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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Huh, never saw this one but in high school I had a dream just like this. I met a beautiful woman, perfect in every way, we got married had some kids, I even got some ways into middle age. Then, I was sitting in chair and noticed that my vision seemed… blurry at the edges, in a very “vignette filter” kind of way and I immediately knew I was dreaming. Woke up just as the existential collapse started. For several years after I’d try to remember her face, what our love had felt like, any of the details that had seemed so solid and tantalizing real for those few sleeping hours.

    In retrospect, a lot like that Rick and Morty episode with the life simulator game. I wonder if one of the writers ever had that dream too? Brains are weird, and I haven’t any dreams nearly that all encompassing since.


  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comInterviews
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    11 months ago

    Don’t worry, once you get the job you’ll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that’s 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren’t good at and that aren’t part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.



  • Remember when Humble Bundle was actually a charity and not just a charity-themed storefront owned by IGN?

    Well, technically owned by IGN, a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis, formerly J2 Global, formerly Ziff-Davis.

    I’m sure firing what was left of the employees with any commitment to the concept of HB and folding the brand under the rest of your e-commerce verticle will have no further adverse effects on the quality or usability of HB as a service.




  • But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

    And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

    But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

    He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

    The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.


  • I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build.

    Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”

    I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.