't like as much as C# but that was his conditions).

..as soon as I've created base for the engine, he said that the first version has to be console based.. so I'm like - okay, how do I show my 2D _graphical_ engine in a console?
So I came up with showing basic vector maths like movement towards a bearing angle and whatnot.

..now I've been pointed out that we are supposed to make a documentation, except it's supposed to contain info on ALL libraries and ALL classes our project will have.. which is insane, how can one predict what he'll need to accomplish the task? You can only know the half of the things you'll need, unless the project is way too simple.

I'm just plain annoyed, because this whole 'wow, I can showoff my mad skills' turned into 'wow, I have to do shit the tedious way and I'm already crying that I've picked a 2D engine and not a simpleton game like crosses and circles.

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Q: How do you stay warm in an empty room?\

A: Go stand in the corner—it’s always 90 degrees.

Yeah, handouts create lazy people I'm not impressed with
You want something in life, then why don't you go and get it?
Actions speak louder than words do, it's pretty quiet, isn't it?
Look at the world we live in, defined by comment sections
Surround yourself with people that challenge how you think
Not people that nod their head and act like they agree
Those people will cut you open just to watch you bleed
Always be yourself, not the person that you pretend to be, no!
These people gon' tell you that you will never make it
Then when you do, they gon' say they knew you were goin' places
That's just how it works, next thing you know you'll be overrated
Hearing people say they miss the "old you, " it's crazy, ain't it?
And perfect people don't exist, so don't pretend to be one
I don't need pats on the back from people for my achievements
When I die I wanna know that I lived for a reason
Anyone can take your life, but not what you believe in, no

Just remember this

Yeah, don't take opinions from people that won't listen to yours
If money's where you find happiness, you'll always be poor
If you don't like the job you have, then what do you do it for?
The cure to pain isn't something you buy at liquor stores, nah
The real you is not defined by the size of your office
The real you is who you are when ain't nobody watchin'
You spend your whole life worried about what's in your wallet
For what? That money won't show up in your coffin, woo!
Yeah, anger's a liar, he ain't got no respect
I fell in love with my pain and I slept with my regrets
Happiness saw it happen, maybe that's why she up and left
Joy called me a cheater, said she ain't coming back
I've always had a problem with relationships
But that's what happens when you see the world through a broken lens
Mistakes can make you grow, that doesn't mean you're friends
Who you are is up to you, don't leave it up to them, no

Just remember this

Yeah, they say you got into music, you signed up to be hated
That's kinda weird cause I don't remember signing my name up
Coming from people that give advice but never take none
I like my privacy, but, lately, I feel it's invaded
I heard that life's too short, don't let it pass you by
We waste a lot of time crying over wasted time
It's not about what people think, it's how you feel inside
My biggest failures in life are knowing I never tried, woo!
I look at the world from a different angle
People change, even Satan used to be an angel
Think twice before you're bitin' on the hand that made you
Don't believe what you believe just 'cause that's how they raised you
Think your own thoughts, don't let them do it for you
Say you want a drink, don't wait for people to pour it on you
Cut out the liars, stay close to the people you know are loyal
Grab your own glass and fill it, don't let your fear destroy you, woo!

!rant
But still kindof a Rant...

I Just got my Oculus Rift (Summer Edition bundle)
And I was Soo happy to try the Oculus Touch Controllers!
Except, the Setup was pretty hard because I dont have so much room to move in and the Setup always said: GO FURTHER BACK!
Until I realized that it was because of the Sensors which I put in an Angle not 90°...
Oh hell I was trying for Like an hour until it worked.
But then the Experience was one which I NEVER had! (I Tried VR Rollercoasters, waterslides in VR, PSVR, The HTC Vive, and the gear VR, Oculus DK 1 and DK 2)
It got me a little dizzy after an hour and a half of smaching Robots into pieces...
But still really AMAZING!
So my advice, get it when its on Sale with the Oculus Touch or Just right away.
TL;DR
I bought the Rift and im really happy about it.

So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.

The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.

The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.

Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.

What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.

Unless of course either of them is < 1.

So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.

And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?

I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.

But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.

Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).

The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.

You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.

It turns out my intuition was correct.

Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.

I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:

if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1

This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.

And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.

So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.

Wanna get my geek on with the Perseids tonight, have a new wide angle lens to try out, and the bastard clouds are everywhere! 😭

40 minutes into trying to switch my Apple hbo account to my supposedly ‘free’ AT&T account... I hate Apple... fuck you... I hate ATT... I hate HBO... I don’t even really want to watch this stupid super hero movie... even if it might have an interesting political angle...

Oh. It worked. Never mind. Everything is fine. The dopamine covered up all of the anger and life can just keep on getting pushed a few inches a day until I slide off of the edge of the earth...

Recently .. (28. Jan) .. Bluetooth 5.1 spec was released containing among other things, the abillity to detect the angle of recieved or sent signal using phased array antenas. I am exited as ... as ... i dont know what but this is amazing for indoor location uses ... cant wait to get hands on dev kit.
Anybody else fidling with BL tech ?

Every time a rebase completes without conflicts an angle gets its wings.

Fuck amazon
Bought a 1080p portable monitor
They sent a 768p screen...
What even is that resolution

Just Wtf

And if you put it up on its side like advertised you can't see shit if if you look at an angle

Also the fucking cable doesn't fit right and disconnects if you blow at it

Piece of shit - last time I bought on Amazon

My reasoning is stupid, I just think it's cute in a pimp my ride kind of way. I heard you like getting colossally pounded in the fucking ass, so we put a virtual machine inside your compiler so you can use your binaries while you compile your binaries.

But there is a practical angle to it, too. It's state, structures and execution within the code itself -- that is, in a sense, generators "embedded" within the source, but without any kind of special syntax.

Rather, the code is all the same, and I'd have the option to make calls at compile time: the output of these calls could, in turn, be part of the resulting binary or processed by further calls.

It'd greenlight the wildest fuckery in the jungle, because *that* is the true and ultimate abstraction: programs that write other programs with minimal human intervention. But is my (still) theoretical, cheap ass two-dollar prototype approach held together with clown jizz and prayers better than the endless cumloads worth of corporate investment that's dumped and pumped into generative AI on a daily basis?

Well... **lights cigarette**
That's what we're about to find out, mother fuckers.

A telecom engineering friend of mine asked me if I wanted Backnowýk — a strange brew made of cherries and strawberries that, if you brew it just right, is both lemonade and yogurt, depending on how you hold a glass of it. Straight angle relative to the floor makes it yogurt, but change that angle, and it fades into being lemonade. But if you don't drink it fast enough, it turns into blood.

So, I drank it and gained an ability to slam dunk leather balls, and since then, for every football game I'm in (I don't know how to play soccer though), there is a basketball hoop just for me, and when I dunk, my team scores.

Went for a walk. Met the lead singer of Death Grips — MC Ride. He wrote me a gay ballad:
🎵 Please take me to recording studio Portland🎵
🎵 Please take me to the recording place digital🎵
🎵 Aniverse🎵
🎵 Aniverse🎵
🎵 [DREAM FRAGMENT LOST]-verse🎵

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

Take a hot shower, helps you relax and refocus as well as to see the problem from a different angle

!dev

so I got asked how much I wanted as my monthly salary for my first dev job and I said 300 USD, did I overshoot ? I haven't gotten a reply yet and I am worried I messed up

backstory, I had this online video interview but during that period i was working for my dad in a remote village, the background was terrible, I had to tilt my camera to an odd angle to make it less terrible, after all the usual talks on "our company company's vision and mission........ we are trying to create....... blag blah blah.......". he commented on my area and I said I was working odd jobs to keep up,

him: how much will be enough for you monthly ?

me: I just need enough to pay for internet and maybe a little left for other stuff (I was this desperate)

him; no we need you to face this job squarely without distractions, how much will be enough ? send your reply as message, yes, they reached out to me through email and whatsapp

me; 300 USD

I'm fucking worried I was over the bar.

See now why I understand that in essence given a vector (parameters), you modify weights and biases minimally and these get passed through a set of dropoff style layers like ReLU and that in the end each layer leading to an output will basically sum up to a value that goes through sigmoid and concurrently equals the value desired once trained..... i don't see how this could cover all bases when parts of the math used to calculate the output is trigonemetric and polynomial. I mean not complex math ! Real basic things in my case, but a polar from cartesian coordinate conversion, angle and leg size, etc all going into determining that a target equals a landing zone and if not how to move things to it.

Is there something I'm missing where you kind of model the math because at best sin and cos could be a power series.

Normal and daily task that an engineer approached in a totally different angle that even you didn't anticipate.

Not really a rant, but a question for all of you devs stuck in a really bad company. And I mean 'stuck', as in certain situations that don't allow you to switch jobs at the moment and you have to put up with your job.

What do you tell yourself everyday to go work on something even when your manager doesn't care, your project hits a dead end, the company that you work for is a shit show of a fucking circus, and your career seems bleak from every angle? Have you guys ever had an existential crisis as a dev?

so what is worse than monday morning?

It's finding the right angle for your macbook pro screen because the office changed the fucking lights and they reflect more than ever.

AND THEY ARE BRIGHT AS HELL. MY EYES BURN!

Geometry was the ancient world's AI/ML. "Have you tried using a right angle?"

Chinese remainder theorem

So the idea is that a partial or zero knowledge proof is used for not just encryption but also for a sort of distributed ledger or proof-of-membership, in addition to being used to add new members where additional layers of distributive proofs are at it, so that rollbacks can be performed on a network to remove members or revoke content.

Data is NOT automatically distributed throughout a network, rather sharing is the equivalent of replicating and syncing data to your instance.
Therefore if you don't like something on a network or think it's a liability (hate speech for the left, violent content for the right for example), the degree to which it is not shared is the degree to which it is censored.

By automatically not showing images posted by people you're subscribed to or following, infiltrators or state level actors who post things like calls to terrorism or csam to open platforms in order to justify shutting down platforms they don't control, are cut off at the knees. Their may also be a case for tools built on AI that automatically determine if something like a thumbnail should be censored or give the user an NSFW warning before clicking a link that may appear innocuous but is actually malicious.

Server nodes may be virtual in that they are merely a graph of people connected in a group by each person in the group having a piece of a shared key.
Because Chinese remainder theorem only requires a subset of all the info in the original key it also Acts as a voting mechanism to decide whether a piece of content is allowed to be synced to an entire group or remain permanently.

Data that hasn't been verified yet may go into a case for a given cluster of users who are mutually subscribed or following in a small world graph, but at the same time it doesn't get shared out of that subgraph in may expire if enough users don't hit a like button or a retain button or a share or "verify" button.

The algorithm here then is no algorithm at all but merely the natural association process between people and their likes and dislikes directly affecting the outcome of what they see via that process of association to begin with.

We can even go so far as to dog food content that's already been synced to a graph into evolutions of the existing key such that the retention of new generations of key, dependent on the previous key, also act as a store of the data that's been synced to the members of the node.

Therefore remember that continually post content that doesn't get verified slowly falls out of the node such that eventually their content becomes merely temporary in the cases or index of the node members, driving index and node subgraph membership in an organic and natural process based purely on affiliation and identification.

Here I've sort of butchered the idea of the Chinese remainder theorem in shoehorned it into the idea of zero knowledge proofs but you can see where I'm going with this if you squint at the idea mentally and look at it at just the right angle.

The big idea was to remove the influence of centralized algorithms to begin with, and implement mechanisms such that third-party organizations that exist to discredit or shut down small platforms are hindered by the design of the platform itself.

I think if you look over the ideas here you'll see that's what the general design thrust achieves or could achieve if implemented into a platform.

The addition of indexes in a node or "server" or "room" (being a set of users mutually subscribed to a particular tag or topic or each other), where the index is an index of text audio videos and other media including user posts that are available on the given node, in the index being titled but blind links (no pictures/media, or media verified as safe through an automatic tool) would also be useful.

Be me.
Writing a java class for uni work, that'll eventually run on android.
I get kicks from making functions work using as few steps as possible, using minimal code.
Explain to someone how I'm doing it.
I learn that loops and the rest of it generate more code and take longer than unwrapping the loop and writing every case manually.
Shit ffs I spend hours making my code more concise :(
Then, I'm told the recursive method I'm using for checking for a win is too complicated, that I shouldn't start looking for a win from the last counter I placed, but should scan the WHOLE board for a win in every angle.
Eat my food, open my beer, pet my dog, trundle off back to work.

First thing you do on a brand new system: disable CapsLock.

I recently got into an argument with a random person on internet about the new Corsair XENEON FLEX OLED, the new fancy one that you can make curved or flat…
In my opinion it doesn't make any sense, curved is better, in particular with a 45" display, so it's a cool technology but useless in this case.

Apparently this guy thinks "for work is better flat, for gaming curved".
It made me thinking… really?
There is someone out there (and maybe here) that uses huge flat monitors or when have 2 puts them parallels to each other and not turned towards himself at an angle?

It seemed a random bullshit, but maybe I could find some valid arguments why "flat is better for work" or not. 🤔

Well to be honest with you concerning this coding practice. As a deliberated of obsession without coming from a divers angle of reasoning,by application of ardent and candid Wisdom,and more on a logical pattern of presentations,even in the absence of sentimental aggregations I will move with a conspicuous and convertible analysis,base on imperative understanding of this matter,having in mind not to be influenced by perceptional retroversion which can interfere with good judgmental alibis. Hmm therefore, I will advice or come to a conclusion that point going too deeper cause this is just untainted matters of circumvention and irrational amplitude.Do you comprehend or should I go deeper?

It's all about asking the right question...

Original question that has had me stuck for years: "How do you load landscape images as landscape and not portrait? (some sort of default, always loads it with the longer dimension vertically).

A new insight that I got today while using one of these apps: "How can I rotate an image after it's loaded?"

Very easy apparently...
As long as you keep track of the current angle, just reload and set a Rotation property to (current + 90) % 360...