Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I’ll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.

My current job is the only place that I haven’t done that, because it’s probably the best company that I’ve ever worked for.

I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.

I just finished up a ~700 line PowerShell script to send input/keep a login session from timing out due to inactivity, and prior to that was a Python script to format LetsEncrypt SSL certs in a way haproxy likes + an accompanying Bash script to make sure those certs are correct, check in the current good haproxy config to a git repo, and then restart it if there are new certs.

The only thing that I know is that I know nothing.

Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.

I literally cannot tell the difference.

Source: am manager, and sometimes my underlings don’t toil hard enough in the PowerPoint mines.

You should mercilessly berate them until morale improves, that’s MBA 101.

You’re gonna be back in the PowerPoint mines if you don’t fix your soft-hearted attitude.

Seriously, it feels like 1999 internet. And I’m loving it!

56K modem handshake sound intensifies

Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.

They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”

I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.

Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.

It would be better to our them on blast on social media since that sometimes gets the companies attention to try and fix PR.

Works almost every time. I had a ticket with a vendor open at work for just about 3 months, and then only replies I’d gotten on the ticket was the “We’ve received your support request which we’ll promptly ignore!” autoresponse upon opening, and then another auto-response a month later saying the ticket was being assigned to another department. I’d replied to the ticket ~20 times asking for updates in that time.

I finally got sick of essentially yelling into an empty room and called out the company, their marketing team, their support team, and their CEO on Twitter, making sure to @ each one of them in the message. I got a reply from their CEO and an actual human responded to the ticket less than an hour later.

It’s shitty and a last resort, but it’s generally very effective.

I have a Hisense and had a similar experience. I was watching something fullscreen on an HDMI input, and then it suddenly switched inputs and showed a fullscreen firmware update prompt. I had no choice available other than to agree to update the firmware, no cancel button, couldn’t change inputs, nothing, the only choice was to update the firmware. So I unplugged the TV.

About 10 seconds after I powered it back on, the exact same update prompt happened, still with no choice to decline it. I pulled power and booted it back up one more time just to be sure, met with the update prompt again.

This made me very angry.

The next time I powered it on, I had a packet capture running to see where it was phoning home. I created a firewall rule blocking all the hostnames it tried to connect to at startup, pulled the plug, and then booted it back up. No more update prompt, and it hasn’t happened again. Good thing they don’t download and pre-stage the new firmware, I guess.

Let me know if you want the hostnames and I’ll PM them to you.

While on the topic, this isn’t how passwords work in systems.

Passwords are stored as one way hashes. So it’s cryptoed only in one direction, it’s lossy, and can’t be recovered back to the original password.

When you log on, your cleartext PW is hashed in ephemeral memory/storage and then the cleartext password is thrown away.

That hash is compared to the hash in the DB. If the hash matches, then you have access. If it doesn’t, then your PW is incorrect.

Oh my sweet Summer Child. This is definitely how it’s supposed to work, but there are plenty of services that just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

Have you ever been on a site that has a stupid-low character limit for a password? There’s literally no reason to do that, all the hashes are going to end up the same size in the DB anyway regardless of the original string length. Even bcrypt’s max secret character limit is 70-something characters.

Ever change a password and have it not work on the next login because they’re silently truncating it after a certain character limit? Ever get an email with an actual password in it?

The only reason you would do things like this is if you’re storing/processing passwords in plaintext and not hashing it client-side first.

I can think of 3 offenders of this off the top of my head. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.

hunter2

Wow, what a coincidence, my password is ******* too!

Were told our assignments in high school would get an automatic zero if we didn’t turn them in in cursive, even…

Lots of those in C# now, especially with Unity coming along like it did.

On Error Resume Next never before have more terrible words been spoken.

Every time I’m reading a PowerShell script at work and see -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue I want to scream into a pillow and forcefully revert their commit.

I’ve actually done it a few times, but I want to do it every time.

Eh, it depends. Other low-level things (systemd, glibc, etc) need a reboot too.

It’s likely because they use it as the primary/unique identifier for the account, which is just dumb. It’s like they’ve never heard of a UUID/GUID before.

CBOE will create options for it pretty soon after IPO, probably that week or the next. You’ll definitely be able to buy puts on it before you’ll be allowed to short sell it.

They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.