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Joined devRant on 11/14/2022
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I’ve pretty bad ADHD (diagnosed) my entire adult life, so focus has been a huge struggle for me forever. Here’s my strategy:
- Noise-canceling headphones blasting chiptunes (Spotify has some, but YouTube has the best selection of old-school video game music) I’m usually way less distracted if I listen to music without lyrics.
- A chair cushion (I actually use one of those ridiculous donut ones, but I put a normal sized pillowcase on it. SO comfortable, even after many hours.)
- THE POMODORO METHOD. 25 minutes hardcore coding/debugging, followed by 5 minute intervals for breaks, like checking fb, etc. (Breaks are totally optional if you’re in the zone tho 💪) It’s a great way to reward your brain for focusing.
- And if all else fails, the looming threat of unemployment is always there to keep you motivated 🙃 (Sad but true— always crosses my mind when I’m starting to fall behind on a task)4 -
So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.
First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.
But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.
I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!7 -
Following a conversation with a fellow devRanter this came to my mind ago, happened a year or two ago I think.
Was searching for an online note taking app which also provided open source end to end encryption.
After searching for a while I found something that looked alright (do not remember the URL/site too badly). They used pretty good open source JS crypto libraries so it seemed very good!
Then I noticed that the site itself did NOT ran SSL (putting the https:// in front of the site name resulted in site not found or something similar).
Went to the Q/A section because that's really weird.
Saw the answer to that question:
"Since the notes are end to end encrypted client side anyways, we don't see the point in adding SSL. It's secure enough this way".
😵
I emailed them right away explaing that any party inbetween their server(s) and the browser could do anything with the request (includingt the cryptographic JS code) so they should start going onto SSL very very fast.
Too badly I never received a reply.
People, if you ever work with client side crypto, ALWAYS use SSL. Also with valid certs!
The NSA for example has this thing known as the 'Quantum Insert' attack which they can deploy worldwide which basically is an attack where they detect requests being made to servers and reply quickly with their own version of that code which is very probably backdoored.
This attack cannot be performed if you use SSL! (of course only if they don't have your private keys but lets assume that for now)
Luckily Fox-IT (formerly Dutch cyber security company) wrote a Snort (Intrustion Detection System) module for detecting this attack.
Anyways, Always use SSL if you do anything at all with crypto/sensitive data! Actually, always use it but at the very LEAST really do it when you process the mentioned above!32 -
this came super handy today
https://github.com/ollama-webui/...
chatGPT was down and I asked local:
"codellama"
It is quite good.
Super easy to install new models. and super easy to remove too.2 -
University can be a b*tch. What if you could turn MP4, pdfs and pptx into digestible notes (Obsidian)? [more details]4
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!rant
I made an android game a while back based on mental math, memory and quick reactions. This is the first game I actually finished and published so I would love some feedback from people that actually know what they're doing. Made in Unity with C#.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...
<36 -
What do you guys recommend to read when starting Electron project with React and Typescript. I'm kinda stuck. :/
I've already make a simple Electron app with Js, but few people recommended me to try React, Redux and Typescript. But idk where to start.
P.S: Tried the boilerplate, reading docs.. I need something that explains what does what and how.5 -
Thanks to @bittersweet I found and tried _Notes by Firefox_. An awesome app, wich I definitely will keep and use.
I love the markdown support.
I love the synchronisation.
I hope they will add access-controls, so I can give other users access to my notes.
Sry, for the advertisement.5 -
*In a team meeting*
Me: *happily jotting down notes in markdown*
Other guy: "Dude what are you doing? Pay attention."
Me: "Umm... I'm taking notes?"
Other guy: "But why does your MS Word have black background?"
Me (a bit lost): "Umm... That's not Word. That's my text editor."
Other guy: "Alright... But how do you convert your notes into Word then?"
Me: "... I don't."
Other guy: *stares at me*
Me: * stare back*
It was a nice conversation.13 -
Me: I have been doing really similar tasks I'm going to spend some time making a template for it.
Supervisor: ok just don't spend to much time on it we have a lot to do.
Me: shouldn't take too long
1 hour later.
Supervisor : how's the work going.
Me: almost done with the template.
Supervisor: this is taking you way to long I need you to just get back to work.
Me: ok
He leaves and I continue work on the template.
30 mins later.
Show him the template.
Me: I cut my time on this specific task by 80%
Supervisor: good job glad I knew you should do it.
WTF YOU WERE TELLING ME NOT TO.6 -
Keeping up the tradition!
https://devrant.com/rants/15030806/...
Now powered by the awesome Claude 4!!!! The latest bleeding edge gem in the LLM trend that by the bold claims of big tech and various youtubers is stunning and will replace programmers/insane/godsmacking
This time, I decided to post because I was on the verge of a mental breakdown and I had a firsthand experience and a bit of free time, so instead of waiting that the rage boils down, I just took the chance and so we have a fresh AI experience to proof my previous rants.
Problem:
I have an application that manages interactions between a Mediator pattern between Kafka, some http listeners and other stuff (Rabbitmq, Redis (redis= another shit) etc etc)
Kafka handling was already done, i needed to exacly replicate what was being done with kafka for http. I said, heck, we have AI, it's good to do bovine stupid work, why not let him copy the whole structure, they have also agents on copilot on vs code, and they pulled out Claude 4, let's give it faith again.
Big error.
Beside the havoc the fucking agentic AI not being able to fully copy an already existing pattern and scaffolding, it did half shit wrong.
One of the most frustrating parts, since today I have an example, was this (summarized version of the prompt because I was very much more specific also giving the AI files and pointers to the code and explaining it):
PROMPT:"I have to return fake http transports, just copy what exists for kafka and adapt it to a new transport type called "Http", this is the structure {json with the class}
AI: "I need to see the current ITransportsItemResponse interface first to understand the structure, then I'll modify ...... BLAH BLAH"
Of course I had to review the whole code.
PROMPT:"any valid reason why you dumb shithead didn't respect the IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse and generic IGetTransportsItemResponse format and you pulled out of your ass a full blown IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse with extra properties when compared to IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse"
AI: "You're absolutely right, I fucked up. Looking at the IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse interface, it has way more properties than the basic IGetTransportsItemResponse and IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse interfaces. BLAH BLAH wall of text reasoning"
Then it modified the api calls to suit the kafka objects and didn't update any class of the Http transports
PROMPT:"So you tought it was a good idea to leave the #sym:IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse like it is respect to #sym:IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse ? Why? And answer the why don't apologize like a little wuss"
AI: "I left them different because they represent different domain concepts... BLAH BLAH EXPLANATIONS WALL OF TEXT"
Now ai tought it was good to do this and that but....
PROMPT: "In your fucking careful analysis didn't you reallize the "items" object are a basic representation and in the fuckin same folder there is also the object with the full set of properties?"
Literally it missed objects used in the same folder for different scopes and modified stuff without caring.
AI: "You're absolutely right. I missed that there are TWO different response types BLA BLAH"
I won't continue to not get too lenghty than it already is but the point is:
AI IS RETARDED.
People say it will replace programmers.
People says agents are the future.
Sad reality it's an overglorified broken ball of if/else that can't do shit well beside bovine work.
No amount of tutoring it with careful prompts, explainig the code and whatever else is going to fix it.
I've used gpt since gpt 3 and no model has been up to anything good, not even NLP. They suck also at the sole scope they were invented for.
I tried to ask GPT to make a curriculum based on another, I gave it the example curriculum and another one with the informations.
I carefully explained that it must not be a copy of the other, they are 2 different roles and to play by fantasy to make it look it was written by 2 different persons and to not copy stuff from the other.
Hope lost. It looked like the other curriculum was copied over and some words swapped, lol.
What a fucking joke, lmao, I am studying deep learning and machine learning to get on the bandwagon to make my professional figure more appealing, but I can already feel this is a waste of time.6 -
chat gpt is too politically correct, and i hate that im paying for an API that refuses certain prompts because they were considered inappropriate or because it thinks that it should not be giving me its analysis on a certain subject.
has anyone dabbled with using an open source LLM and made their own lite version of ChatGPT minus all the restrictions ?
i know its not gonna be as good, but at the very least free from the constraints12 -
Tried to run ollama with a small model on a laptop that's like 10 years old and use that inside vs code. Weak CPU, GPU not to mention. I didn't really expect it to work. I was still a bit disappointed, though as expected. It was crying for help.
Are there any laptops powerful enough?4 -
listening to some blue collar conspiracy theorists and it annoys me they keep saying how painful learning is. that whole segment of the population seems to have, what I view, like a suicidal depression about how doing good things is supposed to hurt you and I just find that so messed up. not only because I've never found learning to be painful. so I don't appreciate people, wildly and with 100% absolutely conviction, saying the experience of learning must always be painful like they're a church saying everyone is born with the original sin, or that every form of anger is a "negative" emotion like the psychologists, or that every form of stress degrades a person when eustress has been a concept for thousands of years... like you're literally making up a harmful myth, which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, and it drives me nuts
do you find learning painful or is it effortless? or does it come with some other flavour of experience or emotion? am I nuts here? how do I deal with these religions9 -
"Hmm, I wonder if Cloudflare has a limit to the amount of data I can store in the CDN"
*Uploads a shitton of crap to a Nextcloud server and caches everything via cloudflare*
So far - 300GB stored.4 -
Found a private api key on a github project. Created a pull request with key changed to “TH1S5HOULDB3SECR3T!iMBECIL5“ comment was “security fix“ i wonder if they accept4
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1. Keep your rythm: 7/8 hours of sleep each day and DON'T take your work home. Unless you have your own business ofcourse. Still: don't wear yourself out!
2. Put on music. Me personally like fast punk when i'm struggling with a deadline. Makes you want to go faster.
3. Close ALL communication like chats, mail etc. Hell i even thought of a sign "do not disturb"
4. Coffee. Lot's of coffee
5. Use a time tracking method like pomodoro6 -
As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.
I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.
These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.
Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.
All I want to say is:
No time was lost.
This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.
Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.
One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.
You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.
You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.
You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.
You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.
Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.
Please, for the love of code...
Start and fail as many projects as you can.31 -
It's high time I learned the arcane rituals of VR testing. Got the hardware. Got the console. Got the necessary adapters to connect the thing to the PC, too. Things are going to be interesting.
https://pravda.education/posts/... . -
Any vim/nvim users here? Why do you use it despite having to setup that thingie for hours? People like me who wants to try vim/nvim, the setup process scares the crap out of us. What I want? I just want to be able to do what I can already do in vscode. all I wanted my vim/nvim to be able to debug TypeScript/JavaScript with Nodejs. There's packages like, Vim-vscode shit, that takes help from vscode to debug it using vscode! why not use vscode then?
I'm tired of trying nvim/vim over and over again, and every time, it feels like I'm just a little luckier that before. If it continues, Its gonna take forever to setup. No thank you! I'm going back to vscode. Let me know when there's a gui kinda thing where I can see all the available packages for neovim and its just one click/enter install away. else, consider me sleeping...12 -
I know we might think we need drugs to accomplish something. Like coffee to get work done or alcohol to socialize better. But honestly, you are better when you are sober - because you are perfect just the way you are :)7
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I came across this german platform that provides rest api level access to database without the need of a backend. I’m a frontend developer and the possibilities like a wet dream. Saying bye-bye to Firestore.
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