Years ago when I was living with my parents, my mother was at work, I worked nights. She called me during the day and this was the conversation :

Mom: I need a favor, go into my bedroom, get my cell phone and bring it to me.

Me : you are are work right?

Mom: yeah

Me: you can’t make personal calls at work so you must be on break right?

Mom: what? Just bring me my phone!

Me: if you are on break, how are you calling me?

Mom: oh shit, nevermind I found it.

Yeah I’m thinking my SD card is failing… I know it’s slow but I tried to do a fresh install in recovery 7 hours ago and it’s still initialing the “noob” installer.

Supposedly I was thinking to small, I was thinking like trying to use nmap to discover all ip addresses on my lan or load vim to practice vim motions (I get the idea but I’m still too slow put in alot of commands cause I’m like ok… Up 10 lines, ok, up is… Look on cheat sheet… I… then number of lines… That was 10…look on cheat sheet… Oh just enter 10…it didn’t work… Figure out because it’s not ingrained in my head the time looking at a cheat sheet is making commands time out).

Yeah, I tried virtual box on my main system and kept running into odd problems with every distro. For example Debian had a full second of input lag, with 2 cores of a 13th Gen i5 and 16 gb of ram dedicated to it. Kali would install and I ejected the “installation medium” aka the iso and reboot and the virtual box couldn’t see any bootable drive. I tried fedora and it kept freezing on installing(sat at like 35% for over 3 hours)

I cause a genocide of white cheddar cheeze-its… Does that count?

Wait… Ups drivers get $46 a hour? Where?

It would be horrible in real life but I thought a funny intro to a post apocalyptic movie would be a person giving a tour of a bio lab to college interns and…

“through our studies we have learned to increase the transmission rate and the death rate of the small pox virus. The downside is we had to mix it with rabies so the infected tend to get aggressive and lose there ability to rationalize their thoughts. Don’t worry though, there is only this one vial of it in the entire world… these gloves are quite slippery… Oops”

Ah a fellow member of the old gaurd of the interwebs

Mushroom mushroom

Fun… Well not really fun… Fact:

Giant tortoise didn’t get a scientific name for 300 years. They were so delicious no crew actually managed to get one back to England. They always ended up eating all the cargo.

You end up with a kid?

Or

You end up playing a very dangerous game

That may be my only choice. Was trying to avoid it as I don’t want to lose everything on my computer and dual booting would be difficult as I don’t have a huge hard drive.

I “tried” Linux but never got it usable. I initially decided to run a vm on virtualbox to experiment. I tried Debian, arch, kali, Ubuntu and all ended up having an input lag of 1-2 seconds. Windows the system was fine. But I found my self unable to do basic tasks it was no bad. I don’t mean I didn’t know a command or unwilling to find a foss software equivalent, I mean it took several tries to get the mouse over the X to close a program due to input lag.

OK I then decided to try a docker container with Linux. It got so messed up if I open docker desktop it displays an error that the container was unable to start, if you close the error to edit settings or create a new container it closes docker desktop, no way to fix it.

I was able to get a wsl command line working but all I found it able to do is add 5 steps to everything due to having to start the command, start wsl, log on, elevate permissions etc.

That’s not the scary part, it’s a fortune 500 international company whose customers could die if the product didn’t work…

That’s not even code grief…

Two examples that were far worse:

1. My last company wanted software developers. They offered to send me to code boot camp and give me a promotion. The boot camp was primarily python. I complete and get the promotion. New manager tells me the code base I’ll work on is actually c… Umm ok. New manager retires a week later. I spend a few weeks basically teaching myself c. New manager is assigned. He tells me I should basically assist the senior Dev, ok no problem. Find out the code base is actually c#… Should be doable it’s c based atleast. It’s c# framework 4.8 based on winforns… No one in the building had heard of a unit test…the code was released to production on December of '23. Oh and yeah the senior Dev then announced he was retiring. There are no other c# programmers on the team.

2. I told this story before recently. On a separate c# code base the “login” function had hard coded credentials in the source, which checked if they existed in a local sql database table with one entry(the hard coded values) and then verified the returned value for “password” was >= than 5. It then logged you in. Didn’t check if the password was correct or even the correct length just that the return of the select statement was greater than or equal to 5 characters… Just for fun remember that false is 5 characters 😂

Why is your password all astricks?

I hope not. I hope it’s just for pure chaos.

Like imagine going to the store, everything is normal and you pay like normal. Then you leave and stop to get gas and grab your wallet and somehow there is a blueberry in your pocket. I’d start questioning reality…

Yes, but how many of these niche communities are there? Hell, lemmy itself is a niche community and everybody here should take a stand against this sort of stuff occurring here.

This is explainable from a boy who does this…

Common cold - I want to be allowed to rest and be taken care for(for example “I’m sick so can you cook me some soup and a sandwich for lunch?”).

Life threatening illness - I don’t want to make the person worry about me. I don’t want them to force me to a hospital which I cant afford.

You’re not going to worry or take me to the er for a cough but you would probably care for me and pamper me… That’s the difference

If I confess to what I did on a dare is that a truth or dare?

I’m also a software engineer (at least in title). I agree with the social skills but a different thing came to mind. The ability to actually watch and understand what people are trying to do. I’m lucky as all my software is internal to my company. I don’t make what we sell, I make what tests the products we sell. And yes I test the tests and also test the test’s tests 😭.

I’ll give an example. I have an operation where the operator is to scan a number off a paper before testing. That number is for traceability we need to know which test results are for which unit. Previous engineer said since it’s scanned off the unit it will never be incorrect as long on the printed barcode is correct(separately validated) so no need to verify format.

I ran into an issue where units had an extra zero either before or after the number. So if number was 12345 sometimes it would be 012345 or 123450.

I went to watch the process. The operator scanned the unit( I watched them work all day, this was 1 unit out of a whole days work) and when they put the scanner down the scanner’s corner was on the 0 button of the keypad.

We did a 2 phase remiduation. Stage 1. Operator instructed to log in and then place keyboard on shelf away from workplace. Stage 2. Verify the number is in correct format in code. Yes the code update is simple but in our field needs weeks of work to test, validate, and release.

Actually watching the operator closely identified the problem. The code was not the issue, the code passed all requirements and tests. The issue was the tests and requirements did not match the user’s experience but if I stayed in my cube as for weeks I would not of been able to find the bug.