bgro

The true fault here is ambiguous naming conventions that become booby traps.

Should we be blaming people for trying to pull open a door that has a pull handle even though there's technically "push" writing on it? It's just so convenient, as the door maintainer, to have just one type of door, though. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong!

Aside from redesigning a lot of things like this that could've been implemented better, we need to do better to avoid ambiguous naming. We should adopt more verbose naming standards. In this case, we could get rid of literal "number" to replace with "number-incremental," "number-money," "number-scientific" etc.

If people try to use just "number" and see it doesn't work, they should be able to quickly find the correct thing without having to decipher a made up nonsense name like "lambda" or scrolling through an alphabetical list of input types and having to spot every possible number type, read its description, and then compare every result to determine the actual correct one.

Yeah, developers can learn with time and it's good to know all the different options... But why aren't we setting people up for success in the first place?

If there's a lazy security option that can be enabled, a lot of companies are just going to inappropriately turn it on because it doesn't bother them that your phone can't do anything fun. That doesn't cost them money. Even if you're a web designer for a small shoe store where obviously nuclear power plant level of security doesn't really make sense.

I remember android phones like 10 years ago or so had some corporate policy option so any time the screen is locked, you need to enter a 20 character password that has uppers, lowers, capitals, symbols, and numbers.

Any patterns / words it decided were too easy to guess were rejected for a password. This wasn't a "Lock after an hour of inactivity." It was "Lock immediately, and set screen timeout to 30 seconds."

We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.

Not that this was said in this particular case so directly. This is just a general thought.

How is funding so tight that cutting the 1% of money going to these people is going to make all the difference? It's not even a total 1% gain, there will be some lost productivity making it somewhat difficult to measure.

If you truly tried everything, couldn't the CEO or other executives take a tiny cut? Not that I expect them to, I'm just saying if they truly did everything within their power to prevent it, like is often said.

I mean, sometimes I give a significant amount of my salary, like 10% as donations / tips / handouts and expect nothing back. These aren't even people I did something bad to, like forgot to pick up when I said I would, or felt guilty for spilling food on their carpet.

Surely in situation where I messed up and caused a problem for someone, I would do whatever it takes to make it right. I wouldn't just say "Well, that's what you get in this system of inviting friends over. I'm not technically required to do anything. I guess there's nothing I can do (including picking up the mess I caused or paying to have it cleaned)"

I've seen similar large donations from people who truly struggle to pay for rent and food even be similarly generous. Sometimes people will live on limited food or delay getting an apartment if it means helping out an acquaintance.

If you make millions of dollars, you don't need to worry about these basics. You'd think it'd be easier to take a personal hit which probably will have actually 0 impact on your life (literally no change-- keep on golfing, vacations, etc), rather than supposedly living with the guilt, as is frequently said, of people struggling to survive because you wanted to save 1% of your company's money for a few months (before realizing you need to hire and retrain people from scratch.)

You'd think the vast amounts of scientific papers would be conclusive, but they're constantly contradicting each other or people uncover ulterior motives, like having shares in a questionable weight loss company.

In some of these cases, the source material uses inappropriate sample sizes or has other similar problems, or references other studies that had problems like this.

I bet if you type "X is the reason for obesity," you will find information for any noun.

Here's a partial list of topics off the top of my head from the best of my ability that I believe have been blasted as the definitive one-and-only "root cause" of obesity: [Sugar, Aspartame, Plastic, Butter, Margarine, Carbs, Milk, Bread, Fruit, Nuts, Phones, The Internet, TV, Video Games, Your job in general, Canned Products, Gluten, Pollution, Global Warming, Cars, Cheese, Alcohol, No Exercise, Cardio-only exercise, Blue Light (from electronics in general)]

Lately it's been just getting drowned out by people posting ridiculous AI art where they try to get absurd results. It was interesting and fun at first, but after seeing probably as low as 20 of these images I can tell they're all a similar sort of thing.

I feel bad for people posting their art getting drowned out by this, and these aren't even remotely art related groups.

"Red means positive, as in I'm positively sure you owe me a lot of money."

I eventually graduated and my second job was a Java SWE.

I realized it's not just you sitting in a void on a theoretical BS questions. You have a team to talk to and get help from. If you forget what a HashMap is called, you don't get stuck trying to declare a HashArray with an automatic fail grade on the same level as someone who did literally nothing and handed in literally nothing.

Then I got a few years experience as a SWE and I realized my original assumption WAS correct. You are stuck in a void answering BS leetcode questions, and you DO automatically fail if you get stuck declaring a HashArray with otherwise perfect logic.

Indeed, technical interviews are so fun. Especially the fully automated ones, but honestly even the ones with interactive humans they still can't comprehend how somebody could POSSIBLY mistake a HashMap as a HashArray unless you were literally fake trash.

They just prioritize that over any of the details or useful terminology to actually explain what they did or how this thing relates or builds off something that already exists.

Everyone's so worried about getting as many new tech keywords thrown out as they can in order to gatekeep others. Even when communicating to other devs-- I realize some of these sound like they're aimed at non-tech people. These are not out of place statements on Stack Overflow or in YouTube tutorials.

"The Cloud is a revolutionary technology that you be will literally unable to comprehend unless you have these 20 certificates like me." But then it can just be summarized as saving and accessing a file on someone else's computer.

"Typescript is a literally brand new technology built from scratch that you cannot begin to comprehend until you put 10k hours into it and become a master like me." But then it's just JavaScript with extra steps. Just like every other main front end language. They're all JavaScript plus X.

"I built my own computer and then operating system from scratch. Why don't you try the same before suggesting your ideas." Well, you ordered pre-assembled parts from a list somebody else wrote and then you plugged them in with less steps than a Lego kit. And your OS from scratch was just a GUI checkbox installer than you clicked through that now has a thousand driver errors you neglected to mention.

"I passed my FAANG leetcode interview because I'm a better programmer than you. If you can't pass a leetcode interview, are you even trying?" You passed your leetcode interview because you spent hundreds of hours memorizing every question and answer in order to recite it from memory under pressure. You also got lucky by getting a question you happened to memorize. Memorizing the answers before a test doesn't make you better at that subject.

etc.

I honestly can't find a way to explain this that's not negative. If someone can rephrase my points, I would be curious to hear a respectful counter argument.

I don't know why most programs have an in-program settings menu, an external settings.json or something similar, and then registry entries to configure similar things.

I don't know why Windows has almost 0 policing about programs editing the registry. If you uninstall a program, why is it so hard to remove all entries? Why do entries usually from deleted programs sometimes turn into random strings of characters?

The whole thing reminds me of developers installing to %APPDATA% without my agreement, because they want to circumvent getting admin permissions. That's the whole point of admin permissions. Also if I don't want everything installed on my C drive, because it's a smaller sized SSD, I'm just out of luck.

I think in the past few years they added some more credibly binding statements on their site about not removing or identifying user reviews. However, I don't know if this is actually the case or not.

There's also some sites that seem to actively make things worse on purpose or refuse to load even if they otherwise do work. I think YouTube was noted for doing this a few years ago.

In other areas, small company sites may claim Firefox just doesn't work on their site. Sometimes prompted because an ancient version once was broken and the browser entry list was never updated, or they simply forgot to account for it in the grouping of "Internet Explorer or Other." I see this more often than I would like.

I was just about to schedule my 1st-set whiteboard style interview with the recruiter, which always ends in a flaming disaster, but maybe I should consider their other routes.

I'm a full stack (backend main) software engineer but I'm usually exceptional at fixing server stuff and fully understanding logs to debug problems or find potential exploits through logs or when reading through code reviews. Everyone else I've ever worked with struggles at these things. I can just naturally comprehend other's code / architecture even across technologies.

If there's a career path I can show this in interviews instead of fumbling on even easy LeetCode problems or the other silly things I randomly get stuck on only in interviews, maybe I could actually shine for once.

A lot of random programs that seem to be needed for corporate work, like outlook and teams, I imagine don't work or are somehow even worse on linux. Or is that what people are referring to with the junk software?

Does the general dev stack really run significantly more performant on linux distros? Significant as in uses 50% of the resources, compared to a 5% performance increase.

Windows drivers are relatively so optimized, I've seen battery life double when switching from Ubuntu to Windows on laptops although I haven't tested it in a while. The constant random headaches with webcams / mics / mice not working as expected has basically been my deal breaker in the past. Mac has been a decent medium.

The consent is you’re given a random question and let’s see how you do under pressure to solve it. What creativity do you have? What can you remember? How do you interact with the interviewer?

Memorizing the question or the patterns commonly used and being able to regurgitate it out doesn’t make you good. You’re lying and breaking the agreed upon consent. You don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just regurgitating out a string answer instead of creating the object oriented program you lead them to believe you have. This puts real programmers who don’t have time to memorize trivial work at a disadvantage.

Programming interviews need to be based on real world situations. If that’s not possible, memorizing a bag of tricks that aren’t useful or practical in the real world is not an acceptable solution.

(How about you do a paired code review instead? You’d see real code, show team work skills, and demonstrate your knowledge by the questions you ask or bugs you flag as potential problems.)

You're not thinking through the problem like the interviewer implies and asked for. You're replaying inputs, like a bot programmed to beat a level in Mario.

If they're looking to hire a good Mario player, you're misrepresenting yourself with that technique. The pixel perfect glitch you nail on every screen has nothing to do with your actual ability when you get the role.

I could seemingly never explain the concept to other developers in a meaningful way or cared myself to code these out.

Anyway my quick summary in this is just think of a dialup modem. You connect to a phone line and you get like a 56k connection. That sucks today, sure, but actually it’s kind of mind blowing for how data transfer speeds worked at the time.

You know how else you can send data via a phone line without a modem? Just literally call someone and speak the data over the phone. You could even speak in binary or base64 to transfer data. It’s slow, but it still “works,” assuming the receiving party can accurately record the information and hear you.

That seems to be what this main topic is. Using a fast medium (video player) to slowly send data over the connection, like physically speaking the contents of other data. But there could be some problems with this approach.

Mainly, YouTube will always recompress your video. For this method, that means your colors or other literal video data could be off. This limits the range of values you can use in an already limited “speaking” medium.

if this wasn’t the case, we would like to use a modem connection. Just literally send the data and pretend it’s a video. However, where I left off on this idea, we appear to be hard blocked due to that YouTube compression.

We can write data to whatever we want and label it any other file type. (As a side note, Videos also are containers like zip that could be abused to just hold other files)

But YouTube is an unknown wildcard that changes our compression and thus our data which seems to invalidate all of this.

If we somehow convert an exe to an avi, The YouTube compression seems to just hard block this from working like we want. If we didn’t have that barrier, I think we could otherwise just use essentially corrupted videos to become other file types if we can download the raw file directly.

(steganography is a potential work around I haven’t explored yet)

Without these, we’re left to just speak the data over a phone which compresses our voice quality and in theory could make some sounds hard to tell apart. This leaves us in the battle of what language is best to speak to avoid compression limiting our communication. Is English best? Or is Japanese? What about German? Which language is least likely to cause confusion when speaking but also is fast and expressive?

This translates into what’s the best compression method for text or otherwise pixels in a video where data doesn’t get lost due to compression? Is literal English characters best? What about base64? Or binary? What if we zip it first and then base64? What if we convert binary code into hex colors? Does that use less frames in a video? Will the video be able to clearly save all the hex values after YouTube compression?

"Why was I banned? I didn't say any hate speech. I just stated my favorite movie."

"I hate that movie, thus it is hate speech because it promotes hate (something that I hate)." or "Read the rules, figure it out"

Sometimes then the mods ironically send actual hate speech in their reply, then block you. Or you reply to them, and replies to mods automatically unlock the nuclear admin ban missiles "for harassment." God forbid you quote their literal message in a report which then triggers the automated word filter bans which are disabled for some reason when it's mod messages.

I'm not really surprised though, since

Or the auto renewing subscriptions that either cancel your service immediately the second you turn off auto renew, even if you paid for the current time allotment, or they just prevent or ignore your request to not renew.

I feel like reverse charging didn’t exist back then.

There’s also entitled devs that say your email domain or VOIP number isn’t good enough when signing up for their service. There’s no reason for anybody to use an email from their perfect in test whitelist of gmail or Microsoft domains… And why would anybody ever have a voip number unless they were a terrorist?

Confirm your email is valid, and then add it to the list of "continue to spam" accounts.