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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

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Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#181

Post by Klathmon »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #174
asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers. I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentati…

I love that story, and that's actually such a fantastic punishment IMO (even if it was a bit unwarranted).

I did some similar harmless "hacking" in my high school that accidentally ended up crashing a major switch causing the whole schools network to die for the day. I told my programming class teacher right away, but unfortunately in my case the superintendent decided to press charges.

In the end all it taught me was to never never trust anyone, not exactly the best lesson for an already introverted teen to internalize...

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#182

Post by nox101 »

maxbond wrote: post #46
adityapurwa wrote: post #29

I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do. It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. Now that I’m working, with the endl…

> Somehow, those joyful feeling of engineering no longer feels like the blue sky. I think its still blue, but for an eye washed in silvers, everything looks gray. Beautifully said. I'm glad to hear that you feel hope for rekindling this feeling. It sounds like you've already figured this out, but I want to highlight that this a symptom of burnout, and that people who resonate with this should take it seriously. I rem…

I'm not sure it is burn out for me. I think part of it is it feels less special. Maybe that's selfish or delusional on my part. Basically, I used to feel like I was doing something at least somewhat unique. Now, via Youtube and Github, I see that everyone is doing the same thing and repeating the same stuff so I end up with a "why should I do it if it's already been done" feeling.

It's similar to blogs. I ran blog since 26 years ago. Before Facebook, posting and sharing on the net felt special. After Facebook, everyone was posting so blogging was no longer special.

I get that doing it for the fun of the doing itself is a thing. Cooking might be the perfect example. Yet I have a similar problem there. More often than not I learn that a recipe is too much work and it's just better for me to enjoy and appreciate that someone else is willing to make it professionally, and better. One motivation is dishes I can't find at local restaurants. But I still often come to the same conclusion. That it's too much work and I should just wait and really enjoy the dish the next time I'm in a place where it's possible to get it.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#183

Post by foobarian »

beachy wrote: post #56
hunter2_ wrote: post #49

> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial. This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagi…

I use a bot for booking overnight huts on the more popular hiking trails in my country. They become available for booking online at a fixed time each year and are all taken a few seconds later. Using a bot is the only reliable way to get one. Amusingly there are news articles every year about whether or not people are using bots to book these huts and the operators always deny it vehemently. Whereas I know my bot is…

We used to run into the same issue booking camping spots in Massachusetts, which open many months in advance. I don't know what the situation is nowadays but it used to be very competitive, with spots vanishing in seconds after opening.

Amusingly, one camper family we came across said they manually register at the stroke of midnight, but they all do it together from like 6 computers in their house.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#185

Post by onelesd »

hunter2_ wrote: post #49

> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial. This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagi…

I had to do similar during the first summer of COVID to get my boat onto Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe (and most lakes in CA) requires boat inspections immediately prior to getting onto the water (mostly to prevent Quagga contamination). Those inspections had to be scheduled online during COVID, and there was similar supply & demand to what you describe for parking, so I wrote a bot that notified me (also via Pushover) when a slot became available.

Once I got the reservation I had to tow the boat 9 hours, praying the whole time I didn't have a drop of water on the boat, for which most inspectors will immediately fail you and send you away. The inspection crew there turned out to be pretty awesome though, and they actually washed my whole boat down with hot water which apparently kills any (baby? egg? idk) Quagga muscles.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#186

Post by jszymborski »

asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

Our high-school had an intro to programming class which taught folks how to use VB6 in a computer lab. It was exceptionally self-driven and gave me a lot of rope to do whatever I wanted.

The PCs in the lab were very slow, and a known prank (taught to everybody at some point by virtue of being a victim) was to hold Win+E, spawning hundreds of Explorer windows and bringing the PC to its knees. Sometimes you could wait it out, but a stealthy pranker could hold it so long a restart was required.

Well, I created a little VB6 programme named "DoraTheExplorer.exe" which would do exactly that when you clicked on it. I put that on the schools shared drive (where you could sometimes find portable executables of the original Halo game until the admin found and deleted it).

My prank was successful for a short while until, however, it became quickly evaded by folks just hitting Alt+F4 quickly and exiting the Dora Programme.

I then discovered you could get the programme to launch another instance of itself on exit, but this was also countered by spamming Alt+F4 rapidly.

Finally, I hit my magnum opus. A hydra. Everytime you'd close dora.exe, it'd open two more. It was an ICBM in the Explorer prank wars and defeat was declared.

The admin knew about this the whole time, and they were generally chill. They made it clear that if anyone lost work or if it caused harm, then I'd be held responsible. But that never happened because everyone knew what dora.exe did, I was too proud not to tell folks :P People only clicked on dora.exe for the dumb pleasure of crashing their PCs and trying to see if they could evade it.

Very grateful for that class and the generally chill environment I was in.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#187

Post by hakanderyal »

maxbond wrote: post #121
adityapurwa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Now that you mentioned it. Maybe it was a burnout. If you don't mind sharing, what did you do to improve your mental health?

Let me disclaim that this is a work in progress and that I am not a doctor. Part of it was that I had a breakdown. That was unpleasant. But ultimately it was part of the process. (Not to say this is necessarily true of everyone!) This forced me to quit my job. I have a one track mind, so I couldn't really do the work on myself I needed while I was working. I hope this isn't necessary for you or anyone else though. Wh…

Thanks for posting this. It's helpful to read about how others deal with burnout.

Your post reminded me this quote is from a book written in Turkish by a psychologist that had a profound impact on me related to this topic:

"Every rise and ascent to a higher level represents the death of our lower personality at the level we leave behind. Then, we can gently return to that level and whisper to the ear of the actor playing that role with love, understanding, and affection, 'Yes, you are me, but I am not just you!' This way, we can end the dominion of that role in our lives. We both free it from an existence it actually hates and offer ourselves an opportunity for growth! The biggest obstacle in abandoning the role, that is, the lower personality, is not knowing the existence of a higher level - the fear that if the role goes away, we will fall into a void."

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#188

Post by jszymborski »

seattle_spring wrote: post #176
bjackman wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did almost exactly the same thing at my school (brought down the system with a VB6 script that wrote infinite text files to networked storage). They sent my mum a letter accusing me of terrorism. At the time I thought I was pretty ridiculous and unfair (lucky my mum agreed), but now looking back with adult eyes I also see it as an almost criminal level of disregard for the job of raising children. Just absolutely i…

Yup, absolute insanity. My good friend was expelled because he used "net send" while our teacher was giving a presentation. Wasn't even anything vulgar.

The first time I heard a Chuck Norris joke was via "net send" in a high school computer lab.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#189

Post by bnchrch »

This was already such a fun and interesting project, but its even cooler to watch the community give back to it in the same spirit!

On the note of community, I would kick myself if I didnt link the Elixir clone it inspired. As I think its the best example of how powerful the primitives of elixir are when it comes to massive and distributed concurrency

https://github.com/PJUllrich/twomillioncheckboxes

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