A story from my day job. I submitted it to the Daily WTF. Fingers crossed that they'll accept it.

In order to facilitate development of frontend apps that rely on my employer's antediluvian monolith codebase, a team of developers at the company came up with a backend for frontend (BFF) service that would allow developers on other teams (such as mine) to quickly make frontends that use the monolith's logic and data. The service uses a schema-driven UI approach, where developers make forms by specifying the input elements (along with some related layout and validation logic, also schema-driven) using JSON schemas. This also includes specifying classes on the element for styling purposes. Who wants hot reloading when tweaking styles for a frontend app when you can instead make a JSON schema in a separate DotNET codebase that needs to be compiled (this is sarcasm)? As gross as that aspect is though, it is not today's WTF.

Right after lunchtime today, I saw a post

With modern tools, you have to try very hard to do something stupid, because the tools (rightly) recognize you’re doing something stupid. [Andreas Karlsson] can speak to that first hand as he tried to get four billion if statements to compile.

You may ask what state space requires four billion comparisons to evaluate? The answer is easy: the range of an unsigned 32-bit integer. The whole endeavor started with a simple idea: what if instead of evaluating whether an integer is even or odd with a modulo or bit mask, you just did an if statement for every case? Small ranges like 0-10 are trivial to write out by hand, but you reach for more automated solutions as you pass 8 bits and move towards 16. [Andreas] wrote some Python that outputs a valid C program with all the comparisons. For 16 bits, the source only clocks in at 130k lines with the executable less than 2 MB.

Of course, scaling to 32 bits is a very different problem. The source file balloons to 330 GB, and most compilers ba

I have no idea how to title this post. Oh well.

A few years back I worked somewhere that had a large breach. Many practices changed in the wake of it. Developers actually had admin access prior to the change which was very nice. In an effort to restrict access but also let folks do their jobs they deployed some tool that would start all programs that "needed" admin access as an admin. This included cmd for the devs. So every time I opened cmd I had to be careful not to break something since there was no way to launch it without admin access after that change.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/36467447

I am not allowed to credit the site that has this disaster. Its owner said "Nobody should see that"

I was looking through various RCON tools and found this. Someone does not like commit messages.

For those unfamiliar with JS: subValue (the first argument in the forEach callback) is the value contained at arr[index].

Jesus Christ, just add an if statement for even or odd!

what do i do in this position ?