The trend of referring to staff you just laid off as “alumni” is fucking stupid.

So is emailing and asking said recently laid off staff to join an “alumni committee” that involves, among other things: going to off sites and community events that the company will almost CERTAINLY be using for recruiting photos and “Best place to work” blog posts.

Just send me my final pay and fuck off already.

In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.

Well, no need for those notes any longer.

I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".

I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.

We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.

I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.

It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.

Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.

Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.

Just very diplomatically told the VP of Engineering to kick rocks (fuck off) for calling me at nearly 9pm to talk about project planning for a thing that isn’t even in active development.

Asked point blank if we were dealing with a life or death thing. He said no. I replied “then we can talk about this tomorrow”.

He balks and tries to tell me how important it is.

I cut him off “I wasn’t asking you, I am telling you it’s a quarter to 9 and I’m at a bar. This call is over. We’ll talk tomorrow. Good NIGHT”. With as much aggression and pissed off emphasis as I could muster on the ending.

Stay tuned to find out if I still have a job after this.

Late post because drinking:

I’m going back to work, got a verbal offer this afternoon after being laid off two weeks ago, thanks mainly to a referral from a former direct report that I once went to bat for. Gave myself a nice 3 weeks of chill time before start date.

But the funny thing was a company who gave me a take home assignment that I breezed through in half an hour, only to say “we’re going with other candidates” after the follow up interview calling me a few hours after I accepted said verbal offer elsewhere.

They wanted me to redo the take home assignment but with different acceptance criteria and requirements than the first time.

Fucking lol.

I told them, verbatim “I think I’ve done enough to satisfy any questions about my skills from the prior assessment. If you have more questions about design and implementation choices I’m happy to schedule a call.”

Hiring manager said he’d reach out next week.

Because even if the verbal offer gets redacted, I’ve got three other final rounds coming up and this particular place just sounded way too fucking chaotic and disorganized for my tastes. If everything else flames out and I’m left with no other options for work, I’ll consider giving them some more time out of my day, but as is, redoing a coding assessment with different criteria because you can’t decide wtf you want from a job candidate?

Not gonna lie: this is not a good look for you.

I got a job! (Not the place from last rant lol)

Party at my place. Bring your own drugs.

A few hours ago I got notified that youtube-dl had been subjected to a DMCA takedown from the RIAA (https://github.com/github/dmca/...). I was instantly asked to mirror a known copy of the repository, but was too late to do it.. the other mirror had already been taken down as well. Coincidentally I also had to deal with an attack from 2 email spamhausen at the same time (still ongoing too, but things have settled down). As we frantically started searching for other mirrors we did find another one at https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/.... I've now also mirrored both youtube-dl and NewPipe to https://git.ghnou.su/mir/youtube-dl and https://git.ghnou.su/mir/newpipe respectively.

The reason for it in the DMCA takedown is ridiculous though... There were 3 links to copyrighted videos in the readme file. Yeah.. 3 links, that's what a whole project got taken down for. Sending an email to one of the maintainers or opening an issue was clearly too much work.

If you want to participate in the mirroring process, feel free to use my mirror as a source. I find takedowns like this unacceptable and this software should remain available on the internet, until the youtube-dl developers can appeal for takedown removal or move their project elsewhere. Together we can do it!

I'm not a programmer by trade, so the only language I know well is bash. But as sysadmins we do use bash often.

Looking at other sysadmins' scripts though, there are interesting things in it every so often. Like for example `touch file` which creates a file. I've seen some sysadmins just do this instead `> file`. Genius! Or perhaps a `cat file >> elsewhere`. You can do that with `< file >> elsewhere`. It's something that if I hadn't seen it elsewhere, I wouldn't have thought about. But yeah, it saves a program call and it works!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

'"I\ absolutely\ love\ bash\n"'
And somehow it will still be fucked up.

Devrant is so full of people venting, I want to be an aisle of positivity, something you know you wanted for years on devrant!

First of all, remember that whatever your boss tells you, you should know what you can do and never let them intimidate you!

Whatever your mates tell you, the Issue probably isn't just you.

Remember to listen to many differentstyles of music. Keep Hydrated! Be nice to people, they'll be nice in return.

How about you come into the comments to have some nice talk? Remember: Only spread positivity 🌻🥀🌺

Ps: Havent ranted in such a long time. What's new?

Programmers then:

No problem NASA mate, we can use these microcontrollers to bring men to the moon no problem!

Programmers now:

Help Stack Overflow, my program is kill.. isn't 90GB (looking at you Evolution) and 400GB of virtual memory (looking at you Gitea) for my app completely normal? I thought that unused memory was wasted memory!1!

(400GB in physical memory is something you only find in the most high-end servers btw)

Thoughts on "questions".

As a junior Dev, I understand asking too many simple questions is irritating and usually not welcome, but, is not asking any questions at all considered a sign of disinterest or "zoning out" or lack of curiosity etc etc ?

Do people think that much ??

Was browsing stackoverflow and saw how they handle votes in comments, clearly indicating one is to upvote (like other websites), the other to (quite literally) flag said comment for moderation purposes (it even clarifies when you hover it! amazing!).

Quite different to devrants UX. :)

On another note, glad to see the time capsule website still didn't change since years back, people even discovered that not everything is a rant. :^)

Couldn't spot any edgy pre-teens either scrolling a bit.

Back here after ages... V2.0

So this happened last year, but I feel it's worth sharing :P

I was at an internal hackathon-sorta event at the place was interning at and teamed up with a bunch of co-interns almost randomly.

While working we had some issues with the wifi so one of the guys suggested we use the mobile hotspot, I offered mine.
My hotspot ID was "cee"

The guy : Cee ? Wait are you ceee from devrant ??

Loss of anonymity, but it was pretty cool XD
What a small world :p

Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.

So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃

Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.

So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?

So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.

"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."

So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.

But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.

Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.

Just realizing now that I've probably spent 60% of my programmer age (years of experience) waiting for dependencies to install and praying that the 9 kB/s connection I'm struggling with remains alive every single fucking time otherwise I have to start the wait all over. 😡😡😡

Since Microsoft is racist and is trying to remove the "master" term on GitHub to "fix the World" I hope they won't forget about the "master" volume in the audio settings of Windows.

Guess I'mma go fuck myself :)

> clicks Twitter shortcut
*dns probe failed*

"oh, is cloudflare dns down?"

> goes to cloudflarestatus.com
*dns probe failed*

"ah, right dns isn't working..."

java --version
FATAL: Unknown parameter

java -v
FATAL: Unknown parameter

*googles get java version*

java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_252"

FUCK YOU

Here’s how my Friday night is going:

def signin
if should_not_sign_user_in?(stuff)
return redirect_to :nope
end
# signin logic
end

The guard says I shouldn’t sign the user in. It logs the details of why. I read the logs; they’re all correct. It logs the return value, which is false, and the user gets signed in anyway.

Wat.

There’s a return and a redirect there!

This is only happening on the QA server, too, so something fishy is going on.

me: "ah, my scraper is nearly done - just need some final tweaks"

coworker: "JuSt FrOm LoOkInG aT yOuR ScReEn A fEw TiMeS tOdAy, I cAn TeLl YoU iT wOnT wOrK"

me, infuriated by his idiot mentality but not trying to start anything: "ah, its fine, I've already scraped 3000+ entities"

coworker: "but it wont work."

me: "but... its working..."

coworker: "but it won't work."

me: "ok."

sometimes its just better to just affirm the narcessistic assholes. make sure they are right.

IBM job requirements:

- 12+ years kubernetes experience
- kubernetes is 6 years old

IBM, never change cheered me up today

https://theregister.com/2020/07/...

What about "Man page"? You sound like a sex-throlling maniac and I demand that you blacklist the term also from the dictions on your doc 🤪 (Oh fuck, did I just used the word 'blacklist'?) *whispers* Sorry Jim, I actually meant 'darklist' the word 'Man page'.

Is anyone getting this image glitch in the discussion section??

When I didn't have to rely on Google or Stackoverflow

Fun fact.

The HTTP error 451 means "content is not available because of legal reasons".

The name comes from Ray Bradbury's book Fahrenheit 451, which is about a dystopian society where books and literature are censored by the government.

From Bauhaus to Jessica Walsh, all the previous design experience and vision of the entire civilization lead to this.

This monstrosity is apple’s new battery icon in Big Sur.

I’m speechless.

So.. my MacBook Pro 61 Watt C-Type Adapter sparked and stopped working... and my mac is left with just 6% charge. I have a placement exam on the 7th and a certification exam on the 8th. And also, there's no WiFi provider (or I must say a good one) in my area. The one that provides the service is a known fraudulent company.

Don't know if I should be really sad about the problems or be a bit happy because now I don't have to stare at my screen for hours.. life really sucks sometimes.