How I understand it is that the admired language is one of those “I’ll start learning it tommorow” languages, that you however already talk about how great it is wherever you can, i.e see Rust on Lemmy.
I also find it funny (and relatable) how neovim is the most admired IDE. I totally relate to that, I’ve been telling myself “I’ll learn and switch to Helix tommorrow” for the past two years.
76% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year, an increase from last year (70%). Many more developers are currently using AI tools this year, too (62% vs. 44%).
What the fuck. That’s horrifying. I also though that every sensible workplace bans the use of AI.
A friend was telling me about a discussion between CTO’s at a conference, where they were talking about whether it’s even worth it to hire junior developers anymore, since there’s a high risk of them just being “AI-raised”, without much (or any) experience of coding without AI. And, this survey result… I can see where they are coming from. The future of programming looks pretty bleak - our job will not be replaced. It will just get worse, with good developers being more of a rarity.
And the amount of people who use vim or neovim as their IDE is surprisingly high. Is it skewed by sysadmins?
That’s a good question, and I never through about it like that. I think that the lack of documentation isn’t that much of a problem, rather that the code stands out in the project in that it is complex to understand and requires some more though, effort and imagination to grasp, since it’s generic with lot of interfaces and polymorphism.
Now, that usually wouldn’t be much of an issue, however - the project is a game we’ve been actively working on in our spare time in a team of 2 programmers for the last 6 years, and we are all fed up with it and just want it to end. Most of the (pretty large by now) codebase is kind of simple - it’s a game code, after all, and since we started it when we were 20, there aren’t many overenginered ideas or systems, but everything is mostly written in the ugly, but simple and direct way, so if we had wanted to change something, we may have had to rewrite a part of it, but it never really needed much effort to understand what’s going on.
But now I need to change this code, which is one of the only parts that requires some kind of imagination and actually sitting down and trying to understand it, and since my motivation about the project is so low, it’s a pretty large hurdle to cross. One that is also unnecessary, since most of the generalism isn’t needed and will never be used. But since the code is written in such extensible way, it’s hard to just hack up a simple and ugly solution somewhere into it and be done with it, without really figuring out what the hell is going on.
A documentation wouldn’t help with that - it would still take the same amount of mental effort to be able to work with that code, which we generally lack in the project. I think that if I actually took the time to properly look through the code, figuring out what’s going on wouldn’t be too hard - the naming convention is pretty ok and it’s not that difficult, it just requires some mental effort.
I’m not trying to make excuses, the code very probably has problems, I’m just trying to better sort my thoughts about why I have so much problems working on it. It probably has more to do with my motivation, rather than the code in itself, and the fact that the complexity here wasn’t required, and is now a needless hurdle that actually hinders progress. Not due to it’s quality, but do to unrelated motivation issues and us having to basically force ourselves to work on and finish the damn project.
There’s a piece of code in our hobby game project that I’ve written after attending classes in college about how to write clean and SOLID code. It’s the most overengineered piece of shit I’ve ever written. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the lectures, of course it’s on me being a little bit over zealous, but it does check all the boxes - It’s a simple “show selectable list of stuff”, follows MVC, it’s extensible without rewriting to adittional data-types and formats, extensible view that can show any part of data you need, generic, and in general it could be used anywhere we need, for any kind of data.
There’s only one place where we need and use such list in our game.
I needed to rewrite a part of it, since the UI changed drastically, to not need this kind of list, while also adding events into the process. I haven’t seen the code for almost 4 years, and it’s attrocious. Super hard to understand what’s going on, since it’s too generic, interfaces and classes all over the place, and while it probably would be possible to rewrite the views for the new features we need, it’s just so complex that I don’t have the mental capacity to again figure out how it was supposed to work and properly wire it up again.
I’m not saying it’s fault of the classes, or SOLID. It’s entirely my fault, because the classes inspired and hyped me with ideas about what a clean code should look like, that I didn’t stop and think whether it’s really needed here, and went over-the-top and overengineered the solution. That’s what I’d say is the danger of such Clean Code books and classes - it’s easy to feel clever for making something that passes SOLID to the letter, but extensibility usually comes at a complexity, and it’s super important to stop and think - do I really need it?
One night when returning from a party at work, I’ve decided to stay a while longer in the tram to escort my co-workers to the tram central hub (which was like half an hour of tram ride), instead of getting out at my home, which was only 5 minutes from our workplace.
When I got into the tram back home, there was an older guy with a carboard robot costume, who was talking to someone about his work in the theater. Because I find people like that interesting, I decided to move closer and sit next to them, so I can listen to their pretty interesting conversation. I’ve tripped and basically literally fell into their conversation, and the other guy left, so we started talking. It turned out he does a prop-guy on movies and for theater, and we hit it off pretty well. He also lived literally 3 minutes from my place, and we have decided to go have a few more beers at his home, which was basically a storage lot full of random stuff without much furniture - just random props, one bed, and a lot of beer.
I’ve messaged my GF that I’ll be late, since I’m drinking with this pretty cool old guy, and send her a picture of the place. Her reponse was “Wait, isn’t that <name>?”. Turns out, he was a prop guy on a movie they were filming a lot of years ago at their old family house when she was young, and not only he was the most fun guy to be around there, always sneaking out to drink with them, but also briefly dated her (late) mother, so he’s basically her step-dad. Since he’s pretty old-school, no social networks, internet and barely a phone, we did exchange contacts and since then have seen him a few times, and it was always a treat, like getting us to the backstage of theater production. But the way we have met is so, so random and the odds of something like that happening are mind blowing. I usually don’t follow random people home, but here we have hit it off so well that we wanted to keep talking and it didn’t even felt weird.
One important thing about CS was that it’s also marked as a boot-start driver. That flag tells the OS that it can’t boot without it no matter what happens, aside from safe mode, and iirc if your driver doesn’t have that flag, which drivers probably shouldnt have, from how I understand it if such a boot loop would happen due to a faulty non-boot-start driver, the system will recognize that and simply disable it.
What stops you from tampering with the game folder, and changing the function that sends the hash, to send a pre-calculated and valid value, instead of calculating it from real files you are running?
We found a RCE on a server during pentest. In KOBOL.
Learning how to make a reverse shell in KOBOL was pretty unique experience. Thankfully, we found another path to DA ajd didn’t have to continue, but maan, learning KOBOL, especially of your use-case is niche, is borderline esoteric.
I wouldn’t call Crowdstrike a corporate spyware garbage. I work as a Red Teamer in cybersecurity, and EDRs are bane of my existence - they are useful, and pretty good at what they do. In the last few years, I’m struggling more and more to with engagements we do, because EDRs just get in the way and catch a lot of what would pass undetected a month ago. Staying on top of them with our tooling is getting more and more difficult, and I would call that a good thing.
I’ve recently tested a company without EDR, and boy was it a treat. Not defending Crowdstrike, to call that a major fuckup is great understatement, but calling it “corporate spyware garbage” feels a little bit unfair - EDRs do make a difference, and this wasn’t an issue with their product in itself, but with irresponsibility of their patch management.
I still use Parsec for remote, and I don’t have any issue with it, it works great and I like it. However, they also did offer a free SDK (Unity plugin) to integrate remote play into your game natively (just like you can have “Invite to Steam Remote Play” button from Steam SDK), which was exactly what we needed - and Steam Remote was never working without issues for us, in comparison to Parsec which worked amazingly well every time we tried it.
I found numerous mentions of Parsec SDK and how easy it is to integrate, but after Unity bought it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Only mention was that if you need it, you should contact them.
So I did that, mentioning that we are a small team of students working on a offline co-op only 2 player game in our free time, and that since Steam Remote wasn’t working for us and I have great experience with Parsec, I asked what we have to do to get access to the SDK/Unity plugin.
Unity’s answer? Sure, no problem, they will be happy to give us access, with first step being that we pay them 1 000 000$ for it.
Like, wtf? Did they even read the email? How out of touch you have to be, to casually ask a small student team to pay 1 000 000$?
My best VCS experience so far was when working with Plastic SCM. I like how it can track merges, the code review workflow is also nice, and in general it was pretty nice to work with.
Fuck Unity, who paywalled it into unusability, though. Another amazing project that was bought and killed by absurd monetization by Unity, same as Parsec.
While I’m not using it, since we started our small-team hobby project in git and moving away from it would be a bother, there is one use-case of SVN that would save us a lot of headaches.
SVN being centralized means you can lock files. Merging Unity scenes together is really pain, the tooling mostly doesn’t work properly and you have no way how to quickly check that nothing was lost. Usually, with several people working on a scene, it resulted in us having to decide whose work we will scratch and he will do it again, because merging it wouldn’t work properly and you end up in a situation where two people each did hundreds or thousands of changes to a scene, you know that the Unity mergetool is wonky at best, and checking that all of those changes merged properly would take longer and be more error prone than simply copying one persons work over the other.
We resorted to simply asking in chat if anyone has any uncommited work, but with SVN (or any other centralized VSC, I suppose) we wouldn’t have to bother with that - you simply lock the scene file and be safe.
What you are describing is simply a bias from training dataset. The best way how to think abour LLM AI is that works in basically exactly the same way as if you keep mashing space on your phone keyboard, to give you text prediction (assuming your phone does that, mine always recommends next words when I type).
Would my phone keyboard eventually start recommending words relogious words and phrases? Yes, it will, of I’m using those phrases often. Does it mean ny phone keyboard is religious? That sounds pretty weird, doesn’t it?
And it’s not even a hyperbole, about this kind of text prediction being similar to how LLMs and AI works. It’s just math that gives you next word based on statistics of what would be most likely based on previous words. And that’s exactly what LLMs do, nothing more. The only difference is that my keyboard has been learning only on what I type, and in a little bit simpler way than LLMs are, but the goal and result is same for both - a text prediction.
Ever since I played watchdogs and shadowrun, I wanted to work in cybersecurity, especially as a Red Teamer, which is literally Shadowrun - you run complex ops that have to break in, and steal stuff from largre banks without anyone but the management knowing about the test, with almost nothing being off-limits, as long as it doesn’t cause some kind of damage.
Five years later, I do work as a Red Team Lead. Hpwever, our company was just scrambling to start doing RT since thats the buzzword now, and while we did have amazing pentesters, unfortunately pentesting and Red Teaming requires vastly different skills. Ypu never need to avoid EDRs, write malware with obscure low-level winapi, or even know what kind of IoC ajd detections will a command you run create, when you are doing a pentest.
But since no one knew better, and I love learning and researching new stuff, while also having Red Teaming romabticized, my interrest in it eventually led to me getting a Lead position for the barely scrambling team.
Mind you, I was barely out of being a junipr, with only three years of part time pentesting experience. It was NOT a good idea.
I quickly found out that RT is waaay harder and requires the best of the best from cybersec and maleare development. We didnt have that. Also, turns out that I love to learn now stuff and take on a challenge, but being a Lead also means you are drowning in paperwork and discussions with client, while also everyone from the team doesn’t know what to do and turns to me about what should we do. Which I didn’t know, and barely managed to keep learning it on my own. Our conpany didnt want to give us much time for learning outside of delivery, I was only working parttime, and I was slowly realizing that we don’t have almost any of the skills we need.
We were doing kind of a good job, most of our engagement turned out pretty well, but it was atrocious.
Turns out, I’m not good at managing and planning projects, or leading people. I’m better just as a line member.
I’d like to mention one exception, because it took me ages to properly debug.
If your endpoint is serving mirrors for APT, don’t redirect to HTTPS.
APT packages are signed and validated, so there is no need to use TLS. Lot of docker images (such as Kali) do not have root certificates by default, so they can’t use the TLS, because cert validation fails. You also can’t install the certificates, because they install through APT. If your local mirror redirects to https by default, it will break it for people who choose the mirror, which IIRC happens automatically based on what’s closest to you. I think this issue is still there for Czech Kali package mirror, and it took me so long to figure out (because it’s also not an issue for most of the users, since they have different mirrors), so I like mentioning this when talking http/s. It’s an edge case, but one that I find interresting - mostly because it would never occur to me that this can be an issue, when setting up a mirror.
But that was more than a year ago, it may be better now.
Btw, choco (and maybe even winget?) already has a gsudo tool, which implements sudo. It is super handy, and having a native version is definitely better, but before its available, I recommend gsudo.
We’ve had to work in Pharo for our OOP uni course, and it was one of the worse experiences I’ve had in school. Mind you, it was something like 7 years ago, so the language may very well be a lot better now, but the whole “your IDE is the code” felt cubersome, it was buggy and crashed randomly, and in general I spent more time fighting with the IDE than doing something useful.
It was a bad time, but also a great learning experience. Being forced to work in something that IMO sucks is an useful skill, but I never want to see that language again :D
What gives me immense joy is that there’s probably someone at Unity really really upset now. Fuck them.
Someone once told me a story how they made a game in Unity, and were in contact with them, since they are also a content creators. Then they decided it sucks and rewritten the project into Unreal, and when they met someone from Unity who asked how it’s going and whether they need help with anything, and when they told them that they are actually working on Unreal now, the Unity guy got literally upset and angry at them how they can’t do that and what are they thinking. It was hilarious.
Reportedly, then Unreal support was way better and more friendly.
As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.
I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.
From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.