catacomb @ catacomb @beehaw.org

Posts

4

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66

Joined

2 yr. ago

I can anecdotally say that the more right-leaning people I know are the most anti-FOSS but I'm not sure that applies generally.

Even that comes with a caveat: the people I know disagree with it philosophically, i.e. they can't see how it can work for the maintainer and won't donate, yet are as happy as anyone to use something for free.

Just wanted to add a bit about Proton since you mentioned it and I use it quite heavily.

Pros:

• All-in-one platform for storage, mail, VPN, password manager and calendar. Usually works out cheaper than multiple providers.
• E-mail aliases built-in to the password manager makes it a breeze to manage. (Tutanota also supports aliases.)
• Personally, I think the UI is more polished. Not important for privacy but it's a plus for the non tech-savvy.

Cons:

• All-in-one platform. I'm acutely aware that I'm going to have a headache if Proton is enshittified.
• If you're not looking for all of the products they offer, it's just expensive. Tutanota is cheaper for e-mail alone.
• The Drive app needs improvement. Migrating my files was painful and I want automatic Camera uploads. You might be okay with the Windows desktop app.
• The Calendar app has issues when not connected to the internet.
• The password manager doesn't have a desktop application and managing it through the browser extension or app isn't great.
• No subject-line encryption support (and other PGP interoperability issues on the free version) but... unfortunately, I don't get many PGP encrypted e-mails anyway.

Otherwise these two are largely like-for-like for e-mail. There's no benefit to Proton being hosted in Switzerland and I didn't move to be warrant-proof or anything silly. The idea is really just moving emails away from an advertising company and paying for a quality service.

Yeah, this is one of those things which sounds great on paper but also introduces problems. I've seen people get really annoyed when exception messages are translated because it makes them harder to search for online. That would need to be solved too.

I've had huge issues collaborating on a spreadsheet with a Spanish client. It tries to open the sheet in your locale and then can't find the functions. Insane that Microsoft didn't even add some metadata to allow me to work on it in Spanish.

Bottom left is when I make a kubernetes cluster to serve up a mock weather API for practice.

Exactly. I used PHP for years, I haven't "not used it." It was the first programming language I seriously learned. Writing good code was tedious if not impossible and that became even more obvious as I expanded to C#, Java, Python and C++; none of which tolerated any of the bad and unconventional practices I'd inevitably picked up. Keep in mind, I was actively trying to avoid bad practices and pay close attention to types but still got kicked to the curb hard when I tried other languages. I haven't had that since.

I appreciate it's changed since, I'm happy to see it's not the same dumpster fire it once was, I also don't care. I don't actively trash it, I just think there's usually a better option.

Ruby on rails is alive, just not as popular. ASP.NET is popular but looks nothing like it did then; probably for the best.

Yeah, plus PHP was very popular circa 2011-2016 and laravel was loved by many around that time and beyond. It's always been a useful language.

I need to get into NixOS but I have a similar variation on servers: ansible for state of systems, Borg + Borgbase for data (kept in /srv) and code (including ansible) are in Git.

The separation between data and state is really great. You want to be able to go from a base install and only bring in everything which makes your setup different.

Even some shops working with Windows Server are asking "wait, why are we paying for these licenses?"

Then it comes down to whether it's cheaper to rewrite legacy applications or continue to pay for licenses.

Yep, it's usually an existing idea with progression in a few areas. You could definitely achieve serverless with a cluster of servers hosting the same scripts in cgi-bin and I think that context helps to put it into perspective.

Yeah and ARM servers are cheap. You can often get twice the processor cores and memory for the same price.

That doesn't always map to twice the performance, though some benchmarks would suggest it could for certain applications.

I think it's a maturity thing. You eventually see so many trends come and go, peaks and troughs of hype cycles and some developers (probably including yourself at least once!) overusing certain new tech.

You eventually discover what works with current tech and then you can become healthily critical of anything new. You see it more for where it can fit and where it can't.

If you have something small and stateless then serverless is easy and, more importantly, scalable. It was a little easier to see its role once the hype fog had lifted and I had a problem to solve with it.

Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?

Just to throw out another one, there's also Cloudflare Pages.

I don't even mind the shortened arguments too much, though it doesn't help. It's more that every example seems to smush them together into a string of letters.

I would have found

tar -x -f pics.tar ./pics

to be clearer when I was learning. There's plenty of commands which allow combining flags but every tar tutorial seems to do it from the beginning.

Absoutely. I mostly use Firefox because I'm so familiar with it by now but the privacy is generally much better and it doesn't have a massive monopoly on the web. I'm just a lot more comfortable with it.

When I have to, I use ungoogled-chromium on desktop and Bromite on mobile. I recommend those to anyone familiar with Chrome.

I've read not to bother with Decentraleyes. The dependencies are often out of date which mean you'll hit 3rd party CDNs anyway. Unless its coverage is 100℅, it's less than useless for privacy as the hit pattern to CDNs might even make you stand out.

Privacy Badger is also redundant if you have uBO.

My partner is vegetarian, avoids lactose because it doesn't completely agree and recently can't have gluten. It's certainly challenging but can work.

Baking with gluten free flour usually comes out a lot better than the pre-made products in the store, especially with a little xantham gum to add elasticity. Pre-made baked food is already not as good as fresh, so add in gluten free flour to that and you have a shell of what you really want.

So, pizza can still be decent; fake cheese is getting pretty good. You can bake bread, although the pre-baked loafs can be okay. Soy "milk" usually works better because oats are often contaminated. You'll also be surprised by how many chips add gluten, presumably for texture.

I'm not sure exactly what your reaction to acidity includes, but I still make good curries, stews, nacho plates and tacos with meat alternatives. It's not the real deal but it's more than edible.

Sounds like someone has sticky fingers.

These two form a "mesh VPN" which use direct encrypted links between any number of devices. You can think of it as forming a virtual LAN where you can communicate with devices, including open ports. A lot of them have clever tricks to overcome CG-NATs, which you seem to be struggling with.

Another option is to just rent a server. You can get massive storage space for less than some VPNs cost and you don't need powerful hardware if your device supports the codecs you're using. You could even get a cheapy VPS and reverse proxy to your Jellyfin server through an SSH tunnel or similar. Lots of options here.