vrek

joined 2 years ago
[–] vrek@programming.dev 3 points 18 hours ago

Company computers are different, I definitely don't trust them. That said managers like that are not good managers. Measure outcomes, not time. When a problem occurs and I can't figure a solution I go for a walk. 5 maybe 10 minutes. You would be amazed how often I think of the solution on said walk. Yeah it might look like a waste of time but clearing my head is a huge value to the company.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

Ouch! Tell her I'm sorry, and I'm sorry for you too. All the accountants I worked with did alot more than just reports. Not to mention that sounds great until the Ai says 2+4 =2*4 and now the company owes 20 billion on taxes...

Plus in a lot of cases people don't submit records in identical format, the number of excel workbooks I've seen where the data was on "sheet 2" for some unknown reason....

Maybe its just me, I always provided raw data on sheet 1, analyzed data on sheet 2, and if needed complicated formulas on sheet 3. I would be willing to bet their Ai would break on that format.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (10 children)

I don't know but implication the other poster is making is "a human can write 2 articles, a Ai can write 5, I'm being asked for 5 which is impossible. I can use Ai and risk trusting it or not meet my required outputs and also get fired."

I made up those numbers but that's the accusation. You are damned if you use the Ai to meet your goals. You are damned if you don't meet your goals.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You do. When you press submit it sends a http post message with your information. They are not reading your keyboard input on a website. You can verify this with wireshark and any website with a form.

Yeah some places with apps MAY do as you say like Facebook such with full permissions to your phone. That said its still sent as a http post request, just recorded locally and then sent as a giant packet.

That's why they have the submit button. Otherwise they would have way too many transactions. "a" then "d" then "a" and then "m" and have to concatinate them on the server plus initial packet saying they are getting a first name. Then another that you stopped focusing on first name.

Now how do you handle if I typed adan and go back to correct it? Some apps might do this but general web development(99.999%) doesn't.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Possible but back when smoking was much more common (not like 2010s, I mean like 1930s when a pack was included in mre kits given to soldiers in ww2 and the Flintstones cartoon had sponsored segments where Fred and barney had "smoke breaks" and talked about the "smooth and delicious taste" of I think it was camel cigarettes ) There were many more companies making cigarettes. It was only really consolidated in I think the 80s due to lawsuits for causing cancer, false advertising, lying to congress etc. Most of the companies couldn't afford all the fines and were bought out.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

Really? If 1% of customers of a restaurant got food poisoning... Well that's exactly why we have a health department and food inspectors

Now if by slop you just mean "not delicious" people would probably stop going and stop recommending. Some places may be able eat that loss(pun intended) but many would go out of business. Related, sorta, there have studies that one aspect of McDonald's that added to its huge success is consistently being same basically everywhere. Yeah there's some regional differences but you can eat a big Mac basically everywhere. And they are basically the same.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

No, I don't think it was an opinion. My point is in a lot of cases something really bad would never hit 1%. Like commercial airlines, most do several hundreds of flights a day(just a guess but for the large ones seems reasonable across all airports). If one airline had say 3 crashes in a year I can't imagine them still being active.

Population of us in 2024 was 340,000,000. If it effected 1% that would be 3.4 million people. That's like 1/2 of the holocaust victims.

I believe most companies would be done at 0.01% if that. Only company I can think of with that body count is nestle... I don't even think Raytheon has killed that many.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago (7 children)

I think you drastically overestimating 99% vs 1% at scale. For example look at the Chicago Tylenol case. Atleast 7 people died. 31 million packages of Tylenol were recalled, the entire line of powder filled capsules was eliminated, nationwide redesign of medication packages was done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders

[–] vrek@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago

Nope, just a funny wholesome story from my past.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Years ago I was a young white guy with long hair and a short ish beard. Someone at my job decided I looked like shaggy from scooby doo. The name kinda stuck and became my nickname.

Few months later, I was at work and one of the guys came over and asked for some favor. I forget what it was but it wasn't like a 30 second thing, it was like a multi hour task. I denied the request and made some excuse. He then reached behind his back and pulled out a box of scooby snacks. They were like small graham crackers in the shape of a dog head like scooby. "Would you do it for a scooby snack?" Everyone around started laughing, even I started laughing.

I didn't end up doing it and the task was just made up for the joke. It was pretty funny though. He said he saw them over the weekend when grocery shopping for his family and thought the joke was too good.

Side note, they still make scooby snacks and the kid I'm basically raising actually really likes them.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Just curious since you seem knowledgeable, is there a connection between those societies? Or is it just chance they both choose 8?

[–] vrek@programming.dev 2 points 5 days ago

In the US, I'm my experience, you typically have 10 to 15 minute conversation with hr(or separate agency) first. Basically this is for ensuring you will have a chance of fitting in. It's not to test technical skills or abilities. For example and I had one recently where after basic greetings the rep said the job was local for 3 months and then expected about 95% of the time was international travel, was I ok with traveling that much? Long story short basically no. Meeting ended in about 5 minutes, never even met the hiring manager. I'm another case I met with a rep from an agency for a job, after the conversation he told me I would not be a good fit (basically it was a manual labor job and almost everyone spoke Spanish which I don't). That said, he then said but I have another position you would fit and I ended up at that company for many years.

They shouldn't (and don't in my experience) ask specific details. It's not like "what is the timing offset on a Ford 438 engine?" or "how do you transform a spreadsheet of financial data to a presentation for management?" those are for the hirering manager. They ask questions like are you legally allowed to work here? Are you ok with travel requirements? Will you be able to communicate with coworkers? It's short, basic and basically a screen to verify you are worth the manager time for the real interview.

 

I'm not looking for Chromecast but I have a Linux system hooked up to a TV and ether net. I want a way to pick a YouTube or Amazon prime or Netflix video on my phone and display it on the TV via the Linux pc. Is that possible? If so what software can do it?

 

I don't expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it's based on a micro-SD and I don't have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice "work" on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what's possible with it?

 

I don't expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it's based on a micro-SD and I don't have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice "work" on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what's possible with it?

 

For anyone interested agdq started today. Raising money for prevent cancer foundation and showing speed runs of video games. Available streaming on twitch and YouTube. Gamesdonequick.com

 

For anyone interested agdq started today. Raising money for prevent cancer foundation and showing speed runs of video games. Available streaming on twitch and YouTube. Gamesdonequick.com

 

I thought of this after a recent bug I found. I use Vivaldi browser and recently it updated. After the update my mouse cursor was not visible when within the browser window. Other programs worked fine. I tried visual studio and steam and epic game store all had my mouse, Vivaldi didn't.

I closed all instances of Vivaldi via task nanager(was unable to click the x) and restarted it. That fixed the bug and I haven't been able to replicate so I don't have anything to submit for a bug report. Just a really strange thing.

What have been your weirdest bugs?

 

What os? What ide? What plug-ins?

 

I'll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

  1. They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.

  2. The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.

  3. This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.

  4. Here's my favorite part. You obviously don't want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you're thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

 

So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can't tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it's medication time, it's always "did you give him his meds yet?" and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides "alot more recently" or "it's gone down recently". Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.

I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).

What's the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it's health information but I'm only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.

 

The only possible exceptions I can think of are fish(I imagine gills and mouth are not connected but don't really know). I am excluding bacteria and viruses and I believe they don't really breath(correct me if I'm wrong).

 

I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?

 
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